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h X73S 
 
 
GERMAN LIFE AND LITERATURE, 
 
 IN A SERIES OF BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES 
 
GERMAN LIFE and LITERATURE 
 
 In n §zxiz8 of pographkal ^tobies. 
 
 BY 
 
 \ 
 
 ALEXANDER HAY JAPP, LL.D., 
 
 F.R.S.L., F.R.S.E., F.R.G.S., F.S.A. 
 
 \ ^ 
 
 MARSHALL JAPP & COMPANY 
 
 ( 
 
 ff LONDON. 
 
 f 
 
UNlVERSiTYj 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Schone zu Leben ist wahre Kunst, 
 Kunst im Leben das schone Wahre, 
 Leben der Kunst das wahre Schone, 
 Wahre's Leben die schone Kunst. — Schiller. 
 
 Erkenne erst, mein Sohn, was er geleistet hat, 
 Und dann erkenne, was er leisten wollte. 
 
 Goethe's Kunstler's Apotheose. 
 
 Die hbchste Wissenschaft ist ohne Zweifel die Kunst zu leben ; und wie 
 manchen haben seine schone Wissenschaften um diese Einzige, diese gottliche 
 Kunst gebracht. — Herder vher den Einfluss der Schonen in die hokern 
 Wissenschaften. 
 
 " To be great, a writer must have something in him which can influence 
 character, which is edifying : he must, in short, have a noble and lofty 
 character himself." — Matthew Arnold. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Some portions of this volume have already been given to the 
 public during the past few years. The article on Lessing, in a 
 somewhat condensed form, appeared in The Westminster Review. 
 Other parts of the book have been printed in the Contem- 
 porary, British Quarterly and London Quarterly Reviews, and in 
 various magazines. From the first the idea of making the bio- 
 graphic element prominent in an endeavour to trace out and to 
 estimate the main currents in modem German literatute was 
 present to me. I had intended to confine myself to these five — 
 Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Tieck, and Heine, as typical men ; but 
 the more I read and studied the more it was impressed on me 
 that I could not through them represent faithfully all the in- 
 fluences so marked and characteristic as to claim recognition in 
 such a survey. I had perforce and for clearness sake to 
 enlarge my scheme and to include Winckelmann, Mendelssohn, 
 and Novalis, as the representatives of distinct currents still 
 clearly traceable. Mendelssohn's peculiar relation to the 
 " Aufklarung," in the persistent reference to the religious senti- 
 ment which he maintained, might of itself be held to justify his 
 position here. Winckelmann is placed after Lessing, because 
 he was an older man before his influence was widely felt 
 and recognised; and the facts of Mendelssohn's life are 
 treated somewhat more in detail than those of some of the 
 others named, because they are generally so little known in this 
 country. From Winckelmann was derived that fine sense of 
 classical form, which, amongst other results, did much to deter- 
 mine Goethe's development on one side ; presenting the phen- 
 omenon of a life of the narrowest and intensest character— a life 
 very largely detached from all the ordinary interests of the time, 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 giving direction to an individuality characterised by its richness, 
 by the wide range of its interests that sometimes imparted even a 
 touch of irresolution. While Herder must be viewed as the 
 teacher of that reaUsm that sought, by means of a broad humanism, 
 to relate art to life (which the romantic school carried to such 
 perilous extreme, finding its reality in remote and unavailable 
 mediasvalism), Novalis may be regarded as uniting the religious 
 sentiment with artistic feeling and poetry, and thus affirming for 
 pietism a wider foundation than it had obtained. 
 
 The only justification I can urge for going over again some 
 portions of the field, which have been already carefully done, 
 is that I have not been wholly unsuccessful in my gleanings 
 after the harvest, as I hope my readers will honestly admit on 
 perusal of my work. 
 
 Since the articles as they appeared, under the disadvantage of 
 being, detached from their place in the connection originally in- 
 tended for them, had the good fortune to be well spoken of by 
 those whose judgment the author highly respects and values, he 
 is encouraged to hope that, as parts of this book, and in their 
 fuller form, they may still justify such good opinions in the new 
 lights that they may now be found to cast upon each other. The 
 Academy was good enough to say of the article on Lessing : — 
 " The writer is a genuine student of Lessing .... and this 
 thorough and exhaustive article is very temperate, very judicious. 
 It gives a very full account of Lessing's career, dwelling with a 
 special copiousness on his theological writings, and going in both 
 departments to original sources." Similar judgments were pro- 
 nounced by several other journals — The Scotsman amongst them. 
 It would be affectation in me were I not frankly to acknowledge 
 that these opinions gave me great encouragement to proceed in 
 working out my plan in spare time snatched from other labours. 
 But for these appreciative words, indeed, this volume had most 
 probably never have been published. 
 
 It only remains for me to record in this place my thanks for 
 help received from various gentlemen. Rabbi Hermann Adler, 
 and Dr Friedlander of the Jews' College, London, most oblig- 
 ingly aided me to some volumes in the Jewish libraries, and the 
 fruits of this favour will be found especially in the chapters on 
 Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, To Mr Richard Gamett I am 
 indebted for some helpful bibliographical hints. And to the 
 
PREFACE. V 
 
 great care and kindness of my friend, the Rev. Professor Gibb, 
 of the Theological College, Guilford Street, London, I owe it that 
 the following pages are free from many errors that authors them- 
 selves are most apt to overlook. Alexander H. Japp. 
 London, Sefif. 25, 1878. 
 
 [Postscrijit. — I prefer to let this Preface stand, as it was originally 
 set up at a time when the MS. of the book was aheady in the 
 printers' hands. The publication has been delayed for reasons 
 which need not be detailed ; though it may be pointed out, as 
 might indeed be inferred from the Introduction, that this volume, 
 though complete in itself, is really but part of a larger scheme. 
 If the plan should ever be carried "down to the death of Heine" 
 a sketch of Arndt would fall to be inserted, as a sustained bio- 
 graphical illustration of the last chapter in the book. For Arndt 
 efficiently stands for the patriotic impulse in its regenerating 
 power in literature, as creating through a great common interest 
 a meeting-ground for high and low, cultured and uncultured alike, 
 — a function which literature has been found to forego, when it 
 has become either pronouncedly classical or affectedly romanticist, 
 and by standing coldly aloof from ordinary contemporary life and 
 action, has lost its influence and savour. But this, with some 
 others, may form a second volume, if circumstances should be 
 favourable. It is necessary that I should add that the chapter 
 on Goethe was in type before the unexpected and lamented 
 death of Mr G. H. Lewes, else, naturally, many expressions 
 might have been modified ; but whatever may seem severe in that 
 section has reference to a tendency of which Mr Lewes was only 
 the representative and eloquent mouthpiece. Death, alas ! has 
 been all too busy among the men whom this volume aimed at 
 making the English reader a little more familiar with. Herr Rosen- 
 kranz and Herr Gutzkow have both passed away — men of very 
 different character and intellect, yet both truly typical Germans, 
 and men who will be greatly missed by their country and by 
 literature. Various anecdotes might have been culled from 
 Herr G. Hensel's " Memoirs of the Mendelssohn Family " to en- 
 liven the pages on Moses Mendelssohn, had my chapter not 
 been printed before the appearance of that very welcome book.* 
 
 * "DieFamilie Mendelssohn, 1729-1847." Nach Briefen und Tage- 
 buchen. 3 Vols. Berlin. Behr. 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 Notice would also have been taken of the remarkable fact 
 which is conveyed to us in the posthumous work of Mr Bayard 
 Taylor — "Studies in German Literature" — with reference to 
 Goethe's relation to Christiane Vulpius in respect to marriage. 
 Many of the theories which have been advanced with regard to 
 this point collapse under the light of that one fact, and we are 
 glad to find that it is wholly in favour of Goethe's character. 
 We have maintained that Goethe's faithfulness to Christiane is 
 the one redeeming element in the chequered and depressing 
 story of his relations to women, and that those writers were far 
 wrong who have poured condemnation on Goethe for that con- 
 nection in itself. We have held that this is an utterly false posi- 
 tion to take, and that Christiane Vulpius was the only woman 
 who so completely understood Goethe as to hold him in allegi- 
 ance to her without running risk of lessening the permanence of 
 that hold by any craving for, or dependence on, mere conven- 
 tional ties and arrangements ; and that Goethe was not only 
 benefited by this influence, but was himself quite conscious of 
 the real source of the power that was exercised over him. Mr 
 Bayard Taylor writes : — 
 
 "After Schiller's death in 1805, Goethe lost for a time his interest 
 in literature. Within a year and a half the battle of Jena occurred, 
 and Weimar was sacked by the French army. It was perhaps the 
 insecurity of his life at this time which led him to marry the mother 
 of his son, with whom he had been living for seventeen years, or, 
 rather, the sense of insecurity led her to '. consent to the marriage, 
 •which she had refused up to that time. Nothing in Goethe's life has 
 been so misunderstood and misinterpreted as his relation to Christiane 
 Vulpius. When I was last in Weimar, I discovered a great many 
 facts which throw an entirely new light on this subject. Christiane 
 was an uneducated woman, from a much lower rank in society ; but 
 she understood Goethe's nature as no one else did." 
 
 It is quite true that Goethe illustrated in characteristic fashion, 
 to his age and nation, precisely the element which Madame de 
 Remusat finds exemplified in Napoleon. He, too, like the 
 emperor, set himself above all ordinary rules and moral require- 
 ments, and thus, through his art as well as his life, spoke to 
 the ambitious unrest of the time and its feverish desire for 
 individual liberty, if not for licence. Canon Liddon has admir- 
 ably expressed one phase of this tendency thus : — 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 " The more positive and earnest Christianity of the 17th century 
 brought with it a more worthy appreciation of the real seriousness of 
 Hfe ; but in the succeeding age the taste for suicide was renewed, not 
 as a part of the complete Pagan ideal of conduct, but as the fruit of a 
 melancholy estimate of our condition in this world, joined to im- 
 paired or decomposing religious convictions. They felt the dis- 
 appointments of life as a whole, the absence of fixed aims, the culture 
 of imagination and passion without any regulating faith, the feverish 
 indecision, the languid yet ever-growing self- idolatry, the moral at- 
 mosphere of impatience, irritation, curiosity ; the mingled rapture and 
 pain of vagrant imagination, the utter caprice and prostration of will ; 
 — these were the characteristics of a period which was impersonated 
 by, and which recognised itself at length in, Goethe." * 
 
 The influence of Christiane Vulpius on Goethe, though doubt- 
 less it was associated with other elements, was distinctly in the 
 direction of modifying and relieving this disposition towards 
 active defiance of ordinary moral standards as embodied in con- 
 ventional usages ; and thus far it was salutary and good. If 
 Christiane fell finally under temptation, Goethe's devotion to her 
 was only the more effectively manifested in urging her at last to 
 consent to the formal union which Mr Bayard Taylor now tells 
 us had been long desired by him. 
 
 It only remains to add, by way of apology for any misprints that 
 may be observed, that the author was unfortunately suffering 
 from an affection of the eyes when the bulk of the proofs passed 
 through his hands. — A. H. J.] 
 
 * " Some Elements of Religion," pp. 123-24. 
 
ERRATA. 
 
 P. 73, first line of section vii . should read — " Lessin^s influence has 
 been wider and more healthily pervasive" Qr'c. 
 
 P. 152, line 7 of section v. — " Maupertius '' should be " Maupertuis," 
 and two lines lower — "Pr^montral" should read " Premontval." 
 
 P. 242, line 15 from top — '' ought" should be "sought." 
 
 P. 252 — " Neune," twice in first German verse in note, should be 
 "Nenne." 
 
 P. 437, line 3 from foot — "descriptive" should be "disruptive." 
 
 P. 447, line 15 from top — "are'' Should be "is." 
 
 [In one or two instances the German "ie" has been transposed, or 
 vice versd.] 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 There are eastern rivers which are said to lose themselves in 
 sand, and after a time to reappear, gathering beauty around their 
 borders, but causing some difficulty to geographers on the ques- 
 tion of true sources. Something similar may be said of German 
 literature. It would be too much to assert that those early pre- 
 ludes, those Middle-age warblings, with their quaint glimpses of 
 Rhine and Harz-wald, which still mixed themselves, in faint but 
 pleasing reminiscence, with the preachings of the friars and the 
 strife of the Reformation, whoUy ceased to have influence when 
 the Reformation had done its work; but it is an undoubted fact 
 that the later results of the Reformation did something to cut oif 
 the early literature of Germany from modem German literature, 
 and to leave between the two an arid reach of sandy waste, un- 
 watered by the gracious stream of a truly national sentiment. 
 This may seem a strong statement, but we believe it is so far 
 susceptible of proof and illustration. 
 
 Protestantism was properly a reaction against the mystical and 
 romantic elements in Christianity, made possible through the 
 abuses and self-indulgences which a corrupt church had built 
 upon them. Luther accomplished one of the greatest works in 
 favour of human culture, that is, in reserving for each individual 
 the right of independent judgment and complete freedom in re- 
 ligious matters, but his followers (and this is the penalty great 
 men often pay in the irony that links their names to petrified 
 systems of rules or dogmas without any trace of the soul and 
 sentiment that inspired them) entirely failed to grasp or to inter- 
 pret the poetry or the broad human nature, the passion or the 
 romance which had supported him in his work as no merely in- 
 tellectual conviction could have done. The Reformation, as 
 interpreted by Luther's followers, was a logical and severe attempt 
 
 A 
 
2 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to reduce religion to the level of the cold understanding. 
 But till the demands of the emotions and the imagination have 
 been so far reconciled with those of the intellect, something is 
 still wanting to any system as an interpreter of the whole of man's 
 spiritual nature. Christianity, as tempting to a profound and 
 restless brooding on the mysteries of existence, has much in it 
 that is allied to the romantic element in man, and speedily comes 
 itself into conflict with purely logical deductions and sharply 
 formulated dogmas. Nowhere, as indeed was natural, was this 
 disruption between the heart and the head, the understanding 
 and the emotions, more complete than it was in Germany, after 
 the Reformation had done its great work. It sharply separated 
 the religious life from all the other phases of national develop- 
 ment, and was to blame for the dogmatism that inspired both 
 philosophy and art. These indeed had to be brought into strict 
 conformity with it, or be held at fatal disadvantage. A narrow 
 restriction was thus imposed on all productiveness that could not 
 be harmonised with these dogmatic forms, which had obtained so 
 great supremacy. Protestantism, viewed in this wider aspect, 
 ended by undoing the very work to which at first it had earnestly 
 set itself. Freed from the heavy burden of tradition, it used its 
 augmented energies to fashion another burden only a little less 
 grievous. It harnessed the human mind in dogma, and thus 
 made it in appearance secure from deadly error, but it was at the 
 cost of all free activity and healthy individual development. It 
 was with a fine humour that Luther said, " Human nature is a 
 drunken boor, who, when you set him up on the one side, 
 straightway falls down on the other," and the irony of the utter- 
 ance is intensified if we think of its applicability to the history of 
 the Protestantism which he founded. 
 
 Various efforts were made to correct this tendency from 
 within, and notable among these was the Pietistic revival, first 
 under Spener and then under Zinzendorf, whose influence was 
 quiet, deep, and permanent. It was like the spring, which, 
 touched, set many unexpected forces in motion. But it did not 
 directly suffice for a wide and immediate practical reform, partly 
 through the necessarily meditative and retiring nature of the 
 leaders, and partly through their professed indifference to merely 
 outward changes and reforms. Another, though what might 
 seem a more accidental element, was against it. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 Before Pietism had full opportunity of showing how fair a field 
 of life it could open up to men, the frightful condition of im- 
 morality and degradation which prevailed drove under its shelter 
 a crowd who would else probably have proved cynics and Timons 
 of a later time ; and their presence it mainly was that all too 
 soon impressed on Pietism the stamp of a dreary retreat from a 
 life that was disgusting and hardly to be borne. In its later forms 
 it opposed religious feeling to culture, and even to the ordinary 
 enjoyments of life. As a formal and dogmatic system it failed, 
 falling into some of the errors it had at first confronted ; but the 
 influence of its earlier phases remained, to inspire and purify and 
 work for good. As certain English church-magnates, who scorned 
 Methodism, and took advantage of the early connection of its 
 leaders with the Moravians, the more effectually to vilify the 
 whole thing, were yet stirred to a new zeal and to more active 
 effort by the very movement they affected to despise, so was it 
 with not a few of the orthodox Lutherans in regard to the Pietism, 
 which, in spite of them, would show itself in their parishes. Not- 
 withstanding its pecuUar weakness, its lack of nerve and of blood, 
 the Pietistic influence — the appeal from hard dogma to intuition 
 and the heart — runs like a soft undercurrent through the 
 eighteenth century fight against authority in Germany, and in 
 favour of a free spiritual individuality ; imparting to the struggle 
 a chastened and earnest air even in its most defiant moments. 
 Had Herr Rosenkranz made more specific reference to Pietism 
 in the following passage, we should have more readily appre- 
 hended his meaning : — 
 
 " The French have the reformation of their religious conscious- 
 ness still before them, while we, in reality, have ours behind us. 
 In the merely external lines of political systematisation, the 
 French are more advanced. But, since it is a fact that the relig- 
 ious element is the deepest and the widest, the course of history 
 in our case must be very different from what it is with the French. 
 Nothing could well be further from the truth than the idea that 
 we Germans, to make progress in political matters, must of neces- 
 sity repeat all the phases of the French revolution from 1 789 
 downwards. Not a few of us have been so possessed by the 
 writings of Thiers and Mignet that we cannot get beyond the 
 leading ideas which obtain in them. It will become evident, 
 however, that we Germans will finally evolve, not a new. 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ■edition of the French forms, but a totally different form of con- 
 stitution from other materials altogether." * 
 
 Herr Schafer has in one respect viewed matters more compre- 
 hensively, and has done not a Uttle to supply this omission. In 
 ■one of the most interesting sections of what we are inclined to 
 regard as his most valuable, though it is certainly not his most 
 ambitious book, he has in short compass exhibited the effect of 
 the Pietistic revival on literature, philosophy and politics, and to 
 it we would venture to refer the reader who may want a fuller 
 statementt 
 
 This vague reaction against the burden of Protestant dogma, 
 this earnest but half-helpless effort to reclaim a space for the 
 rights of the individual, and the intuitions of the heart, nourished 
 for a time an extreme receptiveness, that issued finally in a false 
 cosmopolitanism, and an indifference to national development 
 and unity. The German mind was divided against itself. It 
 sought countenance for those inward yearnings, at once oppres- 
 sive and inspiriting, in the literature of its nearest neighbour, 
 France, which had succeeded in detaching itself wholly from such 
 burdens as Germany still laboured under ; only, however, to 
 assume burdens that proved themselves still more tormenting and 
 fatal. The general disbelief in religion, which in France had 
 supervened on the reduction of ecclesiastical authority, had given 
 an impulse to the gaiety and cxur leger of that people, and had 
 led to a vigorous development of literature — especially dramatic 
 literature — in association with the new idea of humanity and 
 brotherhood which had recently made itself vaguely, but not the 
 less powerfully, felt as a sentiment. Thus it came about that in 
 the earlier part of the eighteenth century, Germany looked abroad 
 for its culture, grew restive under its religious forms, while, never- 
 theless, it lacked the power to enter on safe, because really 
 rational and gradual reforms. A process of demoralisation, 
 whose later outcome has been so tragical, was begun in this way 
 within the church, literature and art suffered paralysis and looked 
 across the Rhine with longing eyes, as though to find there an 
 intellectual fatherland, which was void for them in Germany itself 
 The situation, indeed, could hardly be better indicated than in 
 the following passage : — 
 
 * Rosenkranz's Deutsche Literatur, i. p. 104. 
 
 t Schafer's Zur deutsche Literatur Geschichte, pp. 43-45. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 " Germany remained a solitary example of a civilised, learned 
 and scientific nation without a literature. The chivalrous ballads 
 of the Middle-age, and the efforts of the Silesian poets in the be- 
 ginning of the seventeenth century, were just sufficient to render 
 the general defect more striking. French was the language of 
 every court, and the number of courts in Germany rendered this 
 circumstance almost equivalent to the exclusion of German from 
 every society of rank. Philosophers employed a barbarous Latin, 
 as they had throughout all Europe, till the Reformation had given 
 dignity to the vernacular tongues, by employing them in the ser- 
 vice of religion ; and till Montaigne, Galileo and Bacon broke 
 down the barrier between the learned and the people by philoso- 
 phising in a popular language. The German language continued 
 to be the mere instrument of the most vulgar intercourse of life ; 
 Germany had, therefore, no exclusive mental possession ; for 
 poetry and eloquence may, and in some measure must be, 
 national ; but knowledge, which is the common patrimony of 
 civilised men, can be appropriated by no one people. 
 
 " A great revolution, however, at length began, which in the 
 coiu-se of half a century terminated in bestowing on Gennany a 
 literature, perhaps the most characteristic possessed by an Euro- 
 pean nation. It had the important peculiarity of being the first 
 that had its birth in an enlightened age. The imagination and 
 sensibility of an infant poetry were singularly blended with the 
 refinements of philosophy. A studious and learned people, 
 familiar in the poets of other nations, with the first simplicity of 
 nature and feeling, were too often tempted to pursue the singular, 
 the excessive, the monstrous. Their fancy was attracted towards, 
 the deformities and diseases of moral nature — the wildness of an 
 infant literature, combined with the eccentric and fearless specu- 
 lations of a philosophical age. Some of the qualities of the child- 
 hood of art were united to others which usually attend its decline. 
 German literature — various, rich, and bold, and at length by an 
 inversion of the usual progress working itself into originaUty — 
 was tainted with the exaggeration natural to the initiator, and to 
 all those who know the passions rather by study than by feeling." 
 
 The " Aufklarung," or " enlightenment," which succeeded the 
 dead period in German literature, was reactionary and one-sided. 
 It glorified common-sense, and aimed at the dissemination of "use- 
 ful knowledge" and the destruction of all sentiment and mysticism. 
 
6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 It was good as a corrective, but was calculated to be fatal at once 
 to literature and life if it became a permanent influence. Ger- 
 many promised to appropriate this pre-revolutionary tendency to 
 the full. It proscribed ideals in the interest of facts ; it laid 
 down hard rules, and would have modelled all genius on one 
 monotonous pattern. Its bold determination and irreverent con- 
 ceit were at once its mainstay and its weakness. It re-erected the 
 understanding into the supreme place ; and put the concerns of 
 religion wholly outside its sphere, piquing itself on a cold indif- 
 ference to everything bearing on that interest. In this it differed 
 from the post-Reformation crusade. Religion in all its claims 
 and possibilities was by it to be made intelligible, self-consistent, 
 logical and without mystery ; by the " Aufklarung " religion was, 
 if not contemptuously dismissed, tacitly ignored. Definite rules 
 were to supersede inspiration in every department, not even ex- 
 cepting Poetry. What could not justify itself directly on the 
 ground of practical use and profit should receive short shrift. 
 This spirit of "enlightenment" had just taken rise, when Lessing 
 began his career. He appropriated what was of special value in 
 it, and wedded it with other elements, which received fuller and 
 more effective illustration from such men as Herder ; and as we 
 shall in a moment see, Lessing, almost in spite of himself, in 
 manifold respects, stood between the old ways and the new, 
 beginning an era in the truest sense synthetic and constructive. 
 Indifference, only intensified by contempt towards any great 
 human tendency or desire, was as impossible to him as it was to 
 •exhaust his principles in any set formulas of a few words. The 
 religious instinct which had given birth to all those creeds that 
 had become cold, barren, ossified, when more and more separated 
 from it, was in itself as' real and as worthy of the study of one 
 calling himself a philosopher as were the ineradicable impulses in 
 human nature which issued in art and poetry, in song and drama. 
 Nothing that concerned man was without interest to him. It is a 
 most remarkable circumstance that when Nicolai wrote to him 
 ridiculing Herder's popular songs, Lessing seriously responded 
 in fullest approval of them (doubtiess somewhat to Nicolai's 
 chagrin), sending specimens of street-songs which he had him- 
 self heard in youth and carefully preserved. Like Balaam, he 
 could not curse, but blessed. It was in such ways that Lessing 
 proved himself something more than a mere clearer of the way. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 His sympathies were finer and far wider, and his instincts were 
 more generous than he himself beheved. He removed the dusty 
 rubbish of old ruins, but he also laid the foundations of a new 
 and fairer fabric, to which a very varied company were to add 
 their own special contributions. He resembled, says a German 
 author, those pious Jews who were often troubled in the construc- 
 tion of the second temple by the attacks of enemies, and who 
 fought with the one hand while they built the House of God with 
 the other.* 
 
 Modem German literature thus begins with Lessing. The 
 great w&rk which he regarded himself as specially called to do 
 was to drive out the French influence, and to show that no truly 
 national literature was possible till the Germans found the 
 materials for it in their own history, in their own national and 
 social life, and were content to express themselves in their own 
 language. His earliest as well as his latest dramatic pieces are 
 marked by this conscious aim. He was almost destitute of 
 imagination in the highest sense and in phantasy, which stands 
 for so much in the field of poetry, but his character was so 
 grand and he had so keen an eye for reality, that through them 
 he often reached to the highest results of poetry ; and, though 
 he necessarily dealt much with the abstract canons of art and 
 taste, he was always in close contact with the life, which he 
 sought by the application of these canons to exhibit the more 
 faithfully. His mind was as if specially constituted to deal with 
 the deism or scepticism which was then the fashion, and on a 
 priori grounds one would have expected him to have wholly 
 fallen in with it. The fact remains that he did not ; but 
 sought out what in it was susceptible of supplementing and 
 correcting the orthodoxy of his time, which, after all, he found 
 was strong in certain of its dogmas, as representing facts of life 
 and nature, and stronger than deism in some of its logical 
 positions. He had been brought into contact with the pietistic 
 idea as indirectly exhibited through simple life and character, 
 and though he had not, any more than his father, any intellectual 
 sympathy with it, yet it was not without its own influence on his 
 determination towards that complete fairness to contending sects, 
 which so distinguished him. The "inwardness" — the charity of 
 the heart, which was possible under any form of religion, and 
 
 • Quoted by Heine, De L'Allemagne, vol. i. p. 269. 
 
8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 for which pietism had in its own way, made a powerful plea, 
 furnished the justification for such expressions as the following : — 
 
 " I prefer the old orthodox (at bottom tolerant) theology to 
 the modem (at bottom intolerant) theology, because that openly 
 contended with the sound human mind, and this would like 
 rather to corrupt it. I make terms with my declared enemies, 
 that I may be the better able to be on my guard against my 
 secret ones.'' 
 
 This complete tolerance did not have its root in logic, though 
 the sentiment in which it had its root was supported by a very 
 keen logical faculty which often did much to hide it. Logic is 
 always ungenerous, unless it be viewed as merely negative ; and 
 that it was so with Lessing, is proved by the wide range that he 
 (protectively at least) included. M. Crouslfe very well indicates 
 this width when he writes : — 
 
 " II a combattu k la fois Tirreligion et I'intolerance. II a 
 releve les Juifs des m^pris de I'opinion publique ; il a rdclam^ la 
 tolerance pour les sectes du Protestantisme et pour les dfistes. 
 Cependant il a compost une comddie centre les esprits forts, et il 
 a toujours m^prisd I'affectation de materialisme et d'atheisme." 
 — CrousU, p. 436. 
 
 Thus even in Lessing — " grim rationalist " as he has been very 
 short-sightedly called — ^we see the under-current of this influence 
 softening the impetuosity of his onsets in his endeavours to 
 recommend the grace of charity, and in his appreciation of that 
 inwardness which imparts the last loveliness to tolerant allow- 
 ances and to self-denying acts. If this is not the " sweet savour" 
 of " Die Juden" as well as of " Nathan der Weise," we know not 
 what else has kept them living and powerful till to-day. 
 
 In Herder, we see clearly how the revolutionary and so far 
 anti-social ideas of Rousseau, came tempered and transfigured 
 through a fine and deeply-sane religious nature, which was 
 perhaps powerful enough to supply such a corrective influence, 
 as in great measure sufficed to prevent the more disastrous 
 results that might have flowed from their embodiment in Goethe's 
 "Werther,"* and its immediate fruit. Herder, in all his re- 
 
 * Das heisse Hungern und Dursten nach tieferer Gemiithsinnerlichkeit und das 
 zornmuthige Ankampfen gegen alles, was in Leben, Sitte und Denkart, in Wissenschaft und 
 Dichtung, diesem Verlangen nach Natur und Freiheit sich hindem entgegenstellt, und wie in 
 Rousseau, so auch in der Deutschen Sturm und Drang Periode zugleich diesselbe Verzerrung 
 
INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 searches, was inspired and directed by the religious idea as 
 exhibited in the whole development of humanity. He sought 
 assiduously for a fundamental reality, which he found in the 
 religious sentiment, and from this, as from a great central light, 
 rays fell on all the separate interests of life, giving dignity and 
 reality and fitness for poetic treatment. It was from this side 
 that he approached the primitive poetry of the nations, as pre- 
 sented to us in his " Volk's Lieder," inferring from them the con- 
 dition of mental, moral, and spiritual consciousness, and finding 
 in this way a purely scientific ground for the pre-eminence he 
 awarded to the Jews as the missionaries of a great moral and 
 religious idea. He anticipated the purely scientific and compara- 
 tive attitude, as seen in Niebuhr, Max Miiller, and in M. Taine, 
 and he showed the possibility of combining with it a delicate 
 intuition and exquisite spiritual discernment, and as it were a 
 divining power, which the later interpreters of his ideas have but 
 too often made light of. He informed the vague and merely 
 conventional cosmopolitanism of the period with a great and 
 fruitful spiritual impulse; suggesting for the historical field a 
 wholly new classification. 
 
 In the light of Herder's history and work, we may say that 
 Wolfgang Menzel's words seem to receive a new significance : — 
 
 " We are," he says, " thorough cosmopolitans. Our nationality 
 is to have no nationality whatever, but to substitute what belongs 
 to man in general for the particular marks that distinguish 
 nations. We appropriate the culture of all nations, and would 
 regenerate in ourselves the blossoms of the human mind in every 
 age. Other nations struggle to make themselves a normal 
 nation for the whole world, but this they would do not by self- 
 annihilation, but by impressing their image on the human race. 
 There can, however, be no true love without self-denial. Egotism 
 and national vanity are the two great enemies of culture. The 
 noblest nations have always been the most tolerant, and the 
 basest always the most conceited.* 
 
 Herr Hettner, though by no means inclined to overrate 
 Herder, has well-indicated Herder's place in relation to the 
 " Aufklarung,'' and the qualifying influences which he first 
 
 dieser tieferen Innerlichkeit in die eitelste Gefuhlssophistik, welche oft wieder verwirrte 
 und gefahrdete, war durch die Siege des AufklSninsfur immer gelost und rerungenschien- 
 — Hettner^ v. pp. 5 & 6. 
 
 * Wolfgang Menzel's *' Deutsche Literatur," p. 44. 
 
lo INTRODUCTION. 
 
 brought of an effective and salutary kind, to save German litera- 
 ture from wreck on the. rocks of mere intellect and "useful 
 knowledge." He says : — 
 
 "As Rousseau in his relation to Voltaire and the French 
 Encyclopaedia, so is Herder in his relation to the heroes of the 
 German ' Auf klarung,' which was at once a progress and a retro- 
 gression. As Rousseau, so also Herder opened up to his 
 wondering contemporaries unknown deeps and secrets of senti- 
 ment and intuition. And as with Rousseau, so also with Herder, 
 his greatness is at the same time his weakness. In a kind of 
 wavering twilight he awakens the imnost feeUngs, in shifting cloud- 
 clothed, spirited, but still self-willed outbursts of genius, the clear 
 outlines of ideas not seldom float and fade away again — ideas which 
 by the great of old time were irrefragably established. Particularly 
 is this true of his earlier writings. ... In his later writings the 
 outhne was indeed much firmer and sharper ; but in them also the 
 feeling often overgrows the thought, the excess of enthusiastic 
 sentiment disturbs the quiet of investigation. As Plato's philo- 
 sophising was often interrupted by the myth ; so Herder's dialectic 
 was broken up by allegory and poetry. Herder was under the 
 necessity to break forth on all sides, but he was never under the 
 necessity to open up and exhaust a subject thoroughly." * 
 
 Herr Hettner, however, hardly does justice to the depth of the 
 religious instinct in Herder, and the effect which it has had indir- 
 ectly, through Goethe and others, on German life and literature. We 
 find another German writer of note thus signalising that element : 
 
 " Religion was a chief element in Herder's character. ' With- 
 out religion,' he says, in one of his scattered pages (' Zerstreute 
 Blatter'), 'man cannot exist. Already the infinity that causes 
 us to look both before and after, has established in us the basis 
 of all religion, that is, reverence, thankfulness and trust towards 
 the great Unnameable. The rule of Right in our breasts unites 
 us still faster to Him, for it is His ; it is the law of the whole 
 moral world. Since we see that before us lies an eternity that we 
 cannot oversee, so arises our chief motive to strive uprightly with 
 hearts full of love, trustfully progressing and believing.' " 
 
 Herr Rosenkranz, with his own peculiar incisiveness, thus 
 indicates one phase of the religious reform which it was Herder's 
 privilege to carry as against the secularity of the "Auf klarung" : — 
 
 Hettner, vol v., p. 30. 
 
INTRODUCTION. ii 
 
 " He did not therefore devote himself in any special way to 
 produce a classical literature, for that was already produced, but 
 rather to infuse into this literature ideas adapted to the present 
 time, specially fitted to transfigure its most intimate life, to trans- 
 form the abstract gods of idea into warm feeling men' and to fix 
 their Olympus in the very midst of the people." * 
 
 Falk, after a somewhat laboured contrast of Goethe and Herder, 
 reaches the same conclusion. 
 
 " Goethe," he says, " was a beautiful, Herder, on the contrary, 
 was a lofty nature. By the spirit of his time Herder was strongly 
 moved ; he drew it to himself, but he moved before it ; and thus 
 indeed he has the more faithfully expressed it in his writings. A 
 kingdom of moral conformation Herder sought to establish. 
 All that he undertook had thus in view a higher human develop- 
 ment." t 
 
 It was doubtless this peculiar union in Herder of the finest 
 religious insight with the keenest interest in all that concerns 
 man's social, political and material development, resulting in that 
 kind of prophetic forecast, which suggested far more than it 
 realised, that led Herr Gustav Merkel to speak of him as " the 
 high-priest of humanity." t 
 
 It has been well said that Lessing in the "Erziehung des Men- 
 schengeschlechts" really pursues an a priori view of the historical 
 development of revealed and pagan religions ; while Herder, pre- 
 occupied with a large idea, incKnes to make the forms of 
 " humanity " results of climate, race and association. . Both men 
 indeed seem to do some violence to their original genius or ten- 
 dency — a fact so remarkable that we shall only view it faithfully 
 if we look at it as illustrating some imperative element in the 
 temper of the times. Herder thus, on the one side, prepares the 
 way for the romanticists ; on the other for the historic or posi- 
 tivistic school. Both lose hold of the nexus which in Herder 
 reconciled the tendencies. It was, however, because of this 
 reconciUation of ordinarily conflicting elements in him, that he so 
 deeply influenced Goethe, and claims the position in these pages 
 which we have accorded to him. 
 
 Turning from the " Aufklarung " and the conflict against pure 
 rationahsm and scepticism as seen in Herder, in looking along 
 the line of literary development, we can perceive in Germany a 
 
 • Neue Studien, i. p. 97. t Falk, p. 148. % Der Hohe Priester der Humanitat." 
 
12 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 reason why the romantic school, with its restless eager phan- 
 tasy, and its pale bloodless enthusiasm, should look back with such 
 feverish zeal towards the Middle Ages and the dreams of a pure 
 cathoKcism. It was an effort to recover for German literature a 
 religious basis as well as a historical continuity, to gain a spiritual 
 foothold as well as to bridge the gap that existed between the past 
 and the present, and to fill up the void in the national sentiment, 
 that was held to have been sacrificed through the misdirected 
 traditions of Protestantism. It was a generous ambition, not 
 only a pardonable, but a praiseworthy, because a truly chivalrous 
 attempt. But what a nation misses in the order of fact and 
 reality, it will certainly not recover by any artificial stimulating of 
 the phantasy and the historico-poetic faculty. The Middle-Age 
 Catholicism was a thing of the dead past, and even as a symbol 
 was largely non-efficient. And nothing was added to its efficiency 
 by the casuistry of symbolism, to which its leader at an important 
 time had recourse. Tieck, taking service with Nicolai, entering 
 the enemy's camp even, that he might speak efficiently his 
 artisticaUy-hidden protest against the philistinish materialism and 
 practicality of the common-sense intellect, sufficiently exhibits 
 the complications and conflict of interests which destroyed at the 
 outset the simplicity of the romantic effort on its most poetic 
 side, and imparts too much of an air of unreality and compliance 
 to the whole thing. While therefore, we recognise in the labours 
 and the aspirations of the two Schlegels and Tieck and Novalis and 
 their confreres, an earnest effort to import into German literature 
 an active religious idea — a confession that something essential 
 had been long awanting to a complete and vigorous national life 
 and literature, we must not be regarded as blind to the defects of 
 the instruments they used. Though in this aspect we must 
 approach their works with sympathy, and a condition of mind 
 that can yield itself to the fineness and the strong ideal sense that 
 rendered these men of genius so impatient of the prosaic Philistin- 
 ism and strife of their day, we need not close our eyes to the 
 lack Of true body or "flesh and blood" that characterises them. 
 But, we must add, that our regard for the more religious 
 spirits of that school — Novalis in particular — will be greatly 
 intensified, if we can fully appreciate the manner in which the 
 pietistic element in them, mingled with and modified the 
 romantic one; imparting to it a gravity and depth, in some 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 respects alien to its phantastical freedom, diffusiveness and dis- 
 regard of form. Novalis, indeed, may be looked upon, in one 
 point of view, as aiming to reunite the pietistic spirit with culture, 
 thus unconsciously in his finer hymns attaining a true cathoUcity 
 through the elevation of the common doctrines of Christianity 
 into a region of true poetry. When we regard him in this 
 aspect, he has a historic significance which neither the Schlegels, 
 nor Tieck, nor our own Carlyle fully perceived. 
 
 It has been well said by Menzel that " Schiller's heroes were 
 in romantic poetry, what the gods of the Greek Sculpture were to 
 the Greeks — divine men, human gods ; " but the. element which 
 made them vital was a vivid S)rmpathy with the general sense of 
 chaotic influences inevitably tending to a new order or harmony 
 — a subtle desire to represent, beyond the Titans, into whom he 
 aspired to breathe dramatic life, a romantic unity basing itself on 
 the conviction of a human solidarity, which imparted a genuine 
 elevation to the most ordinary craft or vocation. It was the 
 earnest conviction of this, which made Schiller dissatisfied with 
 the mingled mystery and reality of " Wilhelm Meister " — under 
 which the hero, arbitrarily and wholly apart from his own attain- 
 ments and deserts, was raised into positions to which he could 
 prefer no true inward claim. Schiller, in a word, had through 
 his fine philosophic sense a higher conception of law than 
 Goethe had. The romantic in the one sprung from a real defer- 
 ence to law, too much, it may be, associated with purely abstract 
 conceptions ; in the other, the source of the romantic element 
 was in reality indifference to law, and the desire to set in its place 
 whimsical and half-superstitious recognitions of occult influences. 
 For this reason, Goethe's social romances, will not yield a 
 genuine moral content, even, in so far as general tendency may 
 be regarded, because his heroes are the subjects of special in- 
 fluences which cannot be conceived as absolute under any 
 assumption of moral order. Character and individuality are 
 mere chessmen, to be moved about by the hand of Chance. In 
 this way the moral tendency of these two great writers, strictly 
 taken, is disparate in spite of the most earnest, eager, and 
 amiable efforts on their parts to render their aims coincident. 
 This was what Goethe in reahty acknowledged when in no spirit 
 of paradox he applied the word practical to the genius of the 
 ideal and romantic Schiller ; for he meant the prevailing sense 
 
14 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 which practicalises the ideal or brings it within the range of the 
 sympathies of the multitude, without doing despite to its purity. 
 But both, in their special ways, so far recovered and reduced to 
 artistic form, the synthesis which Herder had so efficiently 
 illustrated — another reason why his position should be made 
 clear and illustrated as well as may be on all sides. 
 
 Another point should ever be borne in mind. The following 
 namely, that the growth of this wide recognition of a spiritual 
 idea, on which the true claim of individuality could alone be 
 founded, and the purified cosmopolitanism that issued mainly 
 from its assertion and acceptance was coincident with the devo- 
 tion to English literature that gradually superseded deference to 
 the French. Heine has well said in his'book, " Ueber Borne : " 
 " A revolution is a misfortune ; but a still greater misfortune is 
 an abortive revolution." * 
 
 No revolution could possibly have been more complete than 
 that which was accomplished in the turning of the German mind 
 from French literature and French culture to the literature and 
 culture of England and to the realities of its own social and 
 domestic life in view of the creation of a great literature. Looked 
 at in this light, Goethe's early services must ever be viewed with 
 profoundest gratitude. His " Gotz von Berlichingen " and the 
 first part of Faust are in their substance of the very essence of 
 German life and history ; and Heine has said, with perhaps more 
 significance than lies on the surface, that it is to their matter, 
 their substance so directly drawn from that life and history, rather 
 than to their form, that they owe their hold on the national 
 mind. Enough, Goethe's was the hand that drew the substance 
 therefrom and gave it the shape that it bears. " The EngHsh 
 literature,'' says Danzel, " became the staff to which the German 
 of the greater part of the former century, and the first half of the 
 present century, attached itself and clung . . . The new 
 element that pressed in on Germany out of England quickened 
 and regenerated. It was like a fresh breath of sea-air that blows 
 through the close streets of an overcrowded city ; and was the 
 summons back from the ossification of forms and conventional 
 rules to Nature and Freedom." + 
 
 * Eine Revoluzion ist ein Ungliick, aber ein noch grosseres Ungliick ist eine verungr 
 luckte Revoluzion. HeinCy '*Life of Borne." 
 t Danzel's " Lessing," i. p. 282. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 In the study of Shakespeare and the great English dramatists, 
 the various conflicting schools in Germany found a common 
 interest and a point round which they could rally. The influ- 
 ence of English literature upon the German mind was distinctly 
 in the direction of nature, reality and truth — freedom from the 
 artificiality and frivolity that must come from the deference to 
 empty and formal canons of taste. Scarcely anything, therefore, 
 could be more false and misleading than the general statement 
 in the following passage written by Mr William Taylor, of Nor- 
 wich, who often went far wrong in his strictures, though he did 
 much in the beginning of the century to reveal to cultured 
 Englishmen the mine of intellectual wealth that lay awaiting 
 them in the regenerated German literature : — • 
 
 " The general tendency of the German school is to teach French 
 opinions in English forms. They have, indeed, religious poets, 
 such as Klopstock, Stolberg and Korner, but with the single ex- 
 ception of Klopstock, the religious writers owe what they retain 
 of popularity to their love of liberty, not to their love of Christ. 
 Voss, Schiller and Kotzebue are deists ; Lessing, Wieland and 
 Goethe are pantheists ; but their shades of dissimilarity have not 
 prevented their becoming the national favourites." — Survey of 
 German Literature, vol. iii., p. 453. 
 
 But when Sir Archibald Alison, in volumes so lately published 
 as 1859,* could blunder as he did throughout the whole range of 
 German literature, it may be presumed that ignorance — greater 
 even than Mr Taylor's — still remains in quarters that should be 
 well-informed. Lessing, Sir Archibald discovered, was merely a 
 critical genius, whose dramas still more mediocre than his essays, 
 were bad imitations of Voltaire ; while Wieland was a giant by 
 comparison. Sir Archibald discovered too that Goethe was 
 destitute of acquired gifts, his mind not being like that of 
 Wieland, stored with the mythology and imagery of classical 
 times ; and he actually discovered further that Goethe added to 
 his unorthodoxy as a Christian the awful disgrace of being a 
 disbeliever in the immortality of the soul ! He intimated too 
 " that Schiller was a mannerist in the style of the Iliad, though 
 his mind was not graphic like that of Homer:' We have been by 
 these and by many other such tokens, encouraged in our attempt 
 to present, as it were, a bird's-eye view, biographically as far as 
 
 * " History of Europe," vols. vii. and viii. 
 
i6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 we may, of modem German literature in its main currents down 
 to the death of Heine. 
 
 The deep religious impulse which we have traced back to Pietism 
 and Spener, the determined effort to reach reality, and the faithful 
 representation of a truly German sentiment in literature, without 
 the sacrifice of a healthy cosmopolitan sympathy, was aided, and 
 only aided, by the study of English authors. Milton inspired 
 Klopstock, if Shakespeare inspired Goethe. The finesse and 
 the frivolity — the ridicule of sacred things for the mere sake of 
 ridiculing them — which had been the fashion for so long ceased 
 to have scope. Even Wi eland, the most French of the Germans, 
 regretted in his age some of the elegant badinage of his youth. 
 Men were in earnest even in their errors. Goethe and Schiller 
 aimed at restoring the stage to the position of a teacher, and 
 were impatient of all submissions to the prejudices of the vulgar. 
 Whether or not they deeply felt religious sentiment themselves, 
 they were compelled to recognise it as a fact in the life of their 
 people. Goethe gave specific embodiment to it in his " Confes- 
 sions of a Beautiful Soul." For this reason, amongst others, 
 Heine was essentially right when he said in his "De L'AUe- 
 magne," that the French people had entirely failed to appreciate 
 Germany by paying attention only to its art, which was but one 
 face of its intellectual activity, and that for complete comprehen- 
 sion of it, other two faces must be fully conned — those, namely, 
 of its religion and its philosophy. 
 
 Madame de Stael is therefore hardly so discerning as she might 
 have been when she wrote : — 
 
 " L'imagination, en Angleterre, est presque toujours inspirde 
 par la sensibility ; l'imagination des AUemandes est quelquefois 
 rude et bizarre. La religion de TAngleterre est plus sdvbre ; celle 
 de I'AUemagne est plus vague ; et la podsie des nations doit 
 ndcessairement porter I'empreinte de leurs sentiments religieux. 
 La convdnance ne regne point dans les Arts en Angleterre comme 
 en France; cedependant I'opinion publique y a plus d'empire, qu'en 
 AUemagne I'unitd nationale en est la cause. Les Anglais veulent 
 mettre d'accord en'toutes choses les actions et les principes, c'est 
 un peuple sage et bien ordonnd qui a compris dans la sagesse la 
 gloire, et dans I'ordre la liberte ; les Allemands n'ayant fait que 
 rgver I'une et I'autre ont examind les iddes independamment de 
 leur application, et se sont ainsi necessairement dlevds plus haut 
 en theorie." 
 
LESSING. 
 
Lessing ist der Mannhafteste Charakter der Deustchen Literaturgeschichte. 
 Sein Leben und Streben war ein unablassiges Kriegen und Siegen. — Hettner's 
 "Literaturgeschichte des Achtzehenten Jahrhunderts," Buch. II. p. 486. 
 
 Es ist nicht genug zu wissen, man muss auch anwenden ; es ist nicht 
 genug zu woUen, man muss auch thun. . . . Das erste und letze, was vom 
 Genie gefordert wird, ist Wahrheitsliebe. — Goethe. 
 
I. 
 
 GoTTHOLD Ephraim Lessing was bom in January 1729, in 
 Kamenz, a small Lusatian town in Saxony, which, however, had 
 greater traditions than some larger towns, being one of those that 
 had wrung from the Emperors in the Middle Ages the rights of 
 free cities. The Lessings had for long held respectable positions 
 in Lusatia ; some had even risen to be burgomasters. They had 
 often shown great independence ; and Gotthold's grandfather, in 
 his thesis for his doctor's degree, defended the right to complete 
 freedom of religious belief. His father, Johann Gottfried Les- 
 sing, was faithful throughout his long life to this tradition ; he 
 translated Tillotson that he might thus the more effectually 
 illustrate the Christian duty of forbearance to opponents — -even 
 to free-thinkers. Of this the distinguished son never ceased to 
 be proud ; writing to a friend in later years : " What praises"~J 
 would I not bestow upon him, if he were not my father ; he was_J 
 the first translator of Tillotson." And yet he was an orthodox 
 Lutheran, faithfully fulfilling the duties of his office, without 
 affectation or pretence, first as assistant-pastor, and later as the 
 successor of his wife's father in the office of pastor primarius. 
 His style was clear ; and he had an apt faculty of illustrating his 
 points by instance and analogy. A good many of the father's 
 traits reappear in the son. Though of a hasty temper, the 
 pastor had great self-restraint. And he was a good deal of a 
 stoic. Leaving domestic matters, entirely to his wife — a common- 
 place but energetic and affectionate woman — he was content 
 with the simplest fare, and spent all the time that his duties 
 allowed among his books. For he had been distinguished as a 
 student, and had, not without reason, cherished hopes of being a 
 professor, when fate drifted him to Kamenz and pastoral cares, 
 and fixed him there for life. 
 
 Gotthold soon showed an inchnation to follow his father in 
 
20 LESSING. 
 
 his studious ways. As a mere boy his love of books was exces- 
 sive. It is characteristic of him that, when on the occasion of a 
 visit of an artist to Kamenz, the family portraits were being 
 painted, his one solicitude was that he should have " beside him 
 a heap — a great heap — of books" — in which whim we learn 
 that he was indulged, the boy of ten appearing in the picture 
 surrounded by big tomes. Tasks that were hard to others were 
 easy to him : " He is a horse that must have double fodder," 
 said his father. And this prematureness, it is clear, led to con- 
 fidences that implied something of real companionship. The 
 pastor would take little Gotthold aside and seriously urge him to 
 begin early to watch and control his temper, saying, " Gotthold, 
 take warning by me : be on your guard ; for I have a fear — I 
 have a fear; and I would gladly see myself improved in yoa" 
 From the first dawning of his fine intellect it was agreed between 
 husband and wife that Gotthold should be a clergyman, and 
 thus carry on the traditions of both sides of the house, and his 
 education was carefully superintended with this object in view ; 
 which was in no way modified, through the speedy appearance 
 on the scene of a very large family. 
 
 After a short period at home under the tutorship of a cousin, 
 Christlieb Mylius, Lessing was sent, when only eight years of 
 age, to the public grammar school, where, besides carrying away 
 quickly what was taught there of Greek and Latin, he imbibed 
 certain ideas of heathen heroism and of the benefits of the 
 theatre from Rector Heinetz — ideas which greatly scandalised the 
 little town, but which sank deep into the mind of Lessing, who 
 already had evinced in several ways a singular independence, 
 which certainly did not decrease as time went on. When only 
 fourteen years of age he undertook to refute the common and 
 unreflecting observation that times are getting worse and worse, 
 and thus showed that healthful belief in human progress which 
 was afterwards to transform his countrymen's notions of theolo- 
 gical tradition. 
 
 In the summer of 1741 he was sent to the " Fiirstenschule," 
 or Grammar School, of St Afra, in Meissen, under a scholarship 
 granted by the Carlowitz family. The discipline was strict, and 
 Lessing, though reasonable and patient in many things even as a 
 boy, was somewhat impatient of this kind of discipline. It was 
 a theological school, meant to prepare lads for the ministry, but 
 
LESSING. 21 
 
 a certain republicanism obtained in it favourable, in some degree, 
 to individual development. The scholars, though drawn from 
 different ranks met on a footing of complete equality. It was a 
 favourable circumstance, too, that a certain time was allowed the 
 scholars for studies of their own choosing, which we need not 
 say was fully taken advantage of by Lessing, to open up other 
 means of enjoyment than the traditions of St Afra approved. In 
 spite of all this, the school influence was narrowing. Lessing 
 said of the rector : " provided he could make good princes' 
 scholars out of his pupils, that is, people who believe blindly in 
 their teachers, without enquiring whether the latter are pedants 
 or not, he felt himself a successful man." Lessing was often 
 irked by the constant pressure of trivial rules, but he made such 
 progress as should have delighted the masters. It may be that 
 this progress sometimes only caused them concern. The usual 
 period of residence was six years, but before the end of his fifth 
 year Lessing had mastered all that he could learn there^ and 
 beseeched his father to release him from it. The pastor was at 
 first much disincHned to this course, but finally consented. 
 
 Lessing had already written Latin verses and epigrams remark- 
 able for their elegance and terseness, and had composed a few 
 lyrics in German. His favourite authors were Theophrastus, 
 Plautus, and Terence, whom to the end he loved to study, and 
 from whom he early derived that taste for comedy which did 
 much to determine his development as a dramatist. One of his 
 boyish productions was a comedy — " Damon ; or. True Friend- 
 ship" — a time-worn theme enough, Isut "enlivened in his treat- 
 merit, as we think, by touches of remarkable vivacity. He made 
 a more ambitious endeavour in "Per Junge Gel ehrte" (" The 
 Young Scholar"), which he had sketched while at school and 
 had expanded during a short residence at Kamenz, before he 
 proceeded to the University of Leipzig to study theology. He 
 was now in his eighteenth year. 
 
 IL 
 
 The change to Leipzig was one that awakened new ideas, new 
 hopes, dim possibilities, that urged him in many directions. But 
 here, as in after yealrs, we see the same clear purpose and ener- 
 
22 LESSING. 
 
 getic will, which, in spite of many temptations, sufficed to keep 
 him in the right road— the road of true self-development. Here 
 he fell into a congenial circle, prominent in which we see the 
 odd, self-absorbed, eccentric MyHus,* and the frank and friendly 
 Weisse, who was determined to complete a defective education 
 and to become a playwright. " Night after night," Mr Sime 
 says, " Lessing went to the theatre with his friend Weisse ; and 
 through the introduction of Mylius he was allowed behind the 
 scenes, and soon became a daily companion of the actors, whose 
 frank manner and freedom from conventional trammels delighted 
 him. . . . The theatre became to him what his parents had 
 intended the lecture-rooms of solemn theologians to be; and 
 sometimes he even seriously thought of becoming an actor." An 
 introduction to Madame Neuber, the distinguished actress, who 
 did so much at this early period to lay a foundation for the 
 German theatre, confirmed him in his determination to be a 
 pla5rHTight, if not an actor. 
 
 Naturally the class-books were thrown aside for the study of 
 stage-plays ; the passion for the theatre grew as it was indulged ; 
 and Lessing translated a play from the French merely that he 
 might be placed upon the free Hst. His boyish plays were 
 retouched and published in a journal edited by Mylius; and he 
 wrote a play, " Die Alte Jungfer" ("The Old Maid"), and set 
 about a tragedy. " The Young Scholar" _was regarded as worthy 
 of trial on the stage, and was put in rehearsal. Schafer notes 
 that at the time when Lessing was busy over these his first 
 dramatic enterprises, Klopstock was polishing the first hexameters 
 of the Messiah, t 
 
 By this date the news of how Gotthold was spending his time 
 in Leipzig had reached his quiet home in Kamenz, and caused 
 great consternation and distress there. To the simple pastor 
 and his wife it seemed as though their eldest son — in whom all 
 
 * This Mylius was a brother of Christlieb, who had been his tutor, and was at once 
 original and eccentric. He was daring, too, having commenced a journal called the " Free 
 Thinker." "According to Karl Lessing, Mylius, with shoes down at heel, worn stockings, 
 and tattered coat, was a familiar figure in the streets. As he was poor, friends would 
 sometimes ask him to share their quarters, but they usually had abundant reason to regret 
 their good nature, for he could never be brought to understand that he was not in every 
 sense at home, and his habits did not commend themselves to a fastidious taste." 
 
 t Im Jahre 1746 trafen Jiinglinge Klopstock und Lessing auf der Universitat Leipzig 
 zusammen, und waren in bescheidener Verborgenheit, jener mit den ersten Hexametem 
 des Messias Dichtung, dieser mit seine ersten dramatischen Versuchen, beschaftigt. — Schafer 
 P- 45- 
 
LESS/JVC. 23 
 
 their hopes had centred — had broken loose and cast himself on 
 the downward slope to ruin. Could they do anything to save 
 him — to avert the awful catastrophe? Many proposals were 
 discussed and rejected ; and at last it was agreed that, at all 
 hazards, they must get him home, that he might be reasoned 
 with and warned as he could not otherwise be. A pious fraud 
 was practised. A letter was written saying that his mother was. 
 seriously ill, and that he must come home to see her. He started 
 off at once, and when he reached home all was clear to him.^ 
 He was talked to by the pastor, but Lessing had something to 
 say on his side ; and when the good man saw that his son's, 
 moral character remained pure and unblemished, and that hi& 
 love for belles-lettres had not caused him to neglect the sciences, 
 he had the good sense to modify the tone in which he spoke of 
 the theatre ; and when Gotthold had written and read to the 
 home circle a sermon to show that he could become a preacher 
 any day, his mother's grief over his defection was perceptibly 
 lessened. 
 
 Lessing returned to Leipzig. His father saw that it was now 
 impossible that he could become a clergyman, but it was arranged 
 that he should study medicine -and philosophy with a view to his. 
 attaining a position at the University.* He found it as impos- 
 sible to study medicine as theology ; the theatre claimed him, 
 and he threw himself more energetically than ever into dramatic 
 studies. Unfortunately for Lessing, circumstances led to the 
 break-up of the company just when he was about to finish a 
 tragedy that Koch, the actor, had agreed to play in, and he made 
 up his mind to leave Leipzig. His pecuniary difficulties were 
 increased by the bad faith of some of the actors. He stayed for 
 a short period at Wittenberg, where his younger brother was now 
 a student ; but he declares that this was a most miserable time. 
 Yoimg men, even although they preserve their moral character, 
 as Lessing did, do not indulge themselves in the " frank and un- 
 conventional " society of actors, and in the privilege of going 
 " behind the scenes," without expenditure, even although very 
 prudent and economical, which Lessing hardly was ; and the 
 results of his conduct in Leipzig soon followed him to Wittenberg 
 in the shape of creditors clamorous for payment. As Wittenberg 
 
 * Lessing pflegte zu sagen: Er habe in Leipzig Medicin studirt, aber kein Kollegium 
 gehort, als fiber die Chemie und die Hcbanimenkunst.— Nicolai's Berlin Savants, p. 49. 
 
24 
 
 LESSING. 
 
 afforded small prospect of engagements, it was with pleasure that 
 he heard from Mylius, who was now editing "Riidiger's Gaz ette " 
 in Berlin, that some work might be found for him there. To 
 Berlin he accordingly went. He assisted Mylius a little, made 
 some translations from the French, and wrote plays — a man 
 without profession or fixed status. Once more his parents were 
 in distress about him, and sent piteous appeals that he would 
 adopt some regular way of life. Though Lessing was reduced to 
 great shifts, finding that the shabby clothes of a poor scholar did 
 not readily recommend him for profitable employment, he kept 
 up a brave front to his parents. He acknowledges his position, 
 sped,ks of his trials in a calm and manly way, and is firm in his jus- 
 tification of the course he has chosen ; if he had but a better coat 
 that he might present himself decently here and there, he is cer- 
 tain that he would succeed. And he meets the objections of his 
 father one by one, and defends Mylius from aspersions. 
 
 " I see clearly that your hostile opinion of a man who, if he had 
 never before shown me kindness, has done so now, exactly when it is 
 most needed, is the principal reason why you are so much opposed to 
 all my undertakings. It seems as if you considered him the horror of 
 all the world. Does not this hatred go too far ? . . . Have I, 
 then, done so very ill in choosing for the work of my youth a depart- 
 ment in which very few of my countrymen have yet exercised their 
 energies ? And would it not be foolish to stop before one has read 
 masterpieces by me ? I cannot comprehend why a writer of comedies 
 should not also be a Christian. A writer of comedies is a man who 
 depicts vice in its ridiculous aspects. May not a Christian laugh at 
 vice ? What if I promised to write a comedy which the theologians 
 would not only read but praise ? Would you think it impossible to 
 fulfil the promise ? What if I wrote a comedy on the freethinkers and 
 those who despise your office f " 
 
 And with regard to creature comforts he disposes of that point 
 easily at this time as afterwards : " I call comfort that which 
 another would call penury. But what does it matter to me 
 whether I have plenty or not, so that I live ? As to my meals, 
 I have no sort of anxiety about them. I can procure a hearty 
 meal for one groschen six pfennige " (three-halfpence). 
 
 So firmly and reasonably did Lessing urge his cause, and so 
 impressed was the pastor by the manliness of his letters, that on 
 receipt of this last he sent him nine thalers and a box containing 
 some things he had left at home. It is to be presumed that now 
 
LESSING. 25 
 
 the household at Kamenz reconciled itself to the course he was tak- 
 ing. Even his eldest sister, who in her orthodox zeal had burned 
 some of his anacreontic songs and dramatic fragments on that un- 
 expected visit he paid to Kamenz, and was coolly punished for it, 
 wrote sisterly letters to him on his birthday, though it needs to be 
 said once for all that neither sister nor mother ever came properly 
 to appreciate Gotthold. They were always, however, very ready 
 to accept money from him, which he would borrow rather than 
 refuse their requests. He had been recommended by Mylius for 
 the work of arranging the library of his employer, Herr Riidiger ; 
 and for this he received " free table " and a small sum of money. 
 He also had the honour of translating some documents from 
 French into German for the great Voltaire, to whom he was intro- 
 duced, and has thus a remote connection with that Hirsch law- 
 suit which Mr Carlyle has treated with such humorous touches 
 in " Frederick." During the whole three years of his stay in 
 Berlin at this time, Lessing lived with Mylius ; and though 
 there was little stimulus to dramatic production, he sketched 
 several plays, some of which were afterwards elaborated and 
 published. 
 
 The condition of things in Berlin at this time was very anoma- 
 lous. A certain pretence of liberalism and enlightenment con- 
 tended with the rankest bigotry and tyranny in high quarters. 
 Frederick the Great regarded all religious earnestness as cant, and 
 put a premium on open infidelity. The man whom Mr Carlyle 
 has attempted to canonise would gladly have stamped out religion 
 altogether. Lessing saw clearly that danger was likely to result 
 from court influence in this direction. He held up to ridicule 
 the logic of the men who thought it a fine thing to attack ortho- 
 doxy in order to attract the notice of the King and gain favour. 
 The love of fairplay was too strong in Lessing, and his logic even 
 at this time was far too keen, to let him relish this kind of self- 
 interested " enlightenment." When Lessing was reminded that 
 he was free to write as he did through the toleration of the King, 
 he replied that, as such toleration was yielded only that religion 
 might be more freely attacked, and the " newspapers made more 
 interesting," as the King said, it might soon be a very disagree- 
 able kind of toleration indeed, and that on principle he could not 
 admire it. In this way bigotry, under the mask of refinement in 
 high places, developed bigotry without any mask in the Church. 
 
26 LESSING. 
 
 Orthodox preachers railed against the theatre because Frederick 
 encouraged his French players ; and strong tendencies were seen 
 to be operating from both sides to defeat what had already risen 
 as a definite desire in the heart of Lessiijg — a really national Ger- 
 man theatre. For it should not be forgotten that though Frederick 
 had in Berlin a troop of French actors, who on certain days played 
 French pieces with great taste, there was then no German theatre 
 in the capital of Prussia ! * 
 
 Stahr tells us : " The theatrical profession was then an abomi- 
 nation to all pious persons. Even in the realm of the king of 
 enlightenment, the clergy preached against Peter Hulferding, chief 
 theatre-director of Prussia, who had been privileged by that mon- 
 arch on his accession. Actors were even denied Christian burial. 
 One must consider this state of feeling to be just to Lessing's 
 father.'' We must keep this in view also to see how broad- 
 minded he was when he had to deal with his refractory son, and 
 how reasonably he came to view matters. 
 
 But other reflections suggest themselves. In midst of this privi- 
 leged and pretentious freethinking, cruelties were practised, par- 
 ticularly toward the Jews, in a spirit more like that of the Middle- 
 Ages than of enlightened Germany in the eighteenth century. 
 Frederick regarded the Jews as hardly within the pale of citizen- 
 ship or protection. It will ever remain a stigma on his character 
 that here, where bright laurels might so easily have been won, he 
 chose to be retrograde. Under his rule, we may say that the 
 prejudice against the Jews in Germany was intensified instead of 
 lessened. They were driven into the most disagreeable quarters 
 of the cities, and treated with all kinds of ignominy. Every Jew 
 was compelled to pay a heavy toll on his own body as he passed 
 out and in at the city gates, as though be were indeed a chattel ; 
 he had protection from the magistrate for only one child, and 
 could sue only in certain processes at law. The iron which then 
 entered into the souls of this people has borne its fruits in many 
 directions in literature. It gave a colour to the patience and 
 energy of men like Mendelssohn and Gumpertz ; it was like an 
 
 * Frederick the Great had from 1740 to 1756 a French troop, which on each Wednesday 
 evening played in a little theatre in the Kurfiirstensaal of the palace. The members were 
 excellent; all who loved the drama of MoUfere, Corneille, Racine, Regnard, and Marivaux, 
 were anxious to see them. The German theatre, on the contrary, remained altogether in 
 the most miserable condition, and the emptiest speculation took its plac^. Hettner, iii., p. 
 
LESSING. 27 
 
 unseen feather on the shaft of Heine's bitterest irony. It was a 
 bold thing for a young writer openly to confront prejudices that 
 were so intense and so firmly shielded by royal favour. But 
 Lessing never considered the value of secondary advantages ; nor 
 did he ever trumpet abroad his virtue in this respect, or try to 
 make capital out of his independence. He directed a blow 
 against the bigotry of freethinking in his " Freigeist," and against 
 the treatment of the Jews in " Die Juden." It may be true that 
 the purpose shows too clearly under the movement, and the chief 
 characters are not so much created as " made to be admired ;" 
 but we cannot but respect his bravery in showing so forcibly that 
 virtues could blossom among a people proscribed, and that the 
 " freethinker," who holds priests in contempt merely because they 
 are priests, may be illustrating the very temper which he is con- 
 demning in another, and missing sight of the possibilities of 
 excellence where it ought, on his own principles, to be his greatest 
 joy to find them. The plot of " The Jews " is of the slightest, but 
 the play is touched with great art here and there ; and the parting 
 of the Jew and the Christian baron — whose daughter he has saved, 
 but who cannot be wedded to the son of a Jew, as had been pro- 
 posed, when the fatal birth-mark has been exposed — is penetrated 
 by vivid pathos. The " Freethinker," too, is undoubtedly feeble, 
 heavy, and slow so far as movement is concerned. But the 
 writer evidently did not aim at swiftness of movement ! rather at 
 emphasising the intolerance and insulting arrogance of Adrast, 
 the " freethinker," and the patient meekness and dignity of Theo- 
 phan, whom Lessing confessedly drew from his own father, as, 
 indeed, the whole play is the redemption of that pledge he had 
 half-humorously given to paint faithfully those who despised the 
 priestly office. The man who could make his first start in litera- 
 ture thus boldly was not likely to become a court favourite and to 
 receive pensions, or at any rate to retain them long, however 
 much he might prove himself a poet and critic and re-creator of 
 literature. In " The Jews " we have the seed that finally blos- 
 somed into " Nathan." 
 
 In carefully criticising Lessing's plays, M. Crousle has the fol- 
 lowing apt remarks on this point : — 
 
 "Lacomddie des Juifs (1749) est legerme de Nathan le Sage. D^jk 
 le caract&e de Lessing se dessine presque tout entier dans cette essai 
 dejeunesse ; independance d'opinions, qui lemet en dehors de toutes 
 
28 LESSING. 
 
 les sectes ; hardiesse k se placer entre tous les extremes, pour frapper 
 en se retournant les uns aprfes les autres ; ardeur dfesintdress^e k 
 r&abiliter les victimes des erreurs traditioneUes, quelles qu'elles 
 fussent ; tendance k transformer le thditre en tribune, en journal, en 
 brochure de controverse religieuse, on eu d'autres termes, k resserrer 
 la poldmique sous forme dramatique, afin de la rendre populaire. 
 Heureusement toutefois pour le theatre allemand, Lessing cultiva 
 aussi la scfene pour elle-meme, et s'efforga d'y proposer k ses com- 
 patriotes des modeles du vrai genre dramatique. II prdtendit m6me 
 accroitre I'int^r^t en rapprochant, dis-je, par la temps et par la con- 
 dition. Les hdros de la tragedie frangaise lui paraissaient trop loin 
 de nous." * 
 
 Kant celebrated the unity of purpose in Lessing's more serious 
 dramatic works by saying that " Nathan " was the second part or 
 " Fortsetzung " of the " Juden." 
 
 Of these two early performances — "The Jews" and "The 
 "^Freethinkers " — Danzel says well : " The astonishing thing is, 
 that the young man of twenty-two was able to place himself with 
 such freedom, firmness, and adroitness above both of the parties, 
 to one of which at that time every one must belong as by a Solon's 
 law." 
 
 In the end of 1750 Mylius had quarrelled with Riidiger, and 
 Lessing, who declined to become editor of the Gazette in liis 
 stead, agreed to contribute regularly critical articles as he had done 
 before. This connection may be said to have inaugurated his 
 career as a critic, and has thus a special significance, claiming 
 more attention than the other plays which Lessing sketched or 
 wrote at this time — among others, " DerSchatz" ("The Treasure") 
 and "JWeiher sind Weiber" ("Women are Women"). 
 
 In the end of 1751, Lessing resolved to leave Berlin for a time, 
 for two reasons. The first was that his dramatic impulses so 
 lacked stimulus that production failed him ; and the second, that 
 he desired to make further study of some things which he regarded 
 as essential to his outfit as a critic, and which he thought that he 
 could study better in Wittenberg than in Berlin. To Wittenberg 
 he accordingly betook himself, and went through a very extensive 
 course of reading — more especially in the Latin authors. He also 
 composed many epigrams and lyrics ; but he also sent abroad 
 some witnesses of his critical acumen, as Jocher and others only 
 too keenly felt. This retreat to Wittenberg also is noteworthy«for 
 
 * Crousle Lessing et le Gout Franjais, p. 44. 
 
LESSING. 29 
 
 the second association into which it brought Lessing and Voltaire. 
 Lessing had borrowed a book belonging to Voltaire from a friend, 
 M. de Louvain, Voltaire's secretary, and either forgetfully or 
 fancying that he might without injury or annoyance to others 
 retain it for a time, took it away with him. When Voltaire found 
 this out, he got angry, stormed at Louvain, and wrote in high 
 dudgeon to Lessing, who answered him in such a manner as he 
 hardly expected ; but Voltaire afterwards had his revenge. 
 
 III. 
 
 Having accomplished what he desired by his stay at Witten- 
 berg, Lessing returned to Berlin at the end of 1752. This 
 second residence in Berlin was notable for the friendship that 
 was then begun between Lessing and Mendelssohn and Nicolai, 
 which left results in many ways. As, we trust, will become more 
 apparent from another section of this book, Mendelssohn con- 
 ferred intellectual benefits on Lessing, as well as received them ; 
 so that there is no real justification for the almost unconscious 
 way in which too often Mendelssohn has been set before us as 
 though he were a mere satelKte, deriving all his light and impor- 
 tance from Lessing. No man would have felt more indignant at 
 such an idea than would Lessing himself, whose habit it never 
 was to favour satellites. But it is very graceful in Jewish writers 
 to recognise so liberally as Kayserling does, the brotherly manner 
 in which Lessing at first aided in lifting off the burdens that 
 hindered Mendelssohn's progress towards the light. He writes 
 at one place : — 
 
 " Yes, Lessing was the man who first properly awakened the 
 slumbering impulse towards knowledge in Mendelssohn ; with- 
 out Lessing Mendelssohn could but slowly and weariedly have 
 attained to that which he very soon became. Lessing was to him 
 teacher, friend and brother ; and what glorious fruit grew out of 
 this faithful and long-enduring friendship ! Mendelssohn knew 
 well and ever acknowledged gratefully that Lessing had builded 
 up, 5s it were, his soul and spirit — this was manifest in every work 
 that , he put forth, in every line that he wrote. In Lessing's 
 glanje he ever found alleviation for all his discomforts; amid the 
 deepest griefs that his bosom knew, Lessing's sympathy brought 
 
30 LESSING. 
 
 back cheerful looks to his face ; Lessing's letters carried to him 
 the sweetest refreshment ; and, dying, his failing eyes rested on 
 the bust of his friend, with whom he hoped that he would soon 
 be once more united." * 
 
 Lessing at once set himself to translation — his unfailing 
 resource in those earlier days — and resumed his connection with 
 the " Gazette," which had now passed into the hands of Riidiger's 
 son-in-law, and had become better known as the " Voss'sche 
 Zeitung,'' showing a clearness and mastery of his topics that 
 astonished his readers. He attacked Gottsched, but in con- 
 junction with Mendelssohn, he treated of Pope as a meta- 
 physician, somewhat to the chagrin of the Berlin Academy,t 
 and he defended Horace Walpole, thus indica,ting that he had 
 recently made extensive excursions in the field of English litera- 
 ture. More to the purpose, he prepared and published a selec- 
 tion from his writings, which, though it was unfortunately a failure 
 in point of sale, gained him friends and admirers. Coincidentally 
 with these labours, however, he had pursued his dramatic 
 studies ; and after having retired to Potsdam, and " shut himself 
 up for seven weeks in a garden-house " there, as Kleist wrote, he 
 finished "Miss Sara Sampson." This drama still more fully 
 exhibits the efiect~~or his" recent studies in English literature 
 during his stay at Wittenberg, and indicates a final break with 
 the French influence. Richardson's " Clarissa " and Moore's 
 " Gamester " may have had a share in suggesting it. " Miss 
 Sara Sampson " is now banished from the German stage ; but no 
 student of Lessing can pass it by without a careful and reverent 
 reading, because it marks a definite point in Lessing's dramatic 
 career, and also forms a turning-point in the history of the German 
 drama. By " Miss Sara Sampson," it is not too much to say that 
 Lessing freed the tragedy of common hfe from the prosaic 
 criminal element, and discovered tragical conflicts peculiar to its 
 situations. By penetrating into the interior of family life, into 
 the depths of the perplexities of individual souls, he obtained also 
 for the lower sphere of human action an arena wherein the 
 absolute worth, and freedom, and sovereignty of the individual 
 
 * " Mendelssohn's Philosophische und Religiose Grundsatze," pp. 14-15. 
 
 t A writer in the Comhitl Magazine of August 1878, p. 199, positively states that this 
 article was sent in to the Berlin Academy in competition for a prize. We should be 
 pleased to know his authority for this. The quiet hits at the Academy would have given 
 this step the aspect of great effrontery. 
 
LESSJNG. 31 
 
 could assert themselves. This field is the family. For only in 
 the relations of the family and the affections of the heart can the 
 man whose capacities as a citizen are narrowly circumscribed 
 appear as a sovereign, a hero. 
 
 It is easy to see that the theory on which Lessing wrote this 
 play would have injurious results if pressed to extremes. It 
 would transform all drama strictly into domestic drama; and 
 there is a good reason why, since scenic effect is a necessary part 
 of dramatic art, some value should be attached to variety of 
 accessories. But Lessing's theory is intelligible enough, as he 
 put it, in this fashion: "The sufferings of those whose misfortunes 
 approach nearest to our own must naturally penetrate deepest into 
 our souls, and if we would sympathise with kings, it would be as 
 with men and not as with kings,^' — an idea which has its counter- 
 part in a remarkable utterance of Dr Johnson ; but what is true 
 of real life itself is not in the same way true of the stage, whose 
 main business it is to create illusions by means of which dis- 
 tinctions that effectively prevail in real life disappear or are 
 modified under demands of sympathy. 
 
 It would be one of the most short-sighted of criticisms to say 
 that " Miss Sara Sampson " was due entirely to English influence. 
 English influence did something to determine its form ; but the 
 play itself is truly the outcome of the revolt against authority, 
 which even then was strongly soliciting utterance, and of the 
 demand for complete freedom, individuality, and the essential 
 rights of classes as dependent on the characters developed within 
 them. Though Lessing was not a master of pathos, nor indeed 
 of any deep sentiment, he has so skilfully associated the general 
 ideas with touching and striking types, and has thrown them into 
 situations so suitable that we are hardly surprised to read in 
 Ramler's letter to Gleim about the play, that " the spectators lis- 
 tened for three hours and a half, sat still as statues and wept;" nor 
 are we surprised- to learn that Goethe remarked on its democratic 
 tendency. He said that it stood high among the dramas that 
 increase the moral respect of the third estate ; and argued that 
 the hterary revolt it led a.gainst the princes of the stage antici- 
 pated the political revolution that ere long followed, making 
 liberty and equality something less than empty words. If there 
 is any truth in these words of Mr John Modey's : " Rousseau 
 was a Protestant ; he was a native of the very capital and mother 
 
32 LESSING. 
 
 city of Protestantism, militant and democratic; and he was 
 penetrated to his heart's core by the political ideas which had 
 arisen in Europe at the Reformation ; " * certainly it is yet truer 
 of Lessing. " Miss Sara Sampson " is the raising of the revolu- 
 tionary standard in the realm of the drama ; and that not in 
 French, but in truly German fashion. 
 
 M. Cherbuliez has signalised this point, with a different pur- 
 pose, writing thus : " Byron a dit ; Je cherche un hdros, / want 
 a hero. Lessing disait au contraire : ' Plus de h^ros : de cherche 
 des Bourgeois.' Et il a rdsoMment choise pour sa muse la 
 joueuse de castagnettes ; mais gu' il ne se rdclaime d'Eschyle et 
 d' Aristotle." t 
 
 Tieck well says of Marwood that it is a highly significant 
 character, and very masterly is the seduction scene. The father 
 and the other characters, he adds, are weak ; but such a highly 
 significant character as Marwood suffices to support the piece. 
 
 It is with a peculiar reluctance that one circumstance must be 
 mentioned with reference to this second residence in Berlin : 
 Lessing, in spite of all his efforts, was in such dire need that he 
 had unwillingly to accept aid from Mendelssohn and Kleist — 
 kindnesses which he never forgot. 
 
 In 1755, " Miss Sara Sampson" was acted at Frankfort-on-the- 
 Oder, and thither Lessing went to superintend the preparations. 
 He was tired of his life in Berlin, which had led to nothing fixed 
 and certain in the way of income, while the excess of court 
 influence was more and more uncongenial to him. He now, 
 therefore, resolved for a second time to try Leipzig, whither he 
 went, and where he renewed his intercourse with Weisse. He 
 was desirous to see " Miss Sara Sampson " on the Leipzig stage ; 
 but he was disappointed in this, for it was not produced there till 
 1756, in an abridged form, under Weisse's hand. With his cus- 
 tomary good-humour, he writes to Mendelssohn that, if the public 
 would but give him one hearing, it would not see or hear anything 
 of him for the next thr^e years. He had been recommended 
 to a young wealthy gentleman named Winklet to go as travelling 
 companion with him for the next three years, and had consented. 
 
 On this subject he thus writes to Mendelssohn : — 
 
 " You know the proposal which Professor Sulzer has made to me to 
 travel in foreign lands . Of this I am now by no means certain, because 
 
 * Mr John Morley's " Rousseau." t Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 
LESSING. 33 
 
 I have received the proposal of another which in a different way might 
 be more advantageous to me. I would not in this case go as a private 
 tutor, nor under what would be to me the burden of soul-distracting 
 boys, nor at the orders of a self-willed family, but travel as the sole 
 companion of a man, who is not likely either from lack of means or of 
 will, to fail to make ihe journey more useful and agreeable to me than 
 I could possibly be able to make it even by myself. He is a young 
 gentleman named Winkler, about my own age, of a very good 
 character, without parents or relatives, after whose crotchets he must 
 direct himself." * 
 
 They set out in May of 1756. Their intentions were to go 
 to Holland, and from that, after some time, to pass over 
 into England, which Lessing's careful studies of English authors 
 had made him very desirous to see. He greatly enjoyed 
 his residence in Holland; but the tour was stopped through 
 the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, and they returned 
 to Leipzig. Notwithstanding the stir in Leipzig through the 
 presence of the soldiery, Lessing, in the winter of 1756-57, 
 confessed himself " bored ; " but he translated some English 
 works, and must have been relieved and cheered when Kleist had 
 joined the army there. The friendship which Lessing had formed 
 with Kleist in Berlin soon ripened into the most ardent attach- 
 ment, now that they were often together. For a time Lessing 
 lived with Kleist, and through him formed acquaintances, some 
 of which were to prove useful to him afterwards. 
 
 Owing to a tedious lawsuit in which he was unfortunately 
 involved with Winkler, through that gentleman's desire to evade 
 some part of the agreement which he was, after great delay and 
 vexation to Lessing, compelled to fulfil, and the departure of 
 Kleist after the battle of Rossbach to take charge of a miHtary 
 hospital, Lessing resolved in 1757 to return to Berlin. He 
 carried with him the first sketch of "E milia Galotti." which 
 many critics regard as the finest of his works. A warm welcome 
 was given him by Mendelssohn, Nicolai, and Ramler. His 
 first work here was the issue of a volume of epigrams by Logau, 
 in conjunction with Ramler, who, before the task was done, had 
 reason to complain of Lessing's dilatoriness. The introduction, 
 which Lessing had undertaken to furnish, was not forthcoming 
 till long after the date fixed ; but Ramler, though chagrined, 
 excused him by saying, " I cannot take it very ill of our friend : 
 
 * " Sammlung," edited by Dr Heinemann, p. 187. 
 
 c 
 
34 LESSING. 
 
 he has ten irons in the fire at once." The " Literary Letters," 
 which were now started in association with Mendelssohn- and 
 Nicolai, had a remarkable influence. They were addressed to a 
 soldier supposed to be wounded in the war — in a word, to Kleist. 
 Though Lessing, in adopting the tone that he took in these 
 letters, in some degree sought to adapt himself to the temper of 
 the time that he might the better gain a hearing, he discussed 
 the most varied topics with such clearness, calmness and sugges- 
 tiveness, as make them still entertaining reading. Nowhere did 
 he ever hit home more directly, or rise more easily from the 
 topics of the moment to universal principles, throwing in effici- 
 ently the most forcible and familiar illustrations. " We are in 
 presence of a man, not of a mere book ; one who has before 
 him, as he writes, the living men into whose minds he desires 
 to cast seed from the harvest that has slowly ripened in his 
 own." 
 
 He wrote also on the question of education, with reference to 
 Wieland's utterances on the subject j he presented analyses of 
 Shakespeare's plays, showing such an appreciation of their deeper 
 qualities as was very uncommon in that day; illustrated the 
 need of childhood for the_ element of mystery in education, and 
 discussed acutely the nature and true form of the fable. It is 
 very characteristic of Lessing that, in speaking of some passages 
 in Wieland's collection of prose writings called " Experiences of 
 the Christian," he should point out that these experiences, 
 " which, since they are those of the Christian, ought to have been 
 those of all Christians, were mere exercises of an individual 
 fancy that left the heart empty and cold." In the course of this 
 criticism there occur expressions which might almost be presumed 
 to have suggested that whole section of Hegel's "Esthetic" in 
 which he deals with the ideals that are wrought out by the poet 
 in isolation and apart from humanity and common interests, and 
 ruthlessly condemns them. 
 
 Lessing, too, has much to say in answer to Cramer, who had 
 laid down a theory of education based on the idea of proceeding 
 strictly from simple to complex truth, with the practical appli- 
 cation that a child ought first to be taught, not that Christ is 
 the second person of the Trinity, but that He is an example of 
 virtue and a high moral teacher, and that the way would thus 
 be prepared for the reception of dogma." "Lessing," as Mr 
 
LESSING. 3S 
 
 Sime well puts it, "Offers no opinion as to the propriety of giving 
 any sort of instruction in religion ; but he very decidedly states 
 his conviction that Cramer's idea is based on a wholly mistaken 
 theory of human nature. Childhood, he points out- — not with- 
 out a slight touch of sarcasm — is the age at which the mind 
 most readily accepts mystery ; and if plain truths alone are then 
 taught, the difficulty of accepting mystery afterwards is increased, 
 since the Socinian and the orthodox conceptions of Christianity 
 are not related to each other as simple and complex, the former 
 conducting to the latter, but are two opposed systems of belief." 
 Lessing is never the logician merely, but delights in regarding 
 human nature in its entire tendencies and needs ; and his caution 
 here is as noticeable as his acuteness. 
 
 This could hardly be better illustrated than by the manner in 
 which Lessing now sought, by two contrasted studies, to prepare 
 himself to expose the spurious classicality of the French drama, 
 with its wearisome rules and its unities.* His work on the 
 Fable, which belongs to this period, had led him back to the 
 Greek, and indirectly to the Greek dramatists. Alongside of 
 Sophocles (whose life he began to write and almost finished, 
 showing great clearness and exact knowledge) he set Shakes- 
 peare; and it was from these two that he drew confirmation 
 satisfactory to himself of his theories of true dramatic composi- 
 tion. Hettner very well remarks on this subject: — " With these 
 Shakespeare studies went for a long time hand in hand the in- 
 spiring study of Sophocles. One should err, if one fancied that 
 the writing of the ' Life of Sophocles,' and the intended transla- 
 tion of his tragedies and commentary on them, which indeed 
 he actually began, were only to Lessing a mere philosophical 
 fancy."t 
 
 Lessing's relations with Kleist gradually shaped themselves 
 into a delicate but pathetic idyl of friendship, and cannot here 
 be passed by. Smarting under the neglect of the King, Kleist 
 had eagerly sought opportunity to show what spirit was in him, 
 and accepted the first opening for service in the field. At the 
 battle of Kunersdorf he exposed himself after he should have 
 ' retired, and died either of his wounds or through neglect. The 
 
 * See for a very full and fair discussion of Lessing and the Aristotelian rules in relation 
 to the French theatre, as well as an analysis of Lessing's dramatic pieces, Crousle Lessing 
 et le Gout Frangaise en AUemagne — livre iL 
 
 t See Hettner, "Literatur geschichte," iv. pp. 513-5. 
 
36 LESSING. 
 
 moment Lessing learned that Kleist had been wounded and was 
 taken prisoner, he uTOte to him ; and as he knew that he would 
 be completely stripped by the Russians, he arranged with Men- 
 delssohn, Nicolai, and Ramler that money should be remitted to 
 him in Frankfort ; and in case he should be brought to Russian 
 Poland, in Dantzic. He wrote to all his friends in Frankfort, , 
 and to some in Dantzic, commending Kleist to their attention 
 and care. He had even determined to go to Frankfort, though 
 the city was full of the enemy, to seek his friend. " If he still 
 lives, I will seek him out," said Lessing. "Shall I never see 
 him again ? Shall I never more in my life speak with him and 
 embrace him ? " 
 
 He had made his arrangements ; but before he could start, 
 the doubt became certainty —Kleist — " our Kleist " — had died. 
 Lessing thus wrote to Gleim on the 6th of September : — 
 
 " Alas ! dear friend, it is too true. He is dead. We have him no 
 more. He died in the house and in the arms of Professor Nicolai.* 
 He was always calm and cheerful, even in the greatest pain. He 
 greatly longed to see his friends again. Would that it had been 
 possible ! My sorrow over this event is a very wild sorrow. I do 
 not indeed demand that the balls should have taken another direction 
 because an honest man stood in their path ; but I do demand that 
 
 the honest man . See, frequently grief leads me to be angry with 
 
 him whom it concerns. He had already three, four wounds ; why 
 did he not go .■' Generals with fewer and slighter wounds have retired 
 from the field without dishonour. He wished to die. Forgive me if 
 I am in excess in speaking of him. It is said that he would not have 
 died if he had not been neglected ! Neglected ! I know not on 
 whom I should take vengeance ! The wretches, to neglect him ! 
 Professor Nicolai has pronounced his funeral oration ; another, I 
 know not whom, has written an elegy upon him. They cannot have 
 lost much in Kleist who can do that now. The Professor intends to 
 publish his oration ; it is all so pitiful ! I know certainly that Kleist 
 would have preferred to take another wound with him into the grave 
 rather than to have such babbled after him. Has a professor really 
 a heart ? He desires now to have verses from Ramler and me to 
 print with his oration. If he has desired the same of you, and you 
 
 gratify his desire . Dearest Gleim, you must not do it ! You 
 
 will not do it ! At present you feel too much to be able to say what 
 you feel. And it is not all the same to you, as it is to a professor 
 what you say and how you say it." 
 
 ^ A brother of Frederick Nicolai, the publisher. 
 
LESSING. 37 
 
 The difference between the characters of Kleist and Lessing — 
 the one so full of sentiment and impulse, the other apparently 
 so remote from sentiment, and obedient to the demands of reason 
 alone — intensifies the sympathy we must feel with I.essing here j 
 and when we know that he was at this period hard pressed both 
 for time and money, his devotion to Kleist comes out in the 
 stronger and more pleasing light. 
 
 The pecuhar cosmopolitanism which coloured Lessing's 
 patriotism had often so severely tried his loyal friends that 
 there can be little doubt they gladly welcomed any signs of a 
 more reasonable, and, as they would have said, more reliable 
 patriotism. Sometimes he had despised Prussia and exalted his 
 native Saxony; sometimes he appeared exactly to reverse the 
 position ; and yet again he seemed to regard all such distinctions 
 and conflicting interests as not only indifferent but mischievous. 
 On these matters he spoke from the mood of the moment, and 
 generally had in his mind considerations not usually regarded as 
 pertaining to any political ideas. Recently he seemed to have 
 reached more fixed and sensible views. Lowositz, Prague, and 
 Rossbach had been fought, and he felt that Frederick had struck 
 a blow for Protestantism and intellectual freedom against 
 Austrian Jesuitism and Russian barbarism, as well as for the 
 honour of Germany against the vanity and pretension of the 
 French. This, however, was but a passing feeling ; there was 
 much that was pretty certain soon to qualify it in the way in 
 which Frederick exercised at home the power that he had won. 
 
 Meanwhile Lessing paid his tribute to the patriotic idea as 
 presented in the career of Kleist. A high artistic end was alsO' 
 to be served. He wished to show that he could write a drama,, 
 moving by swift action to its climax through a series of striking 
 situations, and at the same time embody a high lesson without 
 such moral reflection or formal teaching as had characterised his 
 previous works. The result was " Philotas," a prose tragedy in 
 one act. The hero is the son of a Gi;ecian king, and is taken 
 prisoner by Aridasus, the enemy of his country, whilst the son of 
 Aridseus shares the same fate in the opposite camp. Philotaii. 
 knows that the great end he has cherished will be sacrificed 
 through his father's excessive love for him, and that if an ex- 
 change of prisoners is proposed he will at once accede to it that 
 he may redeem his son from the enemy's hands. He therefore 
 
38 LESSING. 
 
 sends a message to his father, telling him to demand for the ex- 
 tradition of the prince the surrender of the point that had 
 originally caused the war, and intimates that by the time the 
 note is read this will have become the only wise course of action, 
 since the writer of it will have ended his life in order to ensure 
 the success of this plan. The play is worked up with great skill 
 from point to point ; and Philotas, half boy, half hero, is indeed 
 a fine creation. The man who stood as the original of that 
 character was at once a great man and a good man, worthy to 
 rank with the heroes of olden times. I^essing has thus fragrantly 
 preserved record of the noble character of Kleist. " Philotas " 
 is also remarkable for the commanding interest it maintains 
 wholly independent of the sentiment of sexual love. 
 
 IV. 
 
 While living with Kleist at Leipzig Lessing had formed the 
 acquaintance of Colonel Tauentzien, who was enabled at this 
 time to do him a service. By his heroic defence of the capital 
 of Silesia against superior numbers, Tauentzien had attracted 
 the eye of Frederick. He was raised to the rank of general, 
 and made governor of Breslau. Tauentzien, in midst of his 
 administrative duties, greatly wanted the help of a capable and 
 trustworthy secretary. He offered the appointment to Lessing, 
 who gladly accepted it, saying to his friends half playfully that 
 " nothing in particular drove him from Berlin," but he wanted 
 change. The official work did not make such demands upon 
 Lessing's time as to render production impossible, and he wrote, 
 during his stay in Breslau, the greater part of "^jnna von Barn- 
 jielm," and the outlines of the " Laocjion." He also read very 
 largely, and collected 'a good library. Unfortuhately, the pas- 
 sion for gambling— his one great weakness— again asserted its 
 power over him. He said that it relieved him from depression. 
 He fell as if under a fascination : the General warned him, repri- 
 manded him, though always maintaining the attitude of a friend. 
 Whilst he might have amassed a fortune through certain doubt- 
 ful " mint " operations, Lessing was spending his salary as he got 
 it, sometimes doing imprudently charitable actions; and when 
 five years later he left . Breslau, on Tauentzien being appointed 
 
LESSING. 39 
 
 governor of Silesia, he returned to Berlin a poorer man than he 
 had left it. 
 
 Lessing had accepted the secretaryship to Tauentzien without 
 reckoning all its disadvantages. His upright nature revolted 
 against the schemes by which even so loyal and good a man as 
 Tauentzien was content to enrich himself at the expense of his 
 country, through a debased currency. He found himself without 
 sympathy, without congenial society ; and the result was that, for 
 needful relief, he fell on play. High stakes, he said, fixed his 
 attention, and complete distraction was all that he sought from 
 cards. Faro was his favourite game ; and it says much for his 
 skill that he seldom lost anything worth speaking of. He wrote 
 a few more of the " Literary Letters " at considerable intervals ; 
 but the interest in them lessened; and Niolai discontinued them 
 in 1 76 1. While at Breslau, Winckelmann's " History of Ancient 
 Art " reached him. He read it with avidity and with apprecia- 
 tion ; but with some sense of great distinctions intentionally 
 effaced. He regarded the place given by Winckelmann to 
 allegory as likely to have a bad tendency. He had not seen many 
 works of art, but he had thought much on the essential prin- 
 ciples of all art Now, he was anxious to improve his know- 
 ledge ; and as he persevered in this he laid the foundations of 
 the " Laocoon." But never was the discursive nature of his 
 genius more thoroughly exhibited than at this time. Now it was 
 that he also laid the foundation of his extensive theological 
 knowledge. He made a profound study of the Church Fathers, 
 as well as of Spinoza and various ancient authors. The higher 
 development and the wider range which his critical genius took 
 while he was at Breslau amply justifies the remark of Hettner : — 
 " We distinguish in the religion and philosophical development 
 of Lessing two epochs — an epoch of preparation and an epoch of 
 complete maturity. The Breslau period, so determinative in his 
 artistic culture, is also determinative in his critical and theological 
 development." Hettner III., p. 587. 
 
 During his residence in Breslau the Professorship of Eloquence 
 at the University of Konigsberg was offered to him, which, had 
 it been accepted, would have made him a colleague of Kant ; 
 but he declined it on the very characteristic ground that he 
 could not deliver an oration in honour of the reigning sovereign, 
 which was one of the duties of the office. 
 
 It is doubtful if Lessing would have turned to Berhn at this 
 
40 LESSING. 
 
 time had it not been that his friends were hopeful they might 
 secure for him the appointment of Hbrarian to the King. But 
 Frederick remembered too many things he had heard of Lessing 
 — ^Voltaire's reports may have been forgotten, but the talk about 
 Lessing's sayings that seemed disloyal were remembered — and he 
 would not listen to the proposal, preferring after a lengthened hag- 
 gling with Winckelmann about salary, to accept the services of 
 an illiterate valetudinarian from Paris. The spirit in which the 
 King treated the mention of Lessing affords too good ground 
 for the manner in which afterwards Schlegel inveighed against 
 him, for failing to perceive the merits of men hke Lessing and 
 Winckelmann, or to aid them in any way. Turning hopelessly 
 from the idea of help in that quarter, Lessing now devoted 
 himself to the finishing of " Minna von Bamhelm " — the most 
 powerful and popular of his comedies, in which he dealt with 
 a contemporary theme drawn from an episode in the Seven 
 Years' War — to the " Laocoon," and to contributions to " Die 
 AUgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek " (" The General German 
 Library "), of which Nicolai was now editor and publisher. 
 " Minna von Barnhelm " is a genuine comedy, and has been 
 called the first national comedy, and the only one. It shows 
 great power in imparting to ordinary facts and experiences a 
 vivid ideal interest. 
 
 It is very significant of Lessing's uncommercial careless char- 
 acter, that he never received a penny for the innumerable repre- 
 sentations of " Minna " in Germany ; and this though, as we 
 have said, it has been by many, and these good judges, ranked 
 as his very best acting play. Tieck, for instance, says of it : — 
 " I have always put ' Minna von Barnhelm ' above ' Emilia 
 Galotti.' It is very complete and finished, and is one of our 
 most excellent German pieces. The chief character develops a 
 great amiability, and is most attractive. The relation between 
 Tellheim and Minna has in it something tantalising, but this was 
 necessary to comprehend the fate of both." * 
 
 Lessing was now past thirty-seven, still without any assured 
 
 * " Minna von Bamhelm" was first acted in Hamburg in 1767, and the year thereafter 
 in Berlin, with extraordinary success. The French translation — " Les Amants g^n6reux " — 
 was a miserable bungle {elcnde Pfuscherei). A man named Johnstone brought the piece 
 before the English public under the title of " The Disbanded Officer " in 1789. In another 
 translation in 1799, it was called "The School of Honour, or the Chance of War." In 18381 
 at length, it came out once more in English with the "Freigeist" and the "Schatz."— 
 Karl Griin. 
 
LESSING. 41 
 
 source of income. " I stood idle in the market-place then," he 
 said afterwards, " and nobody would hire me, doubdess because 
 nobody knew what use to put me to." The atmosphere of 
 Berlin was less likely than ever to attract him, for the success of 
 the Seven Years' War had produced an effusive vanity and super- 
 ciliousness, and added to that now was the sense of personal slight. 
 When, therefore, it was proposed to him by Lowen, a bookseller 
 of Hamburg, to go there as director of a national theatre, he 
 willingly accepted the offer. The company, however, did not 
 receive the support that was expected ; and it was not so much 
 on account of his work at the theatre as on the issue of the 
 " HambmgischeDramatiirgie," which was begun in connection 
 with it, that Lessing's residence in Hamburg has become 
 historical. Earnestly as he had cherished the idea of a truly 
 national theatre, he was now very bitterly to charge himself with 
 having been too sanguine. 
 
 " One might almost say," he wrote, " that the moral character of 
 the Germans is — the resolve to have no moral character of their own. 
 We are still the sworn imitators of everything foreign, especially the 
 humble admirers of the never enough to be admired French. Every- 
 thing from beyond the Rhine is beautiful, charming, lovely, divine 
 even ; we would rather disown sight and hearing than think otherwise ; 
 will make ourselves take coarseness for naturalness, insolence for 
 grace, grimace for expression, a jingling of rhymes for poetry, howling 
 for music, rather than in the smallest degree doubt the superiority 
 which this amiable people, this first people in the world, as it is 
 accustomed to call itself, in everything that is good and beautiful and 
 subhme and becoming, has received for its share from just Destiny." 
 
 The man who dealt by the literature of his own country with 
 such terrible frankness as this was not likely to be a favourite 
 in most circles. And he does not content himself with merely 
 negative charges : — 
 
 " The best that we Germans have as yet produced are a few 
 Essays of young men. Nay, our pedantry is so great that we con- 
 sider young men as the only proper fabricators of theatrical wares. 
 Men have more serious and worthy employment in the State and in 
 the Church. What men write should beseem the gravity of men ; a 
 compendium of law or philosophy, an erudite chronicle of this or that 
 imperial city, or edifying sermon, and such like. This solemn 
 pedantry being, and having long been, so fashionable amongst us, 
 let us not be surprised that our elegant literature stands so far behind 
 
42 LESSING. 
 
 —I will not say the literature of the ancients, but the literature of 
 all cultivated people ; say what we will, it has 2i puerile and childish 
 cast in the middle of the eighteenth century, and will, I fear, long 
 retain it. Blood and life, colour, and fire, we have in some measure 
 at last, but pith and nerve, marrow and bone, are sadly deficient." 
 
 The " Dramaturgic " is one of the most remarkable contribu- 
 tions ever made to the culture of a people. The great need for 
 such teaching and the disinclination to receive it, only make the 
 testimony the more remarkable, and show both the genius and 
 the daring of the writer in the more striking light. Lessing will 
 for one thing give French taste no quarter. He exposes the 
 superficiality in the masterpieces of Voltaire ; in considering the 
 essential qualities of the con\ic character, he finds the French 
 types are thin, superficial, conventional ; he contrasts the villains 
 of Shakespeare with those of Corneille and Racine, only to 
 the disadvantage of the French writers. And in his hands French 
 tragedy fares no better.* His close, careful study of the actor's 
 art is testified in almost every essay. Everywhere he brought 
 practice to a test in the clearest critical principles ; and his argu- 
 ments were unanswerable here as in other departments, as no 
 doubt poor Klotz felt before he escaped from Lessing's hands, 
 after he had ventured to impugn the statement that the ancient 
 painters did not attempt to represent Homer with pictorial 
 exactness. 
 
 The involuntary prejudices of criticism, especially as touching 
 national tastes, were never perhaps better exhibited than in the 
 manner in which French critics of repute have dealt by the 
 " Dramaturgic.'' M. Cherbuliez may stand as representative. 
 He finds in it the art of the advocate only, Lessing speaking 
 merely for a side. He at once accuses Lessing of being false to 
 his principles, and of being too strict in applying them. He 
 condemns him for laying too rigorous a system to the French 
 theatre, while he tells of his reverence for Shakespeare as against 
 Corneille and Racine. Ah ! there was the front of his offending. 
 M. Cherbuliez is all too naively epigrammatic : — 
 
 " Nous qui sommes d&intfressds dans la question, nous ne sommes 
 pas obliges de croire que cet ^vangile est un chef d'oeuvre. La composi - 
 tion en est fort indgale ; telle partie n'est qu' dbauchde, telle autre 
 offre des longueurs, des subtiUt^s, des minutees d'analyse. Somme 
 toute, ' la dramaturgic ' est un peu trop grave pour un pamphlet, un 
 
 * There is a French version of the Drciviaturgie by De Suckau. Didier, 2d Ed. 1873. 
 
LSSS/NG. 43 
 
 peu rop badine pour une dissertation j Vauteur nage entre deux 
 eaftXj- ou le voudrait plus sdrieux ou ■plus gai."* 
 
 Though calm and unexcitable, Lessing was apt to be sanguine 
 over new schemes ; and here, unfortunately, he had been led to 
 join in a printing enterprise along with one Bode. He was 
 hopeful that the issue of his own works, in which the interest 
 was increasing, would form a nucleus, and that others would 
 employ them. The business did not succeed. Lessing had to 
 sell his library, which he had collected with much labour and 
 expense, for a few hundred thalers, and after all little was done 
 to clear oiF the debts. 
 
 Several efforts were again made by Lessing's friends to find a 
 post suitable for him, but without success. At one time it was 
 hoped that he might have been made director of a great national 
 theatre at Vienna, which the Emperor had projected with the 
 idea of carrying away klat from Berlin ; but the scheme never 
 came to anything. At last he was put in charge of the exten 
 sive library founded by the Duke of Brunswick at Wolfenbiittel. 
 Lessing's name is henceforth identified with Wolfenbiittel. He 
 keenly felt the change from the bustling Ufe and the varied 
 society of Hamburg to this dull, sleepy little town, with its grim 
 wall around it, set in the midst of its flat marshy meadows. Its 
 solitude severely tried him. Only the visits that he now and 
 then paid to friends in Brunswick made it endurable. His 
 labours were hard and uncongenial; but he applied himself 
 faithfully, and he was rewarded by one or two discoveries. 
 Among a heap of books in the Wolfenbiittel library he was so 
 lucky as to alight on a copy of the lost answer of Berengarius to 
 Lanfranc. At first he thought of pubKshing it, but changed his 
 purpose, and devoted the whole summer of 1770 to writing a 
 book upon it. Then he resumed " Emilia Galotti," — the story 
 of Virginius cast among modern Italian conditions, — which had 
 been thrown aside after his disappointment with theatrical 
 matters at Hamburg; and he composed his volume upon epi- 
 grams, of which Mr Sime has given a valuable summary, though 
 we half expected to find there some specimens by way of 
 illustration from Lessing himself, such as are to be found, with 
 a good deal else of interest, in Mohnike's " Lessingiana," to 
 which we do not see that Mr Sime has referred. It may be that 
 
 * Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 
44 LESSING. 
 
 Lessing's epigrams do not exhibit the " charm '' often to be found 
 in this species of composition, but they are shrewd, pointed, and 
 piquant, and very characteristic of the man. Here are a 
 few: — 
 
 " Ein einzig boses Weib lebt hochstens in der Welt, 
 Nuf schlimm, dass jeder seins fur dieses einz'ge halt." 
 (There is but one bad woman ! With a groan 
 Each one assents, and thinks that one his own.) 
 
 " Verse wie sie Bassus schreibt 
 Werden unverganglich bleiben ; 
 Weil dergleichen Zeug zu schreiben 
 Stets ein Stumper iibrig bleibt." 
 (That poems such as these can die 
 
 My credence quite surpasses ; 
 There ne'er can be a lack of men 
 
 To write themselves down asses.) 
 
 The monostich given by Mohnike is very perfect in its own 
 way : — 
 
 " GRABSCHRIFT AUF EINEN GEHENKTEN. 
 
 " Hier ruht er, wenn der Wind nicht weht." 
 (He rests in peace when the winds do cease.) 
 
 And so also is the 
 
 "GRABSCHRIFT AUF KLEIST. 
 
 " O Kleist ! dein Denkmal dieser Stein 
 Du wirst des Steines Denkmal seyn." 
 (O Kleist ! this stone a monument to thee 1 
 Thou wilt, indeed, the stone's memorial be.) 
 
 The following show his way of celebrating brother poets : — 
 
 " You ask why poet Scmir, he whom all men praise, should be 
 A miser rich ? Because true poets starve, is Fate's decree." 
 
 " The reason why this cunning Jew failed in his knavery 
 Is simply that a cleverer knave he found in Monsieur V." 
 
 Voltaire had obtained a decision against a Jew celebrated for 
 his sharpness and trickery. 
 
 "to the READER. 
 
 " Who will not mighty Klopstock praise ? 
 Will everybody read him ? Nay ! 
 A little less extol our lays, 
 
 And read a little more, we pray.'' 
 
LESSING. 45 
 
 The following, written in an album which had for design on 
 the cover a cross, has its point : — 
 
 " Here will I lie ! for here, when life has ceased, 
 I'll have, if not a stone, a cross at least." 
 
 Lessing's genius, clear, precise, and direct, found a sphere in 
 this kind of composition. 
 
 The Wolfenbiittel library was so excellent that it made up for 
 many drawbacks. Lessing wrote to his father : " I can now^ 
 very well forget my books, which I have been compelled to sell. 
 I should like one day to have the pleasure of conducting you 
 about here, for I know what a great lover and connoisseur of 
 books of all kinds you are." But Lessing never had this plea- 
 sure ; the pastor died a few months after that note was written, 
 having suffered much in his later years from narrow means. It 
 grieved Lessing that he could not give more efficient help. 
 Though still in debt, he now generously took upon himself all 
 his father's pecuniary responsibilities, and made serious sacrifices 
 to help his mother and sister. For some time he thought of 
 composing a memorial of his father, which, as he wrote to his 
 mother, " one would read elsewhere than in Kamenz and longer 
 than six months after the funeral." The plan, however, was not 
 realised. 
 
 About this time "Emilia Galotti" was acted in Brunswick 
 with splendid success. Its dramatic force and fine insight, 
 especially in the character of the Prince, were admitted on all 
 sides ; and though Lessing did not go to see it so long as 
 Dobbelin acted in it, he was cheered by the reports of the im- 
 pressions which it produced. Goethe said that " it rose like the 
 island of Delos from the sea of works like those of Gottshed, 
 Gellert, and Weisse, in order to receive softly a goddess in labour." 
 
 Tieck spoke of it thus :• — " In the ' Emilia Galotti,' the most 
 finished and the most unique character is Marinelli. He is truly 
 the centre of the cast, the chief character decidedly, and there- 
 fore the most grateful for the actor. Next in importance in 
 reference to the denouement stands the Prince. It is, however, 
 a very weak part. The seducing and flattering artifices of this 
 character are less satisfactorily rendered. A satisfactory repre- 
 sentation of this part I have not seen. Then follows Orsina — a 
 very good conception ; but Odoardo is a heavy part." 
 
46 LESSING. 
 
 Goethe says it is a " highly characteristic motive by which the 
 Chamberlain in 'Emilia Galotti' is made to lead Emilia into 
 the Prince's way, while the Prince, by going into the church, and 
 meddling in the transaction, should at once spoil Marinelli's 
 game and his own. Nevertheless, the manner in which Lessing 
 works out the incidents of his plot is not always equally fine. A 
 note which the Prince wrote to his former mistress, the Countess 
 Orsina, and in which he declines her visit for the morrow, being 
 accidentally left lying about (if indeed, as the Countess herself 
 remarks, it be not blasphemy to talk of accident in such things), 
 becomes the cause that her dreaded rival arrives at the very 
 moment in which Count Appiani is shot, his bride carried off by 
 Marinelli to the Prince's country house ; and thus delivered over 
 into the hands of the murderer and lover." * 
 
 While in Hamburg, Lessing had formed the acquaintance of a 
 silk merchant named Konig, a man of some culture. Frau 
 Konig was a woman of bright intellect and lively manners ; and 
 just before his death in 1769, her husband had committed 
 the care of his family to Lessing, who was thus led to maintain a 
 friendly correspondence with her, which by and by passed into 
 something of a more intimate character. Dr A. Schone, in the 
 Introduction to his most valuable work, " The Correspondence 
 between Lessing and his Wife," t has given some account of the 
 Konigs. Eva Katherine Hahn, who in 1756 married Engelbert 
 Konig, was born in Heidelberg in 1731. We learn that she had 
 some sufferings in her youth arising from the straitened circum- 
 stances of the family, caused by the death of her father when 
 she was but an infant. It is touching to read her letter, in reply 
 to that of Lessing from Wolfenbiittel, intimating to her the death 
 of his father. She writes : — " You have had a happiness which 
 is given to but few men ; you have had a father as long with you 
 as is in the course of nature possible. I, unfortunately, knew 
 nothing of my father." She had four children by her first 
 marriage ; the youngest of whom was Lessing's godson ; and she 
 was left by her husband in embarrassed circumstances ; so that 
 sometimes, after she was engaged to Lessing, but still struggling 
 on with her husband's business in the hope of getting something 
 ouf of it for her children, she would blame herself for having in 
 
 * " Emilia Galotti" was produced at the Surrey Theatre in London, some years ago. 
 t Briefwechsel zwischen Lessing nnd seine Frau. 
 
LESSING. 47 
 
 a moment of weakness, as she thought it at such times, given 
 Lessing the right to share her misfortunes. And very interesting 
 it is to see how amid her own troubles, she writes cheering letters 
 to him in his solitude — now gently bantering him about forget- 
 fulness of her letters, or of points in them ; and now sending 
 him books and news about books and authors. Her humorous 
 touches respecting that portrait of himself which over and over 
 again he had forgotten to transmit to her are exquisite. She 
 had a bright, easy, and sometimes even graceful epistolary 
 style. 
 
 Even at this time, with such powerful incitements to save 
 every thaler in view of his engagement, we find him sending his 
 last louis d'or to that very sister who had confirmed his mother's 
 prejudice against his works, and had once burned what of his 
 papers she could lay hands on. How much does that say for his 
 sense of duty, unselfishness and greatness of soul ! 
 
 The distinguished success of " Emilia Galotti" was but a glim- 
 mer of sunshine through overhanging clouds. Solitude and want of 
 means so depressed him, that in an evil moment he was tempted 
 to try the lottery, as formerly he had fallen into gambling. The 
 hope of relieving himself by a lucky stroke from the debts con- 
 tracted in Hamburg was the great inducement. These, though 
 they amounted to no more than a thousand thalers, greatly tried 
 him. There is every reason to believe, indeed, that had it not 
 been for these debts, and his engagement to Eva Konig, he 
 would have escaped from the shackles of his librarianship, and 
 devoted himself to finishing several works which he had pro- 
 jected or begun. The letters that passed between her and 
 Lessing during these years of waiting are models of what such 
 letters should be. We see in her an upright, self-respecting, 
 supremely sensible, but deeply affectionate woman, to whom 
 duty stood for so much, that we cannot for a moment credit 
 what Stahr has said, that Lessing's passion for her was entertained 
 before her husband's death. To his brother Karl he wrote after- 
 wards in reference to her : " If I assure you that I consider her 
 the only woman in the world with whom I could trust myself to 
 live, you will readily beheve that she has everything I seek for 
 in a wife. If I am not happy with her, I should certainly have 
 been much more unhappy with any other." 
 
 At last, after a long probation of six years, Eva Konig was 
 
48 LESSING. 
 
 able to intimate that her affairs were so far arranged that she 
 could fulfil her engagement with Lessing. Lessing, on his part, 
 had, by dint of care cleared himself of these terrible debts, and 
 seemed to enter on a new life with the relief! Now that she was 
 ready, there came other causes for delay. One of them arose 
 from the circumstance that the young Prince had asked Lessing 
 to travel with him in Italy. Lessing hesitated, but, on the point 
 being referred to Eva Konig, she said she could not selfishly 
 stand in the way of so much pleasure for him. There were 
 reasons of policy too; his going might improve their position at 
 Wolfenbiittel. " What we long for in youth," says one, " age 
 freely gives us." So it seemed to be with Lessing now. Often 
 had he desired to go to Italy, and at last he was to behold it — 
 the fulfilment of a youthful dream, with a further dream of 
 happiness beyond it. Lessing deeply enjoyed, as he could 
 hardly fail to do, the treasures of Italian art. On his return he 
 was married in the quietest manner possible, not even ordering a 
 new coat for the occasion, as we are carefully told ; and settled 
 down to enjoy what of life remained to him. He was cheerful — 
 never prone to forecast evils, knowing that these would come all 
 too soon without being waited for. Unlike many studious men, 
 his delight was to make his home bright and happy ; he had no 
 greater pleasure than to surround himself with congenial friends, 
 and to abandon himself to the mood of the moment. Miss 
 Zimmern, in her very attractive Life of Lessing, gives the follow- 
 ing picture of his daily life at this time : — 
 
 " His house was appointed with the same unostentatious elegance 
 that appeared in his dress. Disorder and dirt were his enemies, his 
 study did not show the outward untidy signs so often held de rigueur. 
 It was his habit to rise about six and work in his study for some 
 hours, and only when writing did he allow himself to sit crookedly or 
 to wear a loose coat. In due time he would go and wake the child- 
 ren. If he had no duties at the library he would write till dinner ; 
 if he had he would dress carefully after breakfast and go to his post. 
 The dinner-hour was half-past twelve, and it rarely happened but 
 Lessing invited some unexpected guest who had been visiting the 
 library or the librarian, for he had become a celebrity, and people 
 travelled far and wide to speak to him or see him. " Never mind if 
 there is not enough to eat," he would say to his wife when such 
 invasions exceeded bounds, " make up with bacon and eggs." And 
 his wife, who was as hospitable as he, invariably gave the visitors a 
 
LESSING. 49 
 
 hearty welcome, and placed such fare before them as lay in her 
 power ; while the guests knew only too well that the best food of all 
 was that mental one which Lessing liberally supplied. At table he 
 was especially talkative and agreeable. It was a rule with him that 
 the food partaken of should not be criticised, nor passing annoyances 
 form the theme of discourse. Cheerful talk he held the best condi- 
 ment to a meal, and his jokes and heartiest laughter were reserved 
 for home. The afternoon he commonly devoted to recreation and a 
 short walk. At nine a frugal supper was served, at which again 
 visitors were often present. These were usually more intimate 
 friends, with whom Lessing would afterwards play a game of his 
 favourite chess, sucking an empty pipe, if smokers were present, to 
 appear sociable. He never smoked himself. . . . Between ten and 
 eleven he went to bed, enjoying a deep sleep, which, according to his 
 own account, was always dreamless. Though naturally of a pas- 
 sionate disposition, he controlled himself strictly, and it was rarely 
 that his passion obtained the mastery ; but when it did his outbreaks 
 were furious. He was considerate of the servants, and would join 
 warmly with the children in their play.'' 
 
 But the sunshine was not to last long. He had but tasted the 
 draught when the cup was dashed from his lips, verifying his 
 own expression, " F have had no luck!" His wife, whose com- 
 prehension of his purposes and sympathy with his many-sided 
 mind were as remarkable as her prudence and practical tact, died 
 within a week after the birth of their first child. They had only 
 been married fourteen months. The blow to Lessing was terri- 
 ble. His spirit seemed to be crushed and broken. He wrote 
 with the stoical calm that comes of the feeling that no greater 
 trial need be apprehended. This is how he intimates to his 
 friend Eschenburg at Brunswick the birth of his son and his 
 wife's illness : — 
 
 " I seize the moment in which my wife lies without consciousness 
 to thank you for your kind interest. My pleasure was but brief 
 And I lost him so unwillingly, this son. For he had so much under- 
 standing ! so much understanding ! Do not suppose that the few 
 hours of my fatherhood have made me an ape of a father ! I know 
 what I say. Was it not understanding that they had to drag him 
 into the world with iron tongs, that he so soon suspected the evil of 
 it .? Was it not understanding that he seized the first opportunity to 
 get away from it ? And the little rascal tears his mother from me 
 with him ! For there is small hope that she will be preserved to me. 
 1 wished to have things as well as other men. But I have badly 
 succeeded." 
 
 D 
 
so LESSING. 
 
 Two days later he writes to his brother Karl : — 
 " Pity me that I have had so good a reason for not writing to you 
 for a fortnight past. ... I was in fear of losing my wife, which loss 
 would have embittered all the rest of life to me. She was confined, 
 and made me the father of a right pretty boy, who was sound and 
 lively (munter). But he only remained thus some four and twenty 
 hours, and afterwards became a sacrifice to the cruel art by which 
 he was brought into the world. Or perhaps he did not think much of 
 the meal to which he had been so forcibly brought, and shpt away 
 again by himself In short, I hardly know that I have been a father. 
 The joy was so short, and the affliction {Betriibniss) was so overcome 
 by the utmost anxiety. For the mother lay from nine to ten days 
 wholly unconscious ; and every day and every night they had re- 
 peatedly to drive me away from her bed with the intimation that I 
 was only making the last leave-taking harder for her, for amid all the 
 confusion of her mind she still knew me. At last the illness has 
 taken a turn, and for three days past I have had strong hopes of her 
 whose society becomes more necessary to me even in her present state. 
 " As thou wilt pardon me for not having written for fourteen days ; 
 so wilt thou pardon me that I do not write thee more now. I think 
 unwillingly of it, the more that my stepson has caused you so much 
 trouble. God grant that in similar circumstances you may have more 
 cheerful surroundings." 
 
 A few days of uncertainty followed, during which the strong 
 man could do nothing, but walked about, absent and aimless, 
 when he was not at her bedside. He had to write at last to 
 Eschenburg thus : — 
 
 " My wife is dead ; this experience, too, is now mine. I am glad 
 there cannot be many more such trials left for me to go through, and 
 I am entirely calm. It also does me good to feel assured of your 
 sympathy and that of the rest of our friends at Brunswick.— Yours, 
 
 " Wolfenb., \oth January 1778. Lessing." 
 
 It is in such a crisis as this that we see most decidedly what 
 spirit a man is of. Lessing impresses us by the sincerity of his 
 sorrow ; the depths of his passionate grief are revealed to us by 
 the very restraints of expression. He is calm, but it is a calm- 
 ness like that of his Laocoon. 
 
 V. 
 
 During his residence in Hamburg Lessing had formed a friend- 
 ship with the distinguished scholar Reimarus, and on the pro- 
 
LESSING. 51 
 
 fessor's death, some of his papers were put into Lessing's hands 
 by his daughter, Elise Reimarus, with whom Lessing formed an 
 enduring friendship. Amongst these was a series of papers 
 entitled "An Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God." 
 Lessing, by special privilege, was free from the restrictions of 
 censorship in so far as, publishing matter from documents in the 
 library was concerned, and under cover of this right he issued 
 some chapters from Reimarus's manuscripts, giving them forth as 
 by "an anonymous writer."* In these "Fragments" (which 
 afterwards became famous as the " Wolfenbiittel Fragments," 
 through the controversies they aroused) the inconsistency of several 
 of the orthodox positions was exposed with a logical acumen and 
 felicity of style alike remarkable ; it was declared also that the 
 historical evidence in favour of revelation lost weight as time 
 passed on ; that no faith could be adapted to all races of men 
 alike; and that the contradictions in the Evangelists on the re- 
 surrection were really insuperable when the subject was critically 
 examined. The first few " Fragments " produced little or no 
 impression, but a fifth, which had been issued at a long interval, 
 just before the death of his wife, excited a great deal of interest, 
 and called forth several replies from Schumann, Ress and others. 
 One of them by Goeze, a Lutheran clergyman, has thrown all 
 the others into the shade, simply because Lessing answered it. 
 It was more an attack on Lessing than a grave and deliberate 
 discussion of the points raised, and was couched in such a style 
 as made a reply necessary. Goeze charged Lessing with saying 
 
 * It is a peculiar circumstance that within a few years after Lessing's death doubts 
 were again raised whether he was not himself the author of the Fragments (suspicion having 
 been also directed to Mendelssohn as a fellow-worker in them). It is more curious still that 
 C. A. E. Schmidt, who, in 1789, published a posthumous supplement, entitled " Uebrige 
 noch ungedruchte Werke des Wolfenbiittellichen Fragmentister — ein Nachlass von Gott- 
 hold Ephraim Lessing, herausgegeben von C A. E. Schmidt," actually left it in some sort 
 doubtful who the fragmentist was. In his preface the editor says — '* Lessing, in one of his 
 moody moments, gave me the manuscript of the Fragmentist on condition not to pubhsh it 
 during his lifetime. This condition, with which I strictly complied, holds no longer. 
 My motive for publishing these fragments is, that there were to my knowledge four 
 transcripts of the work at Hamburg, six or eight at Berlin, and no fewer at Brunswick, 
 which, as Lessing said, would make more proselytes by circulating clandestinely than they 
 would if exposed to the contradiction of the world. I have added notes to it, in order to. 
 render the book less exceptionable, though I ultimately felt how difficult a task it is for a 
 layman to enter into theological controversy. This work will no doubt be controverted, as 
 it ought ; had I the ability I would enter the lists against it myself Should the refutation 
 be skilful and forcible,— and I wish it may,— religion will have all the benefit of it, since 
 contradiction in religion, above all things, tends most to elicit its truth ; that is, however, 
 if the fragmentist meant to level his attack against essential religion, which I, along with, 
 many others, cannot believe.' 
 
52 LESS INC. 
 
 that it was impossible to meet the objections raised by the 
 ■" Fragments," and insinuated that Lessing was himself the 
 author, whereas it was very characteristic of Lessing that in the 
 notes which he added he distinctly said that he had annotated 
 the " Fragments," and published them for the purpose of exciting 
 discussion and eUciting truth. He had, in fact, in the notes, 
 contested several of the positions taken by the writer, and had, 
 when dealing with particular objections of Reimarus, so obtru- 
 sively seemed to make common cause with the orthodox against 
 him, as to have brought representations from at least one of his 
 friends. Goeze's style stung Lessing into action. This was the 
 origin of the celebrated " Letters to Goeze," or " Anti-Goeze," 
 so often referred to by Lessing's critics and biographers. 
 
 It was at the death-bed of his wife that Lessing received the 
 first attack of Goeze. He went from her grave into the theolo- 
 gical arena ; and it was perhaps a happy thing that duty and 
 honour ahke laid this charge upon him. To natures like his, 
 reticent, intense, and faithfully observant of the true laws of 
 modesty * in the expressions of affection or of grief, the only 
 anodyne is complete preoccupation of the mental powers. We 
 are told that immediately after the death of his wife he some- 
 times had thoughts of casting off the existence that now seemed to 
 him only like a dreary burden ; and we can easily believe that the 
 duty laid upon him by Goeze had its own remedial effect. These 
 letters to Goeze form at once an admirable illustration of argu- 
 mentative dexterity and of severe honesty of mind. He en- 
 lightens the most abstract points by metaphors drawn from 
 common life. He is serious, satirical, severe, and playful by 
 turns, and he lightens up the theme by skilful repartee, delicious 
 banter, and fables that are almost perfect for sly humour and 
 suggestiveness. Never probably was theological argument made 
 so trenchant and familiar, so penetrated by varied knowledge, so 
 transfigured by humour and keen graceful irony. And through 
 it all the poor, thin, peevish personality of Goeze presents itself, 
 like a fly in amber — a personality which else had been forgotten 
 or disregarded. We have often wondered whether Mr Matthew 
 
 * " Not to unveil before the gaze 
 Of an imperfect sympathy 
 In aught we are, is the sweet praise. 
 And the main sum of modesty." 
 
 Coventry Patmore. 
 
LESS INC. S3 
 
 Arnold did not learn some of his tricks of theological banter 
 from these letters ; such passages as the following, in one of the 
 earlier letters (where Lessing is defending himself from the sug- 
 gestion of using the privilege of his position as librarian ruth- 
 lessly to do despite to the truth), almost makes us believe it : — 
 
 " A pastor is one thing," he writes, " a librarian another. Their 
 names differ not more in sound than their duties and obligations 
 differ in nature. In one word, the pastor and the librarian stand, to 
 my thinking, in the same relation as the shepherd and the botanist. 
 
 " The botanist wanders over hill and dale, and carefully examines 
 forest and field, in hope that he may find some little herb to which 
 Linnaeus has not given any name. And how it gladdens his heart if 
 he finds one ! Little does he care whether the plant be poisonous or 
 no ! He reasons that if poisons are not useful (and who will assert 
 that they may not be so ? ), yet surely it is useful that the poisons be 
 known. 
 
 " But the shepherd knows only the herbs of his own ' run ; ' and 
 those only he value? and cultivates which agree with his sheep and 
 are liked by them. 
 
 " So it is with us, reverend man ! I am the keeper of library 
 treasures ; and I would not willingly be the dog in the manger, nor 
 would I willingly be the stable-boy who brings hay to the rack for 
 every hungry horse. If I find among the treasures intrusted to me 
 anything that is not generally known, I give full notice of it. Firsts 
 I place it in our catalogues ; then by degrees, as I find it aids in fill- 
 ing gaps, or in setting matters right, by publishing it. I am indifferent 
 whether one person declare it important and another unimportant, 
 whether it edify one and scandalise another. Useful and hurtful are 
 as much relative ideas as great and small. 
 
 " You, on the other hand, reverend sir, value literary treasures only 
 by their influence on your congregation, and would rather be too- 
 anxious than too indifferent. What matters to you whether a thing 
 be known or unknown, if it might be a stumbling-block to the least 
 of those intrusted to your spiritual care ? 
 
 " Quite right ! and I commend you for it, reverend sir. But while 
 I commend you for doing your duty, pray do not scold me for doing 
 mine ; or, which is really the same thing, for thinking I do it. 
 
 " You would tremble before your dying hour if you had taken the 
 least part in publishing the fragments in question ! 
 
 " I perhaps shall tremble in my dying hour ; before it I shall never 
 tremble. Least of all for having done what all men of sense now 
 wish the ancient hbrarians had done, if possible, with the writings of 
 Celsus, Fronto, and Porphyry in the libraries of Alexandria, Cassarea,, 
 and Constantinople. A man well informed in these matters says : 
 
54 LESSING. 
 
 ' For the writings of Porphyry not a few friends of religion in our day 
 would willingly give in exchange a pious father of the Church.' . . . 
 
 " Christianity moves on with its own eternal gradual pace ; eclipses 
 do not bring the planets out of their path. But the sects of Chris- 
 tianity are the phases of it, and could not subsist in any other fashion 
 than by the stoppage of the whole course of nature, when sun, planets, 
 and observer continue at the same point. God protect us from such 
 awful stagnation as this ! 
 
 " Therefore, reverend man, censure me less severely for having been 
 so honest as to rescue from oblivion, not only a very Christian work 
 of Berengarius,* but also some very anti-Christian fragments." 
 
 When he comes quite to close quarters with Goeze, he thus 
 summarises and lays down in ten propositions the leading 
 points : — 
 
 " I. The Bible obviously contains more than belongs to religion. 
 
 " 2. It is a mere hypothesis that it is equally infallible as regards 
 this excess. 
 
 " 3- The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion. 
 
 ■'■' 4. Objections to the letter of the Bible are consequently not also 
 objections to the spirit and to religion. 
 
 " 5. There was a religion before there was a Bible. 
 
 " 6. Christianity existed before the Evangelists and Apostles had 
 written. Some time had elapsed before the first of them wrote, and a 
 very considerable time before the canon was completed. 
 
 " 7. However much, therefore, may depend upon these writings, the 
 whole truth of the Christian religion cannot possibly rest upon them. 
 
 " 8. If there was a period when Christianity had taken possession 
 of many souls, and when, notwithstanding, not a single letter of what 
 we now hold as Scripture was written, it must be possible that all 
 which the Evangelists and Apostles wrote might be lost, and yet the 
 religion taught by them would abide. 
 
 " 9. Religion is not true because it was taught by the Evangelists 
 and Apostles ; but they taught it because it is true. 
 
 " 10. By religion's inner truth must the Scriptures be interpreted ; 
 and no traditions or records handed down to us can give it inner 
 truth if it has none." 
 
 When dealing with the seventh point, Goeze had confidently 
 asked him whether, without the books of the New Testament, 
 any trace of Christ's words and work would have come down to 
 us. He replied, in the spirit of a reverent truth-seeker, thus : — 
 
 " God forbid that I should ever think so meanly of Christ's teach- 
 
 * Lessing, as we have seen, in 1770 discovered and published Berengarius's answer to 
 Lanfianc, " De Corpore et Sanguine Jesu Christi." 
 
LESSING. 55 
 
 ings as to dare to answer this question with a direct No ! I would 
 not repeat this No if an angel from heaven should dictate such to me, 
 much less when a Lutheran pastor seeks to put it in my mouth. 
 Everything that happens in this world leaves traces of its existence, 
 though men may not always find them ; and Thy teachings alone, 
 Divine Philanthropist, which Thou didst not command to be written 
 down, but which Thou didst command to be preached, had they been 
 only preached, would have effected nothing, nor left sufficient by 
 which we may recognise their origin. Must Thy words be first 
 changed into dead letters in order to become words of life.'' Are 
 books the one way to enlighten and improve mankind.'' If oral 
 tradition be exposed to a thousand intentional or unintentional 
 falsifications, are not books likewise exposed? Could not God by 
 the same exercise of His immediate power, have preserved oral 
 traditions from such falsifications, just as well as books, as is said 
 that He has done ? Oh, out on one who claims. Almighty God, to be 
 a preacher of Thy word, and yet so impudently asserts that, to 
 attain Thy purposes there was but one way by which it pleased 
 Thee to reveal Thyself ! Oh, out on the divine who, except by this 
 one way which he sees, boldly denies all other ways because he 
 does not see them ! Gracious God, let me never become so orthodox, 
 in order that I may never become so presumptuous ! " 
 
 But in Brunswick the orthodox party were too strong to allow 
 him to go on publishing his "Fragments" in peace. They 
 exerted themselves to get the aid of the civil power against him, 
 and with too much success. They took advantage of the absence 
 of the Hereditary Prince to play upon the fears of the aged Duke, 
 now weak and on a sick-bed. Lessing's exemption from the cen- 
 sorship was withdrawn, and the " Fragments " were confiscated 
 — a thing that only increased the demand for them, not only in 
 Brunswick, but throughout Germany. And the influence of the 
 Goeze controversy did not stop here. " Nathan the Wise " had 
 been sketched years before, and probably would have lain un- 
 finished but for these attacks. He called it " the son of his 
 approaching age, of which controversy had helped to deliver 
 him." In it he urges his pleas for toleration vrith prevailing 
 power. He himself had no expectation that it would ever be a 
 successful acting play, and named it a " dramatic poem." He 
 thought that, for stage purposes, it lacked passion, was too argu- 
 mentative, and that the moral was too assertative and permeating 
 for success there. But he also knew the result he aimed at, and 
 was assured that "Nathan" would accomplish it, as indeed it did. 
 
S6 LESSING. 
 
 If Lessing never soared high nor plunged' deep — if he suggested 
 too little of the mystery and wonder of existence — if he afforded 
 few of those glimpses into the world of passion and imagination 
 which awaken even the dimmer understandings to the beauty 
 and terror and tragic pathos of life — he sees his goal clearly, and 
 travels to it with unwavering directness. He thus indicated 
 what he expected of " Nathan '' in writing to his brother Karl : 
 "Even you have formed an altogether incorrect idea of the piece. 
 It will be anything but satirical, to enable me to quit the arena 
 with contemptuous laughter. It will be as pathetic a piece as I 
 have ever written. ... It has nothing to do with our present 
 black-coats ; and I will not barricade its way to the stage, 
 although it might not come there for a century. The theologians 
 of all religions will, indeed, inwardly chafe at it ; but they will 
 take care to express no public disapproval of it." 
 
 And in writing to another he speaks thus of his anticipations 
 of its future : — " I do not know of any city in Germany where 
 the piece could now be represented. But happy and fortunate 
 the city where it shall first appear ! " And he says in a "hundred 
 years " it may be put on the stage. 
 
 It could be no disappointment to him, therefore, that it re- 
 mained unrepresented when he died. In 1783 it was given at 
 Berlin, and his words seemed likely to be realised, for it was pro- 
 nounced a failure. His own prophecy seemed correct. The 
 times were not yet ripe. But the favouring moment came earlier 
 than Lessing had foretold. It was introduced at Weimar by 
 Schiller and Goethe in 1801 ; immediately became a favourite, 
 and has kept its place on the German stage. It was even acted 
 by Greek actors in Constantinople in 1842 with success, though 
 we learn that Nathan's frankness with the Sultan was wondered 
 at and almost resented ! 
 
 It has been well said that " Nathan " is rather a philosophic 
 romance composed in a dramatic form than a drama ; but as a 
 romance, it is certainly one of the very best, both in conception and 
 execution, to be found in the whole body of European literature. 
 On this subject Rotscher speaks well : — 
 
 " It wiU be admitted that for actual concrete forms, ' Nathan' com- 
 pares with such creations as the men of Shakespeare and Goethe, only 
 it has not been conceived with the same dowry of relative liveliness. 
 This, however, lies in the very nature of the idea of the work. For- 
 
LESSING. 57 
 
 asmuch as Lessing will sensibly represent the thought that the pure 
 humanity must triumph over all rehgious dogmas, fenced as it 
 were by prejudices ; and that through the more exceptional in the 
 positive beliefs, the confessors are drawn towards each other — the 
 fetters of the more rigid orthodoxy thus burst open, and the disposi- 
 tion to the expression of moral feeUng largely extended— it is evident 
 that here he stands much more on the ground of thought than of 
 phantasy. It is a great principle which is thus sensibly represented 
 through skilful dramatic development bringing reality very near to 
 the mind. For this didactic purpose, it must be admitted that Lessing 
 showed a wonderful art, clearly unfolding it with dramatic liveUness 
 and truth." 
 
 Ferdinand Schmidt has argued that the "Nathan" would 
 never have found so complete a form, if Moses Mendelssohn 
 had not lived, and had not been the bosom-friend of Lessing.* 
 But a further fact must be noted. As one Jew — i.e., 
 Mendelssohn — is idealised or represented in the hero of 
 "Nathan," another is idealised or represented in its history. 
 There is a beautiful propriety — -we had almost said, a kind 
 of poetic justice — in the fact that indirectly we owe the pub- 
 lication of " Nathan " to a Jew. This was Joseph Wessely, a 
 merchant at Hamburg, who had honoured and admired Lessing 
 from the time of his residence there ; who had written some 
 penetrating letters on " Emilia Galotti " which were published 
 anonymously; and who now, on hearing of Lessing's distress 
 from want of money, troubled himself to contribute help in such 
 delicate ways as would not wound Lessing's feelings of indepen- 
 dence. He offered a loan through Karl Lessing, and proposed 
 to send it without waiting for a letter from Lessing saying that he 
 would accept it. Karl wrote, " But if he does not write to you, 
 will he receive the money ?" "I will now send it to him myself, and 
 surely he will acknowledge the receipt of it," answered Wessely.t 
 
 The offer was accepted, and the loan enabled Lessing to work 
 on with more peace of mind than he could otherwise have com- 
 manded. But so honourable and sensitive was he on such 
 matters, that the thought of it troubled him, and as he was com- 
 
 * Nimmer wiirde die Gestalt des Nathan eine solche VoUendung gefunden haben, hatte 
 nicht ein Moses Mendelssohn gelebt und ware dieser nicht Lessing's Herzensfreund 
 gewesen." — Ferdinand Schtnidf s Moses Mejidelssohn, p. 121. 
 
 t Joseph Wessely was born on the 15th March 1737. He married i* cousin of the rich 
 Moses Keiss, a Schlesinger in Berlin. He was an enterprising and successful merchant, and 
 besides several able pieces of literary criticism, he wrote a good deal on commercial and 
 social questions ; perhaps his ablest writing on this class being that on the *' Burgerliche 
 Verbesserung der Juden." 
 
58 LESSING. 
 
 posing the last act he wrote to his brother saying how much he 
 would grieve if the subscriptions were not enough to cover that 
 debt, as he had no other means of paying it. " You cannot 
 imagine," he concludes, " how this thing vexes me; and it will be 
 a miracle if the disquietude under which I am working should not 
 disclose itself in my writing." * 
 
 So little did any shadow of personal distress intrude into the 
 drama, that nothing more calm, peaceful, and complete had ever 
 come from his pen. " After that production," said Mendelssohn, 
 " he might well be content to die." One thing of significance 
 there still remained for him to do. This was the full develop- 
 ment of an idea which he had announced in one of his eariier 
 writings. With this he now occupied himself " The Educa- 
 tion of the Human Race," his last great work, was the result. 
 When he had finished this, he made a journey to Hamburg in 
 1780, where he had great delight in a reunion with old friends. 
 The change so exhilarated him, that something of his earlier 
 vigour and vitality of mind appeared in his conversations. 
 " Lessing is here," wrote Eliza Reimarus to Nicolai on the 9th 
 of October, " and perhaps because the society of living friends 
 is better for him than that of the dead, or even than strife with 
 enemies, he is almost the man he was formerly." He wished to 
 make his friends there believe that " this winter he had ex- 
 changed heads." But it was the last flicker of the flame. The 
 return to the " everlasting monotony " of Wolfenbiittel was felt 
 the more for the brightness of his Hamburg visit. He made 
 another effort to create a congenial world for himself — to write 
 for the stage ; but his energies flagged ; his letters became more 
 and more despondent. On December 19, 1780, he wrote to 
 Mendelssohn, "My dear friend, this sceiie is over!" He was 
 spared the trial of a lingering chronic sickness which he had 
 feared. In twelve days from the first symptoms of real illness, 
 and in spite of the best medical care and the devoted nursing of 
 his step-daughter, AmeHa Konig, who was to him as a true 
 daughter indeed, he passed away in his fifty-third year. The 
 aged Gleim, amid tears, braced himself to write — 
 
 " Him have we lost who was our greatest pride ; 
 Him who abroad had won our nation fame. 
 
 iMr Sime refers Co the episode of Wessely only incidentally^ and speaks of Wessely as 
 resident in Berlin. 
 
LESSING. 59 
 
 God said, ' Let there be light !' — and Leibnitz came ! 
 God said, ' Let darkness be !' — and Lessing died !" 
 
 While Engel, a younger man, took up the theme, and set it to a 
 more powerful note — 
 
 " Had Britain, not Germania, given him birth, 
 His dust might share with kings the sacred earth, 
 And a proud people, grateful for his fame, 
 Would rear a lasting tribute to his name." 
 
 Mendelssohn a short time after wrote to Karl Lessing : — 
 " When I yield myself to this way of thinking, something of melan- 
 choly still mixes itself with my musings, perhaps due to the regret 
 that I did not profit so fully by his guidance as I might have done ; 
 that I was not greedy enough of his most instructive (Jehrreichen) 
 intercourse ; and that I lost many an hour in which I might have 
 had communication with him. Ah ! his conversation was as a clear 
 spring, from which one could incessantly draw new ideas of the Good 
 and Beautiful, which he threw out like common water to every man's 
 taste. The liberality with which he communicated his gifts, often put 
 me in danger of misapprehending their value, for he appeared to se 
 little store by them, and sometimes so artfully did he conceal his own 
 claim to them as originally his, that I often could not afterwards dis- 
 tinguish them. Above all was his kindliness in all this, so utterly 
 foreign to the narrow-hearted art, which many rich folks use, which 
 makes one feel as though they were distributing alms ; but he spurred 
 on the runners, and his merit lay in what he gave." . . . Fonte- 
 neUe said of Copernicus : ' He made known his new system and died.' 
 The biography of your brother might be similarly summed, up. He 
 wrote ' Nathan der Weise ' and died. Of a work of the spirit, 
 which should stand as far above Nathan as this piece, in my idea, 
 stands above all that up to that time he had written, I confess I can 
 form no idea. He could not rise higher without passing into a region 
 where our sense-dimmed eyes could not follow him — and, indeed, 
 this he did. Even now we stand here, like the sons of the prophet, 
 looking up to the place in the sky where he disappeared from our 
 sight.* 
 
 To the end Lessing had readily and secretly befriended the 
 poor and outcast, in some instances directly risking the displeasure 
 of the great. In this he reminds us of Samuel Johnson. The 
 Jew Daveson, who had offended the Duke of Brunswick, was 
 visited by him in prison, and found a home in his house after his 
 release. And the story of the poor eccentric "philosopher" 
 
 * Mendelssohn an die Munzdirector Lessing.— Dr Heinemann's " Sammlung," pp. 340-1. 
 
6o LESSING. 
 
 Konemann (who was " not always grammatical ") and his dog is 
 at once laughable and pathetic. Leasing took them in also to 
 his house at Wolfenbiittel, kept both man and dog, and would 
 not part with them, troublesome though they often were. " The 
 dog is an ornament of the philosopher," said Lessing, when 
 somebody had suggested that they were inconvenient ; " for he 
 found it in his wanderings faint and starving. He had two 
 rolls in his pocket; he took one out and gave it to the dog, 
 which ate it greedily ; and from that moment it never left his 
 benefactor. The two rolls were all the poor wanderer had at the 
 time to keep himself alive. He shared them honourably ; and 
 so long as I have a roll left, the philosopher shall have half 
 of it." * 
 
 VI. 
 
 The first quality which may be noted as conspicuously char- 
 acteristic of Lessing is his sincerity of nature, his complete inde- 
 pendence of mind, his determination to go to the root, to see 
 things for himself, to trust no mere authority, and to utter 
 nothing as truth which his whole nature could not unreservedly 
 accept as such. When but a youth of sixteen, he wrote home 
 that he thought it the " duty of every young man not to take 
 his religion on trust, but to examine the subject for himself" 
 Lessing carried the same principle into every department of his 
 work. He did not demand agreement with his opinions ; he 
 only claimed that, before assuming to sit in judgment on others, 
 or to teach them, you should have fully satisfied your mind by 
 good reasons, and have at least taken a fair and honest view of 
 the grounds on which others had reached a different or an oppo- 
 site conclusion. This lay at the foundation of Lessing's peculiar 
 tolerance and fair-mindedness. In demanding this from others, 
 he only asked that which he had faithfully given. He was 
 always disposed to ask of every opinion and conclusion what it 
 
 * It would seem that Daveson's wife too was of the household, for we find Lessing 
 writing to his step-daugher, Amelia Konig, on the 17th August 1780, and adding this 
 postscript : — 
 
 " Madam Daveson, die Dich griissen laut, hat gestem meine Messe gewacht, und 
 hoffentlich sollst Du alles nach verlangen finden." 
 
 This Daveson was later editor of what was regarded as a notorious paper, The Tele- 
 graph, which appeared during the presence of the French in Berlin. 
 
LESSING. 61 
 
 had to say for itself on broad and common grounds of reason, 
 and to lay these to the test of his own better judgment. This 
 habit of careful examination and self-examination (for the one 
 in his case implied the other) resulted in two things that are 
 seldom found combined in so full a measure as they were in 
 him — logical clearness, allied with gi-eat range of interests, and 
 a kind of dramatic curiosity, far from cold or merely critical, 
 which made him dependent not only on association with others, 
 but laid upon him a necessity to understand them and to com- 
 prehend their ways of thinking. The impulse that urged Lessing 
 to become a dramatist was very intimately associated with this 
 tendency. Now a very short survey of Lessing reveals the 
 fact that he was remarkably destitute of that imaginative suscep- 
 tibility or sensitiveness which is so powerful an element in the 
 immediate instinctive comprehension of others. This defect left 
 results in several ways. One of them was, that as Lessing, 
 through the exacting character of his intellectual nature — his 
 demand, as we may say, for reasons clear and satisfactory to 
 himself — always tended to become an intellectual recluse, re- 
 moved from a common ground with others, he was saved from 
 the coldness generally inseparable from this character by the 
 necessity he was under to test his own thinking by laying it 
 faithfully alongside of other minds, rather than by the shorter 
 process of poetic sympathy. He found in simple patience and 
 care what in great part supplies the place of imagination to 
 other poets. That he became, in spite of this defect, a dramatic 
 poet at all, would be in itself a phenomenon of literature ; but 
 that he was at once a successful dramatic poet, and a critic who 
 always rose above the range of narrow and technical and tem- 
 porary interests, is still more remarkable. It would seem, indeed, 
 as though he made his very defects serve him as other men do 
 their endowments, and that he wholly escaped certain of the 
 perils peculiar to natures that are over-richly endowed on the 
 side of imagination and sentiment. 
 
 He observed closely ; his mind was vigilant, penetrating, 
 assertive ; but the power of passing, as if by instinct or by magic, 
 beyond intellectual processes to motives, was almost lacking to 
 him. He never, in the strict sense, created a character ; he only 
 threw into dramatic shapes or forms the most striking elements 
 of character, or rather intellectual tendency, in those whom he 
 
62 ' LESSING. 
 
 had most closely observed through actual association, and had, 
 so to speak, inseparably involved in that constant combined 
 process of examination and self-examination. And yet, by dint 
 simply of the sincerity and thoroughness of his character, these 
 personages not seldom impress us precisely as do the truest 
 creations. Such instances we find in every one of his dramas. 
 When Nathan, for instance, tells the Lay Brother the terrible 
 tale of his calamity, and touches the depths of submission in 
 these words, we feel it to be so : — 
 
 Nathan. Already had I lain three days and nights 
 In dust and ashes and in tears 'fore God — 
 In tears, said I ? almost at war with God, 
 Raving against myself and all the world, 
 And vowing deathless hate to the Christian name. 
 
 Lay Brother. Ah, I can well believe you in your plight. 
 
 Nathan. But reason by degrees returned, and I 
 In calmer mood could say ; And yet God is ; 
 This, too. He suffered — so His will be done ! 
 
 Lay Brother. Nathan, you are a Christian ! 'fore my God 
 No better Christian lives. 
 
 Nathan. Well for us both 
 
 That you think so ; for what to you makes me 
 The Christian, makes of you a Jew to me. 
 
 It is indeed a remarkable fact that Lessing's leading characters 
 are all confessedly reflections and reminiscences of his immediate 
 friends — his father, Mendelssohn, Mylius, Kleist, and the rest. 
 Kayserling says, indeed, that he drew most of the characters in 
 the "Nathan der Weise" from persons he had met in Mendels- 
 sohn's house.* The Dervish, he adds, is a true picture of a 
 Jew, Abraham Wolf or Abraham Reichenmeister, as he was also 
 named. A friend of Euler's, he was expert in the mathematics, 
 and had also a wonderful faculty in doing the most difficult 
 arithmetical questions mentally. He was besides, a true cynical 
 philosopher, who indulged himself only with bread and water, 
 and often drank his water out of the palm of his hand. His 
 feelings were naive and kindly, and he was staunch and honest 
 (bieder und redlich.) Many laughable stories of Abraham 
 passed current among Mendelssohn's friends. Nicolai tells 
 
 "^ Kayserling's Mendelssohn, p. 331. 
 
LESSING. 63 
 
 some, and Kayserling others. This is a good one. Abraham's 
 wife did not wiUingly accommodate herself on all occasions to 
 his Spartan ways, and would now and then leave him for a time 
 to stay with friends in Hanover, returning often without warning. 
 On one occasion Abraham came to Mendelssohn, when Pro- 
 fessor Engel chanced to be with him, stood still and spake no 
 word. "Now Abraham, what is the matter?" asked Mendels- 
 sohn ; " you are so quiet, that it must mean something : Do you 
 feel well?" "My wife is come from Hanover," Abraham 
 answered abruptly; "and I have only one stool." And with 
 these words, he seized a chair, and went straight out at the door 
 without another word ! * 
 
 This original genius in mathematics, this oddity in life, 
 furnished a rich field of observation to Lessing, who thus himself 
 tells of the share that he had in the character of Al-Hafi — the 
 Dervish. He writes: — "Read the part of Al-Hafi, and you 
 have my good Abraham Wolf, who has certainly contributed to 
 this part the whole character and the whole soul, even as abstruse, 
 and even as wild and passionate, and absorbed {versenkt) in his 
 own ideas — ^wild, good, noble." t 
 
 The subtle shades and intermingling of contradictory elements 
 which appear always in the work of the inspired dramatist, sug- 
 gesting something of incomprehensibility and inexhaustibleness, 
 have little or no place in Lessing. But he does much to recover 
 the interest in his own way. Even where he seems to forego 
 what might be called the expression of his own personal pre- 
 dilections through the character, as in the "Free-thinker," he 
 only rises to a higher idea, which is dearer to him — that of fair- 
 ness, toleration. It is much that Ave can say that he never took 
 a side, and that he was distinctly a dramatist in the condem- 
 nation of possible faults and vices in those who as partisans 
 would have classed themselves with him. His great characters 
 — Theophan, Philotas, Nathan, and the rest — are reproduced 
 by a laborious process of memory on the Hnes of intellectual 
 discussion, the light that penetrates and imparts something of 
 life being distinctly moral, rather than of the imagination. They 
 are, in a word, the dramatic images of his peculiar methods of 
 
 • We have not met with a single anecdote of Abraham Wolf in English, though some of 
 them have, like the above, a valuable biographical and critical bearing on Lessing. 
 t Kayserling, p. 33s- 
 
64 LESSING. 
 
 questioning and self-questioning. His philosophy lies consciously 
 revealed to us in his poetry ; and both have their foundations in 
 the same traits of character. Hence his leading dramatis per- 
 sonce stand to us as embodied qualities or tendencies rather than 
 as men — creatures whose range is predetermined for them by 
 some hard-set intellectual limits. We can hardly conceive of 
 them moving or acting on any ground outside that which has 
 been assigned to them by the poet, but they often affect us pre- 
 cisely as if we could. 
 
 An able writer has said : — " In Lessing's poems and dramas 
 we have everywhere, except in Minna, either literary reminis- 
 cences and patterns, or a moral and didactic purpose;" but we 
 confess the words "literary reminiscences and patterns'' are 
 unintelligible to us ; for certainly in his later works Lessing was 
 very free from literary reminiscences. 
 
 The very limitations which we thus find in Lessing as a poet 
 are confessions of that unity of moral purpose which imparts so 
 keen an element of interest to his various works when they can 
 be faithfully viewed in relation to each other. Each reflects him 
 from a different angle ; but, like photographs taken from various 
 positions, the different portraits all agree with each other in the 
 leading lines and in the expression. And the conceptions of the 
 individuality only become more distinct and clear as the scrutiny 
 is perseveringly carried on. ^ 
 
 It is thus impossible to detach Lessing from his works, and to 
 view him as the mere thinker and writer, as may be done with 
 some distinguished authors. The works, in his case, in a very 
 distinct and special sense, are the man. He does not work as if 
 from some special faculty, while the moral nature hes aloof or 
 inactive, or is, in fact, moving along quite apart on a line of its 
 own, as is often the case with the poet, the man of over-fine 
 fancy and imagination, creating a world in which ordinary laws 
 and demands of life are set aside. No shadow of such plea as 
 Charles Lamb set up for the dramatists of the Restoration needs 
 to be raised for Lessing. His world of art is one with his world 
 of hfe, and even with his critical principles, because he was 
 faithful to the moral elements in his character. Here lies the 
 grand reconciUng point in Lessing— the man is supremely 
 expressed in everything he did, and his actions are at one with 
 his precepts as far almost as they could be in the life of mortal. 
 
LESS/NG. 65 
 
 Mr Browning, in " One Word More," has very finely expressed 
 the sense of escape from the over-feverish attractions of the Ideal 
 to the calm bliss and repose of life's true solace in loving com- 
 panionship : — 
 
 " The best is when I glide from out them, 
 Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, 
 Come out on the other side, the novel. 
 Silent, silver lights and darks undreamt of, 
 Where I hush and bless myself with silence." 
 
 In Lessing there are no such reactions or escapes from one 
 sphere to another. He is easily touched to fine issues, but he 
 is never transported or lifted from earth into an aerial world. 
 He treads firmly, looking round, rather than ecstatically looking 
 up. If action is possible in any emergency, very readily and 
 decisively it is done ; if not, it is wise to yield to the inevitable. 
 He is clear and vigorously practical — a self-sufficient, calm con- 
 tentment and superiority to lesser cares remove him from the 
 genus irritabile. He finds his delights in cheerful activity : 
 devotion to the past and its pleasures, the remote and the ima- 
 ginary, which exercise so great a spell over the lives of the poets 
 who are more strictly to be classed as lyrical, he would regard as 
 weak, useless, and often hurtful, debilitating to the manly powers. 
 It is very characteristic that he always wishes to subdue fine 
 epithets and high-flown expressions in the poems of Kleist and 
 Gleim. The clearness and supremacy of his judgment would 
 have imparted a cold remoteness to his work had it not been for 
 the strength of his moral nature, which always moves in harmony 
 with it. Had he been to any extent touched with sentiment and 
 romanticism — inclined to defy rule, and to set up, in opposition 
 to the prevailing standards and tastes, an array of loose and 
 fanciful conceits which could not be justified by good critical 
 reasons, he could never have driven French influence from 
 Germany, or have written "Nathan" or the " Laocoon." 
 
 He never, indeed, seems to be under the necessity of seeking 
 relief or of drawing help from a world of fancy ; the worlds of 
 fact and of men are enough for him when he needs to escape 
 from the world of his own thoughts. It is this satisfaction, this 
 restfulness, this EngHsh-like determination to make the best of 
 things as they are, or to improve them only by appeals to the 
 better reason, which has emphasised in the general mind the idea 
 
 E 
 
•66 LESSING. 
 
 that Lessing was little of a poet. But if the poet is he who, by 
 the aid of the higher faculties, seeks to bring men into harmony 
 with a noble ideal that may in its leading outlines become a 
 "realised ideal," as he in his own life may be said to have 
 reaHsed it, and if, for this purpose, he shows the power of trans- 
 muting, at every step, the actual characters, the common and 
 sordid experiences of life, into symbols, we would almost need to 
 seek for a new definition of poetry that would exclude Lessing. 
 We do not claim that he was a dramatic poet of the first rank ; 
 his processes are too evident, and his work too often cold, 
 restrained, and infected by ill-disguised moralisings ; but his 
 power of carrying his thought into figure, and bringing it close to 
 the " bosoms and the businesses " of men, indicates a capacity of 
 vicarious living and thinki?j.g without which there can be no 
 dramatic poetry. 
 
 His life is thus seen to impart a new character to his works. 
 They are not faithfully seen tiU viewed in relation to his charac- 
 ter ; or rather his character, so expressly read in them, relates 
 them by so manifold and so intimate links to his actual experi- 
 ence, that the two things cannot in strictness be separately viewed. 
 In all poets, except those of the very highest order, the imagina- 
 tion hangs, as it were, a veil between the actual life and the 
 created world ; and a sense of revulsion is too often felt in pass- 
 ing from the one to the other. Lessing, if he lacked a power- 
 ful imagination, escaped from this revulsion. Looked at from 
 this point of view, we cannot regard Mr Russell Lowell's en- 
 deavour to separate the writer and the man, and his reiterated 
 expressions to the effect that the man is more interesting than the 
 writer, as having so much ground as they might appear at first 
 sight to have; any more than we can regard Mr Lowell as con- 
 sistent in writing on one page — "he never quite smelted his 
 knowledge clear from some slag of learning," and on another, in 
 contrast with Dr Johnson — " Lessing assimilated learning, and 
 accordingly his education ceased only with his life." * 
 
 It indicates a great force of moral nature that Lessing should 
 have found in those with whom he was brought into contact so 
 much to furnish him with the images or forms that he dramati- 
 cally used for his great purposes of teaching and enlightening. 
 His faithfulness and independence of mind are seen here also in 
 
 * Among my Books, first series, chapter " Lessing." 
 
LESSING. 67 
 
 a very striking light ; for the qualifications that were so urgently 
 needed for certain determinations of his nature were furnished 
 by the qualities he there discovered and found available for his 
 peculiar art. In Theophan in " Freigeist " we have in main out- 
 line his own father. He is presented to us as having attained to 
 that grace of character which comes only of fine moral elements 
 duly disciplined, and he is not represented as having stripped 
 himself of the integuments of his belief. In the Freethinker 
 (who again decidedly reflects certain elements in the well-mean- 
 ing but contemptuous self-assertive and eccentric Mylius) we are 
 distinctly taught that penetration and correctness of intellectual 
 perception may after all be divorced from moral elevation and 
 true refinement of nature. The clearness of vision, the balance, 
 the justness of Lessing's judgment, is seen here precisely as in his 
 purely argumentative works, and so also in his other dramas. 
 
 We have specially cited the " Freigeist " in order that we may 
 pass naturally to a remark which might otherwise be deemed far- 
 fetched or out of place. It is this, that the pause or check which 
 was administered to Lessing's intellectual tendency, saving him 
 from cynicism and from becoming a sneerer and destroyer only, 
 was derived from happy influences to which he had been subject, 
 and which alone inspired him with the enthusiasm that is essen- 
 tial to any form of artistic creation. His father, it is evident, 
 was a powerful influence, and at the very outset of his career, 
 while as yet Lessing was working hard at comedies on the model 
 of Molifere, had suggested an absolutely original and individual 
 starting-point. " What if I should show the illiberality of the 
 freethinkers — those who despise the priestly office?" It is not 
 too much to say that the father's influence, as exhibiting a lofty 
 type of character but little touched for evil by the dogmas held, 
 was a main factor in the maintenance of that essentially revereni 
 and rehgious spirit which so distinguishes Lessing from, say, the 
 Encyclopaedists. And this, too, lay very close to that sincerity, 
 that thoroughness and independence of mind, which we have 
 set down as a primary characteristic. 
 
 It is here that we find the true ratibnale of the words which 
 Lessing used of himself when speaking of his debt to criticism. 
 
 " People often do me the honour to recognise me as a poet, but 
 only because they do not understand me. They ought not to draw 
 such generous conclusions from some dramatic attempts I have made. 
 
^ 
 
 68 LESSING. 
 
 Not every one who takes the brush in hand and scatters colours is a 
 painter. The oldest of these attempts was written in the years in 
 which one so gladly takes pleasure and facility for genius. With 
 respect to what is tolerable in my more recent efforts, I am conscious 
 that I owe it solely to criticism. I do not feel in me the living foun- 
 tain which works upward by its own force, shoots up by its own force 
 into such rich, such fresh, such pure streams ; I must force everything 
 out of me by the fly-press and pipes. I should be so poor, so cold, 
 so short-sighted, if I had not to some extent learned modestly to 
 borrow treasures from others, to warm myself at other's fires, and by 
 the glass of art to strengthen my eyes. I have, therefore, always felt 
 ashamed and out of humour when I have read or heard anything to 
 the disadvantage of criticism. It is said to hamper genius ; and I 
 flattered myself that I owed to it something which comes very near 
 genius." 
 
 The modesty and self-respecting honesty, the thoroughness of 
 insight, which admits no flattering glosses even in a scrutiny of 
 self, the rare independence of mind, in a word, which could 
 prompt so manly and candid a confession as this, is apt to blind 
 us to the fact that, after all, it is not quite a true report. It 
 separates too cautiously two aspects of one activity, and puts 
 them as though they were different and conflicting. It is true 
 that such they would be in the case of men in whom the intel- 
 lectual activity was often divorced from, or at least independent 
 of, the movement of the moral nature. 
 
 There are various points in Mr Russell Lowell's estimate of 
 Lessing with which we can hardly bring ourselves to agree; but 
 when he writes as follows, he seems to throw light on our con- 
 ception of Lessing rather than on his own : — 
 
 " Lessing's advice to his brother Karl, who was beginning to write 
 for the stage, is two parts moral and one literary : ' Study ethics 
 dihgently, learn to express yourself well and correctly, and cultivate 
 your own character. Without that I cannot conceive a good dramatic 
 author.' Marvellous counsel this will seem to those who think that 
 wisdom is only to be found in the fool's paradise of Bohemia ! " 
 
 The moral element with Lessing is literally the first and the 
 last; the literary one is secondary, and must flow out of it : and 
 this from the man whose conception of literary form was so 
 exalted and severe ! His conception of the dramatist and his 
 equipment is, however, absolutely consistent with his character 
 
LESSING. 69 
 
 and with his practice. In the light of this we may the better 
 understand Mr Sime when he writes : — 
 
 " The creative and critical impulses were closely associated in 
 Lessing. Having achieved any particular work, he made it the start- 
 ing-point for speculation as to the ultimate ground of the class to 
 which it belonged ; on the other hand, if he found a body of critical 
 ideas, he was dissatisfied until he had applied them in actual artistic 
 effort. The two impulses were equally spontaneous ; they were, 
 perhaps, at first equally deep. They were never quite dissociated, but 
 in the long run the critical impulse became the more powerful, and to 
 it we owe the greater and more strictly original result." 
 
 Looked at from one point of view, Mr Sime is strictly right 
 here. But more weight should almost, we think, have been laid 
 on the thought which is so far lost through its merely parenthe- 
 tical position, viz., that the two impulses in Lessing were never 
 really dissociated. And seeing that " Nathan " — the last flower- 
 ing of a long process — was brought to birth, as one might say, 
 and as Lessing himself said, by the stir of theological contro- 
 versy, we can hardly admit that, in the strict sense, the critical 
 impulse in the long-run became the most powerful, since the fact 
 is admitted that it could still be made the servant of the creative 
 one in the effort to set forth effectively a great moral idea. 
 
 Lessing's great clearness of style has made his genius seem 
 simpler in its elements than it really was. This accounts for a 
 good deal of the too dogmatic criticism that has been given forth 
 in reference to him, as though it was the easiest thing possible to 
 understand and to exhaust him. We find, for example, Mr Haw- 
 kins, a well-known author nearly half a century ago, writing thus : 
 " He was esteemed a great poet, but we cannot now concede to 
 him the inspiration of genius. ... He had a perpetual thirst for 
 new discoveries, and for discovering new views of old ones ; but 
 his plan of proceeding was fitful and irregular. He would com- 
 pose no poem without laying down a theory for his own guid- 
 ance ; he was always caUing himself to account and mistrusting 
 his impulses." 
 
 The true purpose of criticism is almost completely missed in 
 such writing as this of Mr Hawkins. One of the most striking 
 points about Lessing was, that he is really as much of the drama- 
 tist in his critical and argumentative works as in dramas pure 
 and proper. He never could proceed merely as the controver- 
 
7° 
 
 LESSING. 
 
 sialist. His dramatic curiosities are too strong, and often carry 
 him whither he would not, it must be admitted, to the injury of 
 his first intention not unfrequently. How his line of reasoning 
 would strike another and a differently constituted mind is con- 
 stantly present with him, HOt as a merely speculative considera- 
 tion, however speculative the idea with which he may be con- 
 cerned, but as an immediate and practical result. This it is 
 chiefly which has imparted the aspect of fitfulness and uncom- 
 pleteness that has struck some of the severer critics. Till this 
 point of a pervading moral purpose is clearly seized, we have 
 hardly got at the differentiating quality of Lessing's mental pro- 
 duct; we have not found the necessary unit in it, nor discovered 
 how completely such critics as Hawkins have missed the point. 
 Mr Sime is quite right when he finds, as he does, the superabund- 
 ance of familiar figure and illustrations in Lessing's prose work ; 
 but it is not till we trace the unity of his powers to a root in the 
 moral character which urged him, partly through lack of imagina- 
 tion, to seek his ideal in a sense of absolute fairness, that we find 
 the point where the man and his work pass into one presence. "It 
 has been well said that the idea of ' Nathan the Wise ' runs like a 
 golden thread through the rich and variegated web of Lessing's 
 intellectual life." It forms the chief motive even of his early 
 comedies. When we have seen how completely this idea fills and 
 illuminates every writing from his hand, the fitfulness and irregul- 
 arity of his effort disappear. Mr Sime has eloquently signahsed 
 this pervading dramatic element in Lessing in two passages which 
 in justice to him we must cite: — 
 
 " He loved to confront an opinion with its opposite," says Mr Sime, 
 " to thrill with the stir and glow of intellectual battle. To hear any 
 conviction strongly stated roused in him the desire to qualify it, or to 
 suggest grounds for calling it in question. Thus in conversation he 
 would often take a side with which he had no sympathy ; not for the 
 barren pleasure of victory, but to see how much could be said by those 
 who really held that for which he argued. He was sometimes blamed 
 by one party for maintaining views .which another found fault with 
 him for rejecting. During the Seven Years' War, for instance, his 
 friends in Leipzig were shocked by his Prussian sympathies ; while, 
 after he went to Berlin, he offended his friends there by being, as they 
 thought, too partial to his native Saxony. Even in his inward life it 
 ■was through struggle that he pushed to new conclusions. If there 
 ■was no acttial opponent, he imagined one, and equipped him ■with th 
 surest and most polished antiour he could devise." 
 
LESSING. yi 
 
 And again, with reference to his style ; — 
 
 " Another and essential characteristic of Lessing's style, which 
 meets us even at an early stage, is his love of metaphors and similes. 
 This quality is found in the same degree in no other German author- 
 It is improbable that Lessing's thought was originally, in his own 
 mind, so concrete as it appears in his works ; for, although a poet, he 
 was not sufficiently a poet ; he was too much a pure thinker to pass 
 from judgment to judgment by means of individual images. Had the 
 imagination and the understanding been thus fused in him, he would 
 have given us less criticism and more poetry. But because he was so 
 consummate a critic, he knew that thought expressed in abstract forms 
 is for the ordinary intelligence powerless : for the educated, intelli- 
 gence without charm. Hence he deliberately clothed his ideas in 
 visible and tangible forms ; he brought them, as Socrates brought 
 philosophy, from the clouds, and made them appear in shapes that the 
 common understanding would apprehend and take delight in appre- 
 hending. We find this preference for metaphorical expression in all 
 his writings, dramatic as well as critical, theological as well as 
 Eesthetic. He ultimately became a master in its use ; and this is un- 
 questionably one of the strongest of the many reasons for the power he 
 still exerts. The objects from, which he selects his images are rarely 
 rem,arkable for grandeur and beauty ; he is usually content if they are 
 familiar, precise, and vivid." 
 
 The colouring of this ideal, which depends on sincerity and a 
 sense of fairness, is as distinctly seen in the veriest trifle of criti- 
 cism or of conversation as in the dramatic poems ; but it is 
 evident that it could not but operate so far to the disadvantage 
 of lengthened trains of thought, if viewed only from the stand- 
 point of formal logic. This, however, is not the test which should 
 be exhaustively appli.ed to a practical man engaged with practical 
 questions, as Lessing always was, however much he might be 
 under the necessity of adopting abstract terms. The presence of 
 this ideal, rooted in riioral qualities rather than in the imagination, 
 robust and genial common sense, readiness for allowance and for 
 compromise, and for inclusion of opposites, these things, to our 
 idea, justify in great measure the remark which has often been 
 made to the effect that Lessing is pre-eminently British. A 
 writer of high repute has said — 
 
 " His mind is of a quality eminently British. Of all Germans he is 
 the least German ; yet he created German Mterature, and is the idol 
 of his country. He has the quahties Englishmen most admire. He 
 always writes vrith distinct purpose ; the prominent characteristic 
 
72 LESSING. 
 
 of his works, contrasted with those of his countrymen, is their direct 
 and practical tendency." 
 
 The German heaviness and thoroughness more readily allies 
 itself with vague sentiment and a diffuse egotism, with a kind of 
 vapid self-satisfaction, rather than with sharp sense ; and so far 
 the epithet is well applied. But Lessing is not British in so far 
 as he is never insulated or incapacitated from bringing the ideas 
 of others to a test in a kind of cosmopolitan reason ; and thus far 
 he would himself, we think, have been inclined to quarrel with 
 the title of " British " as applied to him in any strict and com- 
 prehensive way. It is for this reason that, even as a politician, 
 we may regard him as strictly faithful to his own ideal, and in 
 this relation also to have been thoroughly sincere. German 
 patriotism in his day he felt was narrow, alien to true enlighten- 
 ment. While he would not have moved a finger to stir up dis- 
 content in those who were not already alive to the burdens that 
 pressed upon them, he desired to quicken the sense of the en- 
 lightened to these burdens, and so to have a true cosmopolitan- 
 ism based on practical right and justice. He would have cor- 
 roborated Heine's ideas in the following passage, though he 
 might have been inclined to modify the expression — 
 
 " The patriotism of the Frenchman,'' said Heine, " consists in this 
 — that his heart grows warm, and widens with the warmth, no longer 
 ■embracing merely its near relatives, but all France, the whole civilised 
 world. The patriotism of the German, on the other hand, consists in 
 this — that his heart grows narrower, contracting like leather in the 
 cold ; that he hates what is foreign ; that he wishes no longer to be 
 a citizen of the world, no longer even an European, but only a narrow 
 German. There was now to be witnessed the ideal churlishness which 
 Herr Jahn reduced to a system. Now began the mean, dirty, un- 
 washed opposition to the most glorious and holy feeling ever originated 
 in Germany — the feeling of humanity, namely, the universal spirit of 
 fraternisation, the cosmopolitanism to which all our greater spirits, 
 Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul, as well as all cultivated 
 minds, have ever done homage. What soon after came to pass in 
 Germany is too well known to all. When God, the snow, and the 
 Cossacks had destroyed the best energies of Napoleon, we Germans 
 received the most gracious command to free ourselves from the yoke 
 of the foreigner, and we flamed up in manly indignation against the 
 all too long endured subjection, and we encouraged ourselves by the 
 good melodies and bad verses of Korner's songs, and we reconquered 
 our freedom ; for we do everything which our princes bid us." 
 
LESSING. 73 
 
 " Lessing's intellect, like his style," says one, " was clear, sharp, 
 precise ; he would tolerate no vagueness, and he hated rhetoric ; 
 a keen analytic, healthy intellect, practical in all its aims, de- 
 cisive in its movement, inspired by the sincerest love of truth, but 
 never inspired by imagination." 
 
 Lessing's modest disbelief in his own poetic powers was favour- 
 able to his success as a dramatist. He cultivated the study of 
 stage effect, and in one respect verified Carlyle's axiom that 
 " Genius is patience ! " He carefully watched every detail, 
 thinking nothing, however trivial, beneath his regard. In the 
 thoroughness with which he entered on the consideration of 
 minutiae he is an example not only for the student and the man 
 of letters, but for the merchant and the manufacturer. If you 
 would succeed in your object, fail not to study and to master 
 every point, however apparently unimportant or trivial, which 
 bears on the technical detail of the work you may be engaged in. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Lessing's influence has been wider and more health^7P«r- 
 vasive throughout the whole field of culture than that of any 
 other German. Luther regenerated the field of religious life 
 and thought, and indirectly influenced social life and well-being 
 in many directions ; but the tendency of his teaching was to dis- 
 credit culture where it did not seem directly to serve the ends of 
 religion and conventional morality; and so he becomes one- 
 sided in view, and so far limited in influence. Leibnitz, by a 
 process of logic the most exacting, rescued the foundations of 
 moral sense and of religion from attack, but his " pre-estabhshed 
 harmony " is but an ideal conception, which could not but lose 
 hold under the influence of what was more powerfully and acutel)' 
 demonstrated. Goethe, again, stood too coldly apart from the 
 interests in which common men must perforce find their chief 
 concern, and sought in the ideal of pagan repose and stoicism a 
 salve for the divisions and conflicts of his time. And thus the 
 words of Mr Matthew Arnold have grave significance — ■ 
 
 " Goethe's course few sons of men 
 May think to emulate." 
 
 But any man may emulate the wise career of Lessing, distin- 
 
74 LESSING. 
 
 guished and exceptional as were the results that flowed from the 
 exercise of what he would have regarded as being, on the whole, 
 ordinary faculties. We may regard him in the attitudes of 
 religious teacher, poet, and critic, and see how, under each aspect, 
 this is borne out. 
 
 1. Without going out of our way to claim for Lessing what he 
 would have been too modest to claim for himself, it may yet be 
 said, with fullest confidence, that he was a true Protestant, 
 carrying faithfully into all departments with which he was con- 
 cerned the spirit of free inquiry, demanding for every man, as of 
 natural right, the unfettered exercise of the individual reason and 
 conscience on all questions. He was, in this aspect, as has been 
 said, a true successor of Luther ; he carried the doctrines of the 
 Reformation to their proper and legitimate apphcation in litera- 
 ture, philosophy, and criticism, as well as in what pertains strictly 
 to religion. But religion being regarded by him as a permanent 
 and permeating influence, he refused to regard it as separate 
 from any of the true interests of life. His criticism of Scripture 
 was never irreverent ; he distinctly intimated his desire to protect 
 the kernel whatever might befall the shell in which it had for 
 ages been preserved. His leading aim in theology, in fact, was 
 to distinguish clearly between essential and non-essential — form 
 and spirit — and his contests with theologians, as represented in 
 the quarrel with Goeze, were invariably engaged in with the view 
 of making this clear. Sectarian theologians he regarded as the 
 conservators of the letter, of the mere book — men who would 
 have spoken as though religion would perish with their records, 
 and therefore he continually recalled to their minds, by all kinds 
 of arguments and illustrations, that religion was not dependent 
 on a book, but that books were dependent on religion ; and he 
 was firm on the point that nothing final could be predicated of 
 anything drawn merely from any book. He fully anticipated the 
 difficulties that would arise by the progress of modern criticism, 
 and spoke words as wise as any that have yet been uttered on 
 that great theme. 
 
 The divorce which is even now being seen to become day by 
 day more and more complete in whole sections of the educated 
 community between the intellectual life and moral conviction we 
 all profess to mourn. Accommodations of all kinds are common. 
 Creeds and formulas are accepted and read in a wholly non- 
 
LESSING. 75 
 
 natural sense, a sense completely opposed to the constructions 
 put upon them by their original framers, or by the plain common 
 sense of the men who accept them. If we were required to 
 point to a man whose life was devoted to an exposure of the evil 
 of this tendency at a time when it began to exercise influence, 
 and who has exhibited beyond almost all others the true spirit 
 in which men ought to comport themselves in relation to all 
 such questions and difficulties at whatever personal sacrifice, we 
 should unhesitatingly name Lessing. To illustrate this point 
 exhaustively would involve reference to each work in a long 
 catalogue. For that we cannot afford the space, nor is it neces- 
 sary. Enough if we indicate very shortly how the sincerity and 
 unhesitating frankness of the man led him to speak words as 
 directly applicable to one of the great perplexities of our own 
 day, which is felt by many who jdeld under it, and preached 
 against constantly by those who have not yielded or have escaped 
 from the net, as though he were living and writing to-day for 
 the benefit of some of the " broader" minds burdened by the 
 shackles of "subscription.'' When a distinguished theologian 
 tried to lessen the effects of Berengarius's answer to Lanfranc by 
 accusing Berengarius of having studied ambiguity and retreated 
 from publication imder fear of consequences, Lessing made this 
 most moderate but most efficient reply, in which he penetrates to 
 the very essence of the matter — 
 
 " God forbid ! " he exclaims, " that I should so reproach any man. 
 I know not whether it be a duty to sacrifice happiness and life to the 
 truth ; certainly the courage and resolution necessary to such a sacri- 
 fice are not gifts which we can bestow upon ourselves. But this I 
 know is duty ; if one attempts to teach truth, he must teach it in its 
 integrity, or leave it alone, roundly, fully, without enigmas or reserves, 
 with a perfect faith iii its efficacy and usefulness. The gifts required 
 for such a decision are in our own power. Whoever will not acquire 
 these, or, when acquired, will not use them, shows that he has a very 
 poor notion of the human understanding ; and he deserves to lose 
 the confidence of his hearers who, while freeing them from some 
 gross errors, withholds from them the complete truth, and thinks to 
 satisfy them by some compromise with falsehood. The greater the 
 error, the shorter and straighter is the way to truth. But refined 
 error can prevent our recognition of its nature, and blind us to the 
 truth altogether. . . . The man who is faithless to Truth amid threat- 
 ening dangers may yet deeply love her, and Truth will forgive him 
 
 / 
 
76 L'ESSING. 
 
 his unfaithfulness for the sake of his love. But whosoever thinks of 
 prostituting Truth under every kind of mask and rouge, may be her 
 pimp, but has never been her lover!' 
 
 As furnishing one illustration of the width and efficiency of 
 Lessing's influence in the theological field, it may not be out of 
 place to note a peculiar circumstance in the discussion that arose 
 over the publication of "Essays and Reviews." The com- 
 batants in the field — probably because of the dust that was 
 raised by the stampede — were very slow to see their strongest 
 point against Dr Temple for his production " The Education of 
 the World." But when once it had been pointed out that the 
 essay was in far too large a proportion a presentation of the ideas 
 of a German "heretic," the quickness with which it was dis- 
 covered that there were many others to whom Dr Temple might 
 have been indebted was truly astonishing. Seldom has such 
 fertility of resource been seen in a noble cause. Libraries were 
 ransacked suddenly, and lucky discoveries were made. Hegel 
 was the original and then Schelling. One critic fancied he saw 
 some shadow of parallelism in Vischer, and another even stumbled 
 on some semblance of similarity between Dr Temple and the 
 younger Fichte ! The "Quarterly Review" deemed it of import- 
 ance enough to give a long list of parallel quotations from " The 
 Philosophy of History" and Dr Temple's " Essay."* But when 
 a magnate of the Church of England could translate and adapt 
 Lessing, and, in spite of adverse influence and criticism, find 
 himself by-and-bye "translated and adapted" to higher functions, 
 enough has been said perhaps as to the unrecognised influence 
 in later theological thought of this poverty-stricken but potent 
 thinker, to justify in every candid mind the title given him of 
 "the invisible presence in modern criticism." 
 
 "What is a heretic?" asks Lessing. "It is a man who wishes, 
 at least, to see with his own eyes. The only question is, whether 
 he has good eyes. In certain eyes the name of heretic is the 
 greatest recommendation that can be transmitted by a scholar to 
 posterity — far greater than the name of sorcerer, magus, exorcist, 
 for these serve to cover many an impostor." 
 
 It may well have been that Dr Temple was relieved from all 
 charge of heresy, inasmuch as he had, after all, only seen with 
 
 " Qicart€7-ly Review for October 1862, p. 472. 
 
LESSING. 77 
 
 Lessin^s eyes I But even this would hardly suffice to explain 
 away the difficulty that may arise hereafter on the philosophic 
 historian when he finds that one of the organs which was most 
 anxious to be just to Dr Temple wrote thus of Lessing : — 
 
 " We need not tell those of our readers who are acquainted 
 with German literature that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was one 
 of those early Deists who, by the doubts they sowed, prepared 
 Germany for all the long sufferings she has since suffered" (!). 
 
 When Gervinus called Lessing " Der Grosse Wegweiser der 
 Nation" — the great fingerpost for the safe roads — he could never 
 have anticipated such a deliverance as this. But then, he may 
 have missed some aspect of his subject. 
 
 It is as inconsistent to try to demonstrate Deism in Lessing as 
 it is to attempt to prove him a Spinozist, as Jacobi did, or to 
 endeavour to draw some kind of consistent abstract scheme out 
 of him generally favourable to present day neology or agnosticism. 
 He will not be made the apologist of any sectarian issue, nor can 
 he be claimed as a safe supporter. Heine was as far wrong when 
 he discovered a spirit of pure deism breathing from " Nathan " as 
 Jacobi was when he raised a charge of Spinozism, on the ground 
 of conversational remarks which were very probably meant only 
 to be elicitory of Jacobi's own opinions. It is very remarkable 
 that the orthodox would have the most ground in raising such 
 claims as these. It is more than curious indeed to find Lessing 
 in the " Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts " specially reserving 
 for certain of the orthodox doctrines a useful place in the future 
 development of humanity, and one of these doctrines assuredly 
 would not have had his readiest personal sympathy. In the 
 " Necessary Answer to a very Unnecessary Question " his state- 
 ment of the " Rule of Faith " is distinctly in this spirit. 
 
 Carl Lessing, in speaking of his tendency to spin theological 
 and philosophical threads, without finishing any web, remarks on 
 his inability to settle down on any hard and fast theory either of 
 Pantheism or Theism, has one or two wise and well-considered 
 sentences, which will not be out of place in this connection : — 
 
 " Lessing remained not less in his moral than in his theological 
 writings, I might say, in all that he wrote and did for the world by the 
 incontrovertible, beautiful idea of a personal God, precisely as his 
 friend Herr Ramler, as poet, held by the Greek and Roman mythology. 
 . . . Nor can we blame him because he was more a critic than a sys- 
 
78 LESSING. 
 
 tematic philosopher and theologian ; that he planned more than he 
 executed ; that he discovered more weak and faulty passages than of 
 secure defence and positions really made good. His very variety made 
 him more of a philosophical free-lance than of a general of scepticism 
 or of dogmatic philosophy. He would much rather come to the help 
 of the persecuted than hold triumph with the victors. He would claim 
 no authority for himself, not even such as others allowed him." * 
 
 Lessing has often been represented as having drawn Deistical 
 ideas from Voltaire. Those who so speak err grievously. He 
 was the first efficiently to protest against Voltaire's influence ; 
 and as against Voltaire would have in effect occupied orthodox 
 ground. To some extent M. Cherbulier misses one great point of 
 distinction and contrast in the following comparison of Lessing 
 with Bayle, though, certainly, he does not exhaust Lessing's 
 relations to the old theology, when he rests these exclusively on 
 logic : — 
 
 " Lessing ^tait de la famille de Bayle. Chez tous les deux, meme 
 ardeur de recherche et d'examen, meme passion de controverse et 
 parfois m^me friandise de scandale ; une dtonnante varidt^ d'dtudes, 
 une vaste Audition dont ils se servent pour autoriser et multiplier leur 
 doutes, une sort de genie qui se dfepense en malice, une entente mer- 
 veilleuse de la guerre de chicane, I'art de dfetruire I'ennemi en ddtail 
 par des escarmouches plus meurtriferes que des battailles rangdes. 
 Du reste, infatigables I'un et I'autre, toujours frais, dispos, toujours 
 en campagne, du matin de leur vie jusqu' au soir, dperonnds, bottds, 
 ils sonnent le bouteselle. Ces sortes d'esprits enrages que possfede 
 le ddmon de la critique sont fort incommodes aux gens tranquilles, 
 qui trouvent leur repos dans la tradition, leur bonheur dans les iddes 
 recues. . . . Lessingeutsur Bayle Tavantagedugofltetdu style. . . . 
 
 " Lessing prtfdrait la vieille thfeologie k la nouvelle, parce que la 
 logique dtait le dieu de Lessing. Les esprits consfequens ont une 
 aversion instinctive pour tous les accommodemens, pour tous les 
 compromis, pour les reconciliations plitrdes, et ils ne peuvent se 
 defendre d'une certaine sympathie pour toutes les doctrines conse- 
 quentes avec elles-m^mes. On peut penser ce qu' on voudra des 
 vieux symboles du XVI^ siecle ; ils ont ce caractfere de grandeur qui 
 est inherent k tous les systfemes fortement ddduits, ou tout se tient, 
 ou tout s'enchatne. Dans les choses de 1' esprit, la consequence est 
 une vertu, la logique est rh&oi'sme de I'intelligence ; mais ce n'est 
 pas la seule raison des prdfdrences de Lessing : la nouvelle th^ologie 
 lui parassait plus dangereuse que I'autre." t 
 
 * " Karl Lessing's Life "—Chapter on Philosophy and Theology. Berlin Edition, 1793. 
 t " Revue des deux Mondes." 
 
LESSING. 79 
 
 " Voltaire et Lessing, qui se touchent par tant de cot^s, ont encore 
 en cette ressemblance d' entendre en I'un et 1' autre la libertd humaine 
 k la fagon de Spinoza ; mais un pas de plus, et ces deux grands 
 esprits se s^parent. Le ddterminisme de Lessing est optimiste ; celui 
 de I'auteur de Cattdide ne Test gufere." 
 
 2. Lessing as a poet cannot be rigidly separated from Lessing 
 as a theologian and thinker. Prohle indeed embodies his 
 criticism of " Nathan der Weise '' in the chapter in which he 
 considers Lessing as a theologian.* He drew, as we have seen, 
 sufficient supports for both activities from the same source. It is 
 true, as Mr Sime says, that he employed dramatic forms in the 
 service of a special idea in all his more ambitious works. If, in 
 his criticism and philosophical writing, his thought constantly 
 passes into figure and illustration, in his poetry we see him con- 
 sciously adapting and gathering illustration for his thought. In 
 one aspect his poetry may seem less spontaneous than his prose. 
 This was doubtless what he himself meant in that modest protest 
 he made against being taken for a poet, and must be held to 
 explain also what a distinguished German critic meant when he 
 said that "Nathan" should have been written in prose. Men- 
 delssohn, it seems, was of the same mind. Writing to August 
 Von Hennings on the 29th June 1779, in criticising some prose 
 and verse which had been submitted to him, he says : — 
 
 " Your poetry does not much please me. It may be indeed 
 that at my years one loses something of the taste for poetry ! I 
 suspect it is so : for I do not love even the best poetic work so 
 highly as I used to do. Even ' Nathan der Weise,' as I believe, 
 would please me still better if it were in prose, like " EmiKa 
 Galotti." t 
 
 But the purely critical deliverance upon his poetic productions 
 is not fully corroborated by the common judgment ; and therein 
 lies a kind of testimony more efficient even than his own. That 
 he could command such interest in the vehicles he adopted for 
 his teaching is as important a point as that he had always a high 
 lesson to convey. If didactic poetry, which in itself, like a 
 chrysalis, carries an element of disruption and division within 
 itself, asserts a right to a lasting place in men's regards, it can 
 only be on account of countervailing artistic merits. This dis- 
 tinctly Lessing's maturer dramas have; and the typical excellences 
 
 • " Prohle's Lessing, Wieland und Heinse," p. ^^, seqq. t." Kayserling,"' p. 523. 
 
8o , LESSING. 
 
 of his style unfold themselves most fully in " Nathan," though 
 " Emilia Galotti " exhibits best the results of his long and careful 
 study of stage effect, and the technicahties of the playwright's 
 craft. It has been well said that — 
 
 " The object of ' Nathan ' is not to institute a comparison between 
 the three religions as to their historical genuineness or inherent worth, 
 but solely to rebuke the bigotry of a dominant religion, and to incul- 
 cate the simple truth that no man is better for his Christian creed 
 unless the fruits of Christianity are seen in his life. Rotscher, in his 
 ' Cyclus Dramatischer Charactere,' has also pointed out the fine dra- 
 matic antithesis of incarnating the principle of humanity in Nathan, 
 who belonged by birth and education to the narrowest and most 
 exclusive of religions, thus reminding the Governments whose laws 
 recognised in an Israelite no rights which a Christian was bound to 
 respect, that ' our Saviour was himself a Jew.' " 
 
 Here we are once more at the point where all the varied lines 
 of Lessing's activity may be said to meet and fortify each other. 
 
 It indicates the power of thoroughness, sincerity, and a high 
 purpose that "Nathan the Wise" attained the honour of holding 
 the stage in Germany. Something is no doubt due to the wise 
 curtailment and the adaptations it received at the hand of Schiller, 
 who reduced it to an acting play ; but more — far more — to the 
 directness with which the lesson is enforced, and the resources 
 the author skilfully calls to his aid for this end. Mr Taylor, of 
 Norwich, in his translation of the play which was published in 
 England in 17 91, and which did not a little to attract the notice 
 of English literary men of that day to the treasures of Germany, 
 speaks of it as an " argumentative drama ; " and he was in a large 
 measure right. It is, as we have said, more a dialogue conducted 
 with a conscious aim after truth and fairness on all sides than a 
 drama ; a dramatised romance rather than a play. Mrs Austin 
 says : " ' Nathan the Wise ' is the most poetical of all his works — 
 not because it is the only one written in verse, but from the purely 
 idyllic tone of serene wisdom, the Brahmin-like character which 
 pervades it." It appeals to the intellect and to the sober sense 
 of justice and right rather than to the passions, after the manner 
 of the legitimate drama. But how transcendant the sense of effect, 
 how clear the control of all the elements of interest admitted, 
 and how complete the power to mould alien influences to one 
 great purpose, is testified on the part of a man who could thus 
 
LESSING. 8i 
 
 triumph, as it were, over the very conditions of dramatic art ! 
 Lessing, indeed, cast aside, and without any conscious effort in 
 that direction, the traditions of the stage, and elevated it once 
 again to the position of a teacher — a thing for which also he 
 deserves gratitude. 
 
 Mr Froude,in speaking of the object of "Nathan" as being 
 to teach religious toleration, condemns it as a work of art, on the 
 ground that " nature does not teach religious toleration by any 
 such direct method ; " and he adds, that " the play is not poetry, 
 but only splendid manufacture;" and though "the doctrine is 
 admirable, and the mode in which it is enforced interesting, it 
 has the fatal fault that it is not true ; " and he prophesies that 
 " Nathan " will pass away with the mode of thought that gave it 
 birth. But we fail to understand him fully. To teach toleration 
 through a dramatic medium is not to enforce dogma or any 
 abstract form, but to suggest motives for noble conduct — a thing 
 which Shakespeare himself can hardly be absolved from having 
 done, unless we are to reduce him to the position of the wild poet 
 of whom Mr Tennyson sings, " working without a conscience or 
 an aim." 
 
 ReUgious toleration ! What does it imply ? — fairness, sym- 
 pathy for others, mercifulness, the desire to think the best and 
 to hope the best for those who think differently from us. It is the 
 complex sum of which these are the primary elements ; and have 
 not all these been taught indirectly through the medium of dramatic 
 creation ? Did not Shakespeare teach them ? Did not Ben Jon- 
 son, and do not those who still faithfully follow them in their art ? 
 
 " Lessing's merit as a dramatic writer was, a deepjinsight into the 
 nature of composition, of scenic arrangement, and of the progress 
 and conduct of a plot. On these points, no one can deny his master- 
 ship ; nor can we deny him another essential quality of the dramatic 
 writer — knowledge of the human heart and skill in the delineation 
 of character. But here his power ended ; his figures remain, spite of 
 all their merits, somewhat frigid and inaccurate ; they are the off- 
 spring of reflection, of study, of calculation, of comparison, not (and 
 that is the essential point) of the imagination."* 
 
 The Count Mirabeau may qualify the above somewhat, but 
 his anglomania detracts from his judicial air in this case : — 
 " Si sa' manifere dramatique n'est pas vraie, si tous ses personnages 
 
 * Mrs Austin's Characteristics, ii. p. 140. 
 F 
 
82 LESSING. 
 
 sont de beaux esprits, des philosophes, ce grand ddfaut de son theatre 
 prouve du moins la fdconditd de son talent qui a eu I'influence de 
 plusieurs sifecles sur la culture nationale des Allemands. ... Si 
 Lessing paroit avoir pr&ipitd les gens de lettres allemands dans 
 I'anglomanie, ce n'est pas qu' il leur ait jamais donn^ Shakespeare 
 pour autre chose qu' un g^nie brute, excellent k dtudier, impossible et 
 mauvais k imiter, vraiment sublime dans ses belles conceptions, mon- 
 strueux dans ses innombrables disparates, aussi Stranger qui son 
 sidcle au gout, et k I'art qu' il produit. Si les Allemands ont conclu 
 de cette opinion de Lessing (c'est la mienne, je I'avoue, longtemps 
 avant de connoitre ses ouvrages) que la tragddie des Frangois n'est 
 peut-itre pas la meilleure imaginable (bien que la seule qui existe) 
 puisqu' elle donne plus d' occasion de ddcrire les passions que de les 
 repr^senter ; s'ils en ont conclu, dis-je, que nos pieces de theatre 
 dtoient sans mdrite, ils ont parld en hommes fach^s de n' 6tre pas les 
 ainds, et que tourmente la superiority frangoise, mais non pas en 
 disciples de Lessing; il dtoit trop grand pour etre si pdtitement 
 jaloux et si gauchement injuste."* 
 
 3. We need not occupy much space in speaking of Lessing as 
 a critic. He was pre-eminently sane and clear. As he was 
 never content till he reached the fundamental principles on 
 which any art proceeded, so he could not rest till he had made 
 experiments in their application — and these experiments were 
 never carried far without a reference to the life that was being 
 lived around him. It is because Lessing never wholly lost the 
 man in the critic that his writings are still of value for all who 
 would follow on the same road. 
 
 He was emphatically and in every aspect a seeker of truth. 
 His severest attacks on others were dictated more by a desire to 
 approve in their eyes the axiom of Burke — " our enemy is our 
 helper" — than to secure for himself the reputation of a great 
 dialectic. It must be owned that Heine, in the following 
 passage — ingenious and eloquent as it is — intermixes too much 
 of his own character with the image of his subject : — 
 
 "Lessing, as he himself confessed, needed conflict for the full 
 development of his powers. He resembled that fabulous Norman 
 who inherited the skill, knowledge, and strength of those he slew in 
 single combat, and in this manner became at length endowed with 
 all human excellences and perfections. . . . Those whom his sword 
 could not reach he slew with his shafts of wit. His friends admired 
 
 * Count Mirabeau sur Moses Mendelssohn, et sur la Reforme Politique des Juifs, pp, 
 15-16- 
 
LESSING. 83 
 
 the pretty variegated feathers of his winged arrows ; his enemies feh 
 their sting in their hearts. Lessing's wit does not resemble that 
 enjouement, that gattS, these light sallies, which are too well-known 
 in France. His wit was no pretty French greyhound chasing its own 
 shadow ; it was rather that of a German cat playing with a mouse 
 before strangling it."* 
 
 But self-satisfied destructiveness and absorbed self-enjoyment 
 are the two last things that could be attributed to Lessing, and 
 this for the reason that he never ceased, even when his critical 
 discernments seemed to be most outraged, to be actuated by the 
 most elevated and inspiring social and moral ideas. If he " did 
 not always ask whether his opponent was worthy of him,'' he 
 never failed to illustrate some great principle, and thus raised his 
 most trivial discussions to a level of historic interest. As Men- 
 delssohn said, his style is such that one must read him even 
 when he is engaged in mere altercations and not otherwise 
 attractive. Heine was more faithful in discernment, if less 
 rhetorical, when he wrote thus : — 
 
 " In all Lessing's works — critical as well as creative — lives the same 
 great social idea, the same progressive humanity, the same religious 
 reason, of which he was truly the St John, and whose Messiah we 
 still wait for. And then also he knew the art of turning stones into 
 bread ; he spent the greater part of his hfe in poverty and distress ; 
 that is the load — the burden which the Germans lay on all great 
 spirits, and which will probably be first relieved through political 
 enfranchisement. . . . All directions of the spirit, all sides of life, this 
 man followed up with enthusiasm and disinterestedness."t 
 
 This comes much nearer to the true spirit of Lessing, which 
 reconciles an intense love of freedom with a profound regard for 
 rule. In the light of this pervading spiritual aim we find the 
 unity of his varied endeavours. When we read such sentences 
 as the following : " Lessing was indeed the greatest revolutionary 
 genius in science — the most spiritually gifted radical reformer — 
 that has ever appeared" J — the above must be borne in mind; 
 for he was no revolutionist or radical after the type of our time ; 
 
 * The " Blatter ffir Literarische Unterhaltung" (for 1861, p. 78), quotes an English 
 critic who writing much in the same spirit as Heine, says : " He was a dangerous assailant , 
 he never attacked at a disadvantage," and remarks that this is as excellent a rule for the, 
 strategist as for the critic. 
 
 t D'allemagne, p. 37. Kohut's. 
 
S4 LESSING. ' 
 
 and could have taken no part with political zealots of any colour. 
 Herr Karl Grun has well said, that " Lessing did not occupy and 
 could not occupy the standpoint of ordinary German politics ; 
 but stood rather on the watch-tower of culture in the great desire 
 for literary and aesthetic popular education — regarding this as the 
 most sufficing guard against stupidity and pretension, and the 
 only means of building up a truly thoughtful people. And 
 herein he was, if we will, a dictator for the Germany of the 
 future." 
 
 There is a certain significant irony in the fact that few men have 
 been subjected to looser criticism than Lessing, one of the exactest 
 of critics. Not only have the " awkward squad fired over him ;" 
 but the regulars and veterans have made false steps when firing 
 their salute. When we read such a sentence as this in a maga- 
 zine of such established repute as Blackwood's, we are seized 
 with something more than a " temporary bewilderment" : — 
 " Except these dramas (Minna, Emilia Galotti, and Nathan), all 
 Lessing's works share the same characteristics which we have 
 noted as distinguishing the smaller writers who preceded him."* 
 What? The "Laocoon," "Ernst und Falk," the "Erziehung des 
 Menschengeschlechts," the " Anti-Goeze," the " Dramaturgic," 
 sharing the same characteristics as distinguished the smaller 
 writers who preceded him ! Never out of Grub Street did there 
 emanate such a perversion or such a self-betrayal. Let the writer 
 in "Blackwood" read the works we have named, reflect upon 
 the matter till his [or her ?] inkstand is dry and then mend his 
 [or her?] goose-quill very deliberately before touching Lessing 
 again ! 
 
 The most efficient criticism to be offered on Lessing as a 
 critic is his tendency to follow up secondary lines, and to fail to 
 re-connect them clearly with his primary positions. To this is 
 due in no slight measure, the incompleteness which the more 
 exacting minds are apt to complain of in him. This did not 
 arise from any lack of grasp, but from his excessive conscien- 
 tiousness, combined with his wide range of interests, and his 
 being too easily drawn from one subject to another. The 
 peculiar necessity he was at all times xmder to turn out some- 
 thing in an immediately marketable shape, also did its part to 
 intensify this "fragmentariness" — if we may name it so. It had 
 
 * Blackwood, March 1878. 
 
LESSING. 8s 
 
 the result of imparting even to his most finished critical works 
 the aspect of a number of " Fragments" which awaited the final 
 welding together. He himself was fully aware of this; and 
 actually spoke of the "Laocoon'' as being rather unarranged 
 collectanea for a ^book than a book itself. He was usually most 
 complete in his work when the form justified some digression, 
 familiarity and incompleteness, as in the "Anti-Goeze" and 
 " Ernst und Falk." 
 
 Another thing closely connected with the last, and one which 
 will always tend to make him somewhat unsatisfactory to the 
 more logically exact minds, is this: he is without any fixed 
 theories of things, and has no set assumptions which may be 
 found by analysis at the base of each work. This means that, as 
 a purely speculative writer, he was loose and unreliable. He did. 
 not aim at system-making; and logic, in his case, was a tool and 
 not a master. His strength as a critic lay in his weakness as a. 
 metaphysician pure and simple. In a word, and paradoxical 
 as it may seem, he was too much of a poet, viewing life in the 
 concrete and as surrounded by a thousandfold contradictions, to- 
 pin his faith to any abstract form. His whole criticism founds 
 on the idea than any theory is adequate only to a limited pur- 
 pose, life and fact being so subtle and many-sided that it needs, 
 constant revisal and adjustment, even in view of that purpose 
 and as a mere working hypothesis. He is thus a critical sceptic, 
 inclined to question methods of investigation quite as much as. 
 things themselves, and must thus not seldom seem at once too 
 concerned about trifles and too indifferent towards them. His. 
 business was to question and to suggest, and it is because his. 
 questionings pierced to fundamentals, and his suggestions touched 
 always on realities, that his critical works to-day are a power to. 
 rebuke dogmatism as well as to aid disinterested enquiry. 
 
 Schmidt has well spoken of the disease of egotistic conceit 
 and cold self-suflSciency which is so apt to lay hold of those who- 
 keep aloof from production and devote themselves exclusively 
 to criticism. This kind of cheap reputation had no attraction 
 for Lessing ; and the precious heritage of his life and work, 
 exhibiting, as it does, the keenest interest in truth, as that alone 
 which is worthy of man's highest powers, is an inalienable gift to 
 future generations. Literary fashions may change; rules once 
 inflexible as the laws of the Medes and Persians may be cast 
 
86 LESSING. 
 
 aside to make way for new ones equally arbitrary ; but I.essing 
 will for ages be recognised as the inaugurator of a new era of 
 literature and light ; and the student will turn back with affection 
 and reverence to the pages of the sturdy author of the " Laocoon" 
 for suggestion and for refreshment. " He belongs to that class 
 of writers whose value consists in what they suggest and inspire 
 rather than in what they directly teach." He indeed will have 
 utterly failed to grasp the character of Lessing who does not 
 perceive that what is most valuable in his criticism is not always 
 what seems most positive in it. It is the lofty but unaffected 
 chivalry which shines through his most trifling productions that 
 is most to be dwelt on and admired. His thoughts were clear ; 
 he seldom judged wrongly ; but his spirit was always elevated : 
 he was ready to defend good causes, however hopeless — to pro- 
 tect truth, however despised. " If the student wishes to know 
 Lessing properly,'' writes one, "he must see him fighting his 
 battles, and in these battles he is not always to contemplate 
 •chiefly the matter of the dispute, but the fine play of the muscle, 
 the sure aim of the stroke, the position of the combatant wisely 
 chosen and maintained with a kingly attitude. A hireling fencer 
 he most certainly is not ; but you will often be surprised, after 
 much preparation, to see this Titan take his stand against Jove 
 in behalf of some climbing-boy or a poor penniless beggar — 
 some stray heroism on earth not loudly sounded, but recorded 
 by an angel in heaven." 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Our reverence and admiration for Lessing are increased when we 
 have full regard to the circumstances amid which he worked. 
 His life was an unceasing struggle, unbrightened by any of the 
 rewards that fall so thickly on remarkable merit in our day. But 
 he, too, was a " brave soldier in the war of liberation," and his 
 emblem, like Heine's, might be a sword. He bore with him in 
 his heart the wounds he had received in his conflicts ; but he 
 never shrunk in face of danger, and was never known weakly to 
 raise complaint. Amid uncongenial labour for daily bread, he 
 never forgot the high ideal he cherished of a great German litera- 
 ture ; and though tried by poverty and neglected, he was always 
 
LESSWG. 87 
 
 generous. He was most modest in his personal wants : what to 
 another would have been deprivation, to him was comfort ; but 
 he was liberal in giving even where there was no claim upon 
 him ; and he was often in great straits, his mind tormented by 
 trivial distresses that might easily have been spared him. His 
 great and only fear was that his work might bear the marks of it. 
 He said of himself, with a pathetic flicker of gentle humour that 
 reminds us of one of Burns' latest utterances, " I have had no 
 luck ! " He was persecuted and proscribed — treated by those in 
 power as one suspect — at whose hands good order might suffer. 
 Orthodoxy, in those days strong, was up in arms against him, 
 though, as we have seen, he was really as ready to protect what 
 was of true worth in it against a rabid and destructive RationaUsm 
 as to disclose its weakness and dogmatic pretension ; appealing 
 from the worship of the dead letter to the spirit of Christianity, 
 and arguing that the Truth which it inspired was more valuable 
 than the truths which it taught. Though he lived a busy and 
 productive life, inspired by the highest and most patriotic aims, 
 he died so poor that the Duke of Brunswick had to bury him out 
 of the public purse. " The Germans,'' said Goethe, " need time 
 to be thankful." 
 
 The very width of Lessing's range, the decision and complete- 
 ness with which he did his work, his ceaseless efforts, and his 
 power of passing, as if by a single step, from one field to another, 
 withdrew him from the close and continuous scrutiny which may 
 be the meed of more limited intelligences. He was always so far 
 in advance and so active, that he did not seem so great as he 
 really was to those that followed nearest to him. Like a true 
 pioneer, he never rested on the soil he had cleared and prepared, 
 but passed onward to remove other barriers. He has been called 
 the " invisible presence in literature, like a magician working mar- 
 vellous transformations though himself unseen ; " and the figure 
 is not inapt. More and more, as the literary historian and the 
 philosophic critic pursue their way along the lines of modern 
 development, after the manner of intrepid travellers trying to 
 reach the sources of great rivers, Lessing's presence emphatically 
 declares itself. No department of the field of culture but he casts 
 seeds in— seeds that have struck root and grown and flowered, 
 to the innocent delight even of " the dim, common populations " 
 of to-day, who have never even heard his name. For he was no 
 
88 LESSING. 
 
 pedant, no dealer in scholastic subtleties, or wire-drawn refine- 
 ments. He was a man, with healthy, frank, and generous im- 
 pulses, if there ever was one. Even his faults leaned to the side 
 of honesty. Spartan-like virtue, truthfulness, self-respect. Clear, 
 exact, and cautious in his thinking ; zealous, impetuous, and self- 
 sacrificing in spirit, yet of a steady will, he was an enemy to every 
 form of bigotry and prejudice, and ruthlessly exposed them, no 
 matter how firmly intrenched behind privilege, influence, and 
 courtly favour. It was one of his great merits that he saw and 
 systematically illustrated the dependence of literature upon life 
 and its simple unchanging conditions, as against artificialised re- 
 flections of it ; and taught, under every form, the eternal lessons 
 of charity, wise forbearance, and mutual goodwill. A man's 
 dogmatic behef was of less account to him than his conduct ; 
 goodness and self-denial were themselves the essentials, of which 
 dogmas were but the shields, or were worse than worthless ; and 
 he illustrated this theme in countless forms with such grace and 
 efficiency as have never been surpassed. His motto was " Well- 
 doing is the main thing, belief is secondary." " To patch up a 
 system of reUgion before one has thought how to bring men to 
 the harmonious discharge of their duties is an inane conceit," he 
 urged. " Are two vicious dogs made good by being shut up in 
 one kennel ? It is not agreement in opinions, but agreement in 
 virtuous actions that renders the world peaceful and happy." 
 
 His remarkable power of placing himself in the intellectual 
 attitude of another, and vicariously exhibiting relations that had 
 been overlooked or but dimly apprehended, led to that peculiar, 
 and, we might almost say, self-detached fairness of mind, which, 
 in spite of his intensity and zeal, all his writings exhibit, and also 
 imparted to his style that nervous natural directness and dramatic 
 flexibility which could easily draw illustration from familiar 
 phrase and idiom of every kind. He dealt with real experiences, 
 and sought to read in their light every problem that presented 
 itself. He was one of the most learned men of any time, but he 
 knew that learning inevitably degenerates into pedantry and arid 
 remoteness if not brought face to face with the stir of everyday 
 life and corrected by it. His writings, however abstruse the 
 subjects with which he deals, never smell of the study or the 
 midnight oil ; they are redolent of genial and healthy companion- 
 ship; they hint constantly of the market-place or the coffee 
 
LESSING. 89 
 
 house. To his friend Kleist, who had on one occasion con- 
 fessed that when he walked out in the fields he went on " a hunt 
 for images," Lessing said, " When you wish to refresh your mind, 
 you take a walk in the country, I go to the coffee-house." 
 Philosophy with him passed naturally into a kind of dialogue ; 
 and he loved to veil truth in fable, according to that instinct 
 which led him to see that the " genius of each race brings forth 
 its best products only when it works in harmony with the laws 
 of its own nature, expressing without affectation the ideas and 
 sympathies excited by immediate contact with the facts of life." 
 
 The two great defects in Lessing's nature were a total lack of 
 phantasy and little love of nature, as is suggested by the reply to 
 Kleist : but it is a question whether he could so efficiently have 
 done the work he did had these elements been added to confirm, 
 as they would no doubt have done, his irresolution in actual pro- 
 duction, and to have increased his interests, which, as it was, 
 were too many and urgent. A very good story is told which 
 attests his limitation on the side of sensitive impressibility. Be- 
 ing invited to attend the performance of a musical composition 
 of consummate beauty and genius, he quitted the room soon after it 
 had commenced, saying, " I cannot conceive how a rational be- 
 ing can find pleasure in this confusion of mere sounds, which 
 afford no matter for thought." His extreme honesty is seen here, 
 as well as one of his great defects. His humour, of which his 
 fables and epigrams show one aspect, and many of his sharp 
 asides in controversy another, allied with his keen social in- 
 stincts, tended to discourage the concentration that is aimed at 
 and most admired by the mere student. Perhaps his defects in 
 these respects were as helpful to him in accomplishing his great 
 work as were his more positive endowments. And when this can 
 colourably be said, certainly the man was suited to the times in 
 which his lot was cast. 
 
 When Lessing appeared, both literature and the drama in 
 Germany disregarded the conditions of the life around them, and 
 dealt with an artificial and alien world. They were, as we have 
 seen, slavish imitations of French fashions, French rules ; it was 
 a kind of feeble posture-making and adapting — a patching of the 
 garment into a coat of many colours. The learned world was 
 divided into two classes — courtiers who wrote French, and Acade- 
 micians who wrote Latin ; whilst German remained " the language 
 
90 LESSING, 
 
 of horses." Gottsched, a pedant and rhetorician, passed for a 
 great poet.* No one believed earnestly in the possibilities of the 
 German nation or of the German tongue. It was adjudged 
 utterly unfit ever to be a literary medium. In the capital of 
 Prussia itself there was no German theatre. Patriotism, save as 
 a narrow and purblind self-interest, was not understood. Lessing, 
 who, as we have said, leant affectionately to the facts of real life 
 in the very outset, felt that these were firm and sufficient — the 
 true bases on which literature and art must turn or become frigid, 
 inefficient, and affected. That was his mainstay, and the effort 
 after it will be found to colour his developments and account for 
 some of the more prominent faults of his earlier dramas. His 
 greatest claim to our veneration and gratitude is, that though 
 constantly tempted to pedantry, scholasticism, metaphysical re- 
 finement, as he was by one side of his intellect, his large human 
 instincts always prevailed to impart to his work, even when the 
 form of it was most deeply touched by this intellectual tendency, 
 a generous reach of application, a universality and depth which 
 render them enduring. The tendency to a severe, abstract, and 
 formal method in him contended with and was corrected by an 
 incisive but liberal and sympathetic view of life and society. By 
 dint of unwavering application and self-denial he drew from both 
 tendencies the best that they could yield. It was thus that, like 
 the fairy in Eastern fable, transmuting by a touch the common 
 metals to gold, Lessing informed the rude common speech with 
 grace and beauty. And, while he exhibited the vigour and rich- 
 ness of his native tongue, he never forgot that art is not for art, 
 but for humanity ; and so, in a time of weak commonplace, pre- 
 judice, and pretension, he became the herald of a world-literature. 
 It is not too much to say that but for him Goethe's field would 
 have been limited ; Heine had been but half the poet he was ; 
 and even Hegel had hardly been possible. Certainly the 
 " Philosophy of History " had lacked some of its most striking 
 points. 
 
 One other point of preeminence must be noted. Unlike 
 
 * For a good though over appreciative sketch of Gottsched, see Schafers ** Zur Deutsche 
 Literatur," pp. 63-83. The one special claim to be made for Gottsched is that, amid much 
 artificiality and pedantry, he anew exhibited the inseparable relation between the stage and 
 literature, and therein not only the poetry but also the art of representation again pro- 
 minently brought forward. See on this point Hettner's " Literaturgeschichte der acht- 
 zehnten Jahrhunderts," Buch I., p. 360. 
 
LESSTNC. 91 
 
 Hume (who has some superficial resemblance), Lessing never 
 suddenly pulls up, and declares with a sneer, that Truth is not 
 to be found, and is not worth further pursuit, that we are children 
 of sense, and must remain children of sense, so that our best 
 wisdom lies in clearly recognising that our happiest attainment 
 is contented ignorance. Lessing never laughs at investigation 
 and honest enquiry; he never— as Mr Maurice has well said 
 that Hume often did — " flings himself into his arm chair, and 
 becomes as indolently and contemptuously acquiescent as any 
 priest ever wished his disciples to be;"* he returned on 
 common-sense, and drew from that sphere healthy impulse and 
 aid, as did also Mendelssohn. This cynical side of Hume's 
 philosophy was a phase of the French influence also, against 
 which Lessing's whole activity was the most powerful protest. 
 This point likewise Mr Maurice has well expressed. " When," 
 he says, " we can the least hold Lessing forth as a model, when 
 he was most erratic in his course, we can see that he was a sub- 
 ject of that education which he claimed for his race. And we 
 cannot but think that he was acting as a minister in the educa- 
 tion of his countrymen, leading them away from the passion for 
 systems built or to be built, which had proved to be fatal to their 
 best energies and aspirations ; showing how they might be true 
 searchers after wisdom, even if they were unable by any effort of 
 their own to find Truth." t 
 
 Lessing, therefore, was not only a great teacher, a reformer, a 
 liberator, a witness for the ideal, alike in individual life, and in 
 the State, but he was a great creator, if not directly in the sphere 
 of imagination and passion, yet in a field that contributes to that 
 other most immediate and helpful elements. He knew that he 
 did not possess the higher attributes of the poet, and modestly 
 disclaimed inspiration ; but he was more of a poet than he claimed 
 to be, else the lessons he taught could never have penetrated so 
 deeply, nor the general taste have been so permanently raised 
 through his effort and example. And he had to forge and polish 
 the very instruments with which he did this great work. Yet, 
 notwithstanding all the adverse conditions with which he was 
 called to contend in his endeavour to inaugurate a new order of 
 things, in which fact and truth should stand for what they are, he 
 was ever in spirit truly reverent and conservative. He never 
 
 * " Modem Philosophy," p. 567. t Hid, p. 619. 
 
52 LESSING. 
 
 confused religion with the hateful parodies of it that theologians 
 have put forth, nor ran the risk of being thought to sneer at the 
 essential reality, when he exposed the absurdity and pretence and 
 logical contradictions amid which the dogmatists tried to fence 
 themselves. To any one who thinks of Lessing as a mere sceptic, 
 as one who sneeringly delights to subvert the basis of all belief, 
 we should say, " Read the two last letters to Goeze on ' Bibli- 
 idolatry.'" A revolutionary force of the most pronounced 
 character indeed he was ; but he never cast down where he was 
 not prepared in some measure to restore. He was often as wise 
 in withholding his hand as in putting it forth. Here he differs 
 from the " destroyers," with whom he is too often classed. He 
 spoke of himself as an amateur theologian, on whom there did 
 not fall the stress of systematising or rebuilding, but only of cor- 
 recting sophistries and extreme positions. Still, in his various 
 theological writings there comes to view a simple body of 
 doctrine sufficient for the purposes of an upright and reverent 
 life. His influence is becoming more potent as time passes on, 
 mainly because of these simple but positive elements in his teach- 
 ing. While the mere sceptics have fallen into the shade, he 
 emerges more and more into the light as commimicating that 
 which is useful even amid the divisions and loud calls for reform 
 and reconstruction w'hich are now being raised. In this aspect, 
 as in others, he has been almost as great a benefactor to Eng- 
 land as to his native land. It is just, it is but right, that we 
 should acknowledge what we owe to him. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 
 
Es erweckte Winckelmann's tieffsten patriotischen Anmuth, dass er noch 
 immer Menschen gab, die nicht begriffen, wie man deutsch und im Deutschen 
 gut schrieben konne ; sein Herz erhob sich stolzer, wenn er die Hoffnung 
 ausprach, dass seine Werke nicht bios der deutschen Wissenschaft, sondern 
 auch der deutschen Sprache Ehre machen mochten. Hettner, Th. iii., 
 
 P- 433- 
 
 Unter alien Volkerschaften haben die Griechen den Traum des Lebens 
 am schbnsten getraumt. — Goethe's Ethisches. 
 
II. 
 
 The life of Winckelmann is a tragic idyl. An obscure struggle 
 too long unrelieved by any genuine encouragement constitutes 
 the story of his earlier days. It imparted a tone of pathetic resig- 
 nation, which only gives effect to the quiet intensity and deter- 
 mination with which nevertheless he pursued his aim. His 
 persistency makes us think of the impulse which at certain times 
 impels some creatures against all obstacles towards one definite 
 point. The pathetic patience and gentle sweetness of his dis- 
 position transfigure the sordid circumstances, amid which his life 
 was for the most part spent, and give a touch of poetry to the 
 tragedy of his death. The sense of unsatisfied aspiration is 
 relieved and tempered by the calm expectancy and childlike 
 hopefulness which throughout support him. His nature seeks 
 but one outlet, and, often failing to find it, returns upon itself 
 only to regather strength. He is no self-conscious hero, but he 
 makes us think of Tennyson's line in " Ulysses " — 
 
 " To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 
 
 His history is a constant striving and seeking, without the fiill 
 satisfaction of finding. Every inch of the ground he gained was 
 doubly fought for, yet he never enjoyed the sense of complete 
 victory. Though no man was ever more fully gifted by nature 
 for his work, and though he was intensely devoted to it, he 
 never realised the sweet content of reaching near to his ideal. 
 Yet his influence is an inspiration. When Goethe said that little 
 was learned from Winckelmann, but that one became something 
 by studying him, he bore emphatic testimony to his character. 
 He was one of the regenerators of German Hteraturej and it 
 bespeaks the depth of conventionality and pretence to which 
 classical studies, as well as other things, had then fallen in 
 Germany, that Winckelmann who sought to bring new life to the 
 
95 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 old outworn traditions, could find no encouragement from those 
 who ought to have given it. If they had given it, Winckelmann's 
 life would have been more pleasant for him, but hardly so rich 
 in interest and in instruction for us. 
 
 Johann Joachim Winckelman was bom at Stendal, in Branden- 
 burg, in December of the year 17 17. Stendal, as Herr Justi, 
 ■who has written a most exhaustive and valuable life of Winckel- 
 mann,* has been careful to tell us, lies on the flat, sandy stretch 
 known as the Old March between Magdeburg and Hamburg, 
 and was a dreary and dilapidated town, its streets grass-grown, 
 its houses gaunt and out of repair. Some vestiges of former 
 grandeur, we are told, did remain in the town ; but they must 
 have been insignificant, for Winckelmann does not seem to have 
 derived any associations from them, as he certainly would other- 
 wise have done ; since in his later days in the sunny south — 
 in this unhke many who have suffered from sordid poverty in 
 youth — he greatly loved to recall all that was quaint or beautiful 
 in connection with it. Winckelmann's father did not himself 
 belong to the Old March, but had come from Silesia, and had 
 by and by married the daughter of a Stendal weaver, Joachim 
 Meyer, whose Christian name survives in that of his famous 
 grandson.t But the relationship, whatever other benefit it may 
 have conferred, did not lift Martin Winckelmann out of poverty. 
 He was only a poor cobbler. We learn that he was industrious, 
 pious, respected of those who knew him best ; but had fought so 
 unequal a battle with fortune that his home was a thatched hovel 
 with only one room, which served the family for kitchen, dining- 
 room, and bedroom, as well as for his workshop. It cannot, 
 therefore, be said that there was much in the juvenile surround- 
 ings to encourage literary or artistic ambitions. So very limited 
 were the means of the parents that, cheap though school educa- 
 tion was in Germany, and much as they wished it for their son, 
 
 * Winckelman : Seine Leben und Werke von Carl Justi. 
 
 t Der Vater Martin (von dessen Hand es kurze Familiennachrichten giebt) war noch zu 
 Brieg geboren (1686), da wo die Oder die Grenze maclxt zwischen deutsclier und polnischer 
 Zunge. Die Mutter aber war eine Stendalerin, Anna Maria, Tochter der Tuchmaciiers 
 Joachim Meyer.— Justi i. p. 17. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 97 
 
 they could not afford the small fee for his attendance at the 
 Latin school, though he had passionately implored that he might 
 be sent there. Instead, he had to sit down beside his father to 
 assist him in his cobbling, and thus add a trifle to the straitened 
 family exchequer. 
 
 But Johann's irrepressible capacity, and his insatiable hunger 
 for learning, asserted themselves in spite of obstacles and rebuffs 
 the most depressing. It was through his invincible determina- 
 tion and assiduity alone that he succeeded in picking up the 
 elements. The only help he received was from a young school- 
 fellow who was more favourably situated than himself, and the 
 forms that his gratitude took to the boy were very touching. At 
 length he obtained the notice of the worthy rector, Esias William 
 Tappert, who was now nearly seventy, and had occupied the 
 position for more than thirty years. Winckelmann speedily 
 became a great favourite with the old man. He was made free 
 of the school library, in which was a Dutch edition of the classics. 
 When later the rector became blind, he took Winckelmann into 
 his own house and made him his amanuensis. Very soon the 
 boy, in every department of school instruction, was the pattern 
 for his fellow-scholars. He availed himself of every opportunity, 
 and the wide and varied range of his reading was the astonish- 
 ment of all. His vast capacity for knowledge delighted the old 
 rector, who had set his heart on his studying theology, a thing 
 which completely fell in with the wishes of the poor parents, 
 whose highest ideal of a learned life was that of a Lutheran pastor. 
 
 Young Winckelmann luckily was admitted to a school-choir, 
 and by singing at services and funerals earned a few pence. 
 Now that he found the means to gratify his appetite for books, 
 his tastes very soon decisively declared themselves. Already he 
 read as if for a definite object, and showed a peculiar power in 
 putting aside, or in steering clear of, all that did not meet his 
 needs. Rector Tappert, who was fond of him and proud of 
 him, was a little disappointed at his indifference to theology, 
 which he looked upon as the study of studies. But with young 
 Winckelmann the Fathers succumbed to the Greek Poets.- 
 Herodotus and Homer were more to him than the Bible. He 
 devoted whole nights to their study ; and often would he set out 
 on long walks among the sandy Brandenburg Hills to secure 
 that complete isolation which he desired, and with a vague dream 
 
 G 
 
98 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 that one day he might there ahght on some relic of antiquity that 
 would aid him to realise more fully that of which he read. 
 Already, with an odd forecast of later destinations, he was called 
 the "Little Librarian," because he could tell more about the 
 books in the rector's shelves than could the worthy rector 
 himself* 
 
 IL 
 
 In March 1735, as the school at Stendal could do no more for 
 him, Rector Tappert, who knew Bake, the rector of the Kolnische 
 -Gymnasium at Berhn, used his influence to secure Winckelmann's 
 admission to that institution, which was the oldest in Berlin, if 
 ■not even in Brandenburg. On account of his great talents. Bake 
 ■engaged Winckelmann to act as tutor to his children, and, in 
 return for this service, Winckelmann was to receive bed and 
 board. He found a free table in the house of good Pastor Ruhz, 
 to whom he had been warmly recommended. Much kindness 
 he received from Ruhz, which long after in Rome he warmly 
 remembered. The rector, who was a good deal of a pedant, soon 
 found opportunity for reproof in the preference Winckelmann 
 seemed to give to the Greek over Latin. 
 
 Happily he was not altogether without a friend and sympathiser 
 here. The conrector at the Kolnische Gymnasium was Christian 
 Tobias Damm, who later, as " the Greek Oracle of Spreestadt," t 
 was sought as an instructor by Moses Mendelssohn and Frederick 
 Nicolai (of whom we have already heard somewhat and will hear 
 yet more). Winckelmann in the days of his success remembered 
 Damm gratefully, for he was one of the few who discerned his 
 spirit and was in s)Tiipathy with him in his devotion to the Greek, 
 and did what he could to help him. When Winckelmann was in 
 
 * Winckelmann wrote later in these terms to the General Superintendent Kalten of this 
 period :— 
 
 " Ego vero applaudo ter et quater litterarum elegantiorum chore et prKsertim litteris 
 Grsecis, quae ignava caligine mersae erumpent sub auspiciis tuis, et vigebunt in scholis 
 patriis Animum fere induce, ut credam, non alte unquam in Veterem Marchiam penetrasse 
 patrum nostrorum memeria, ut ne vestigium quidem sui in scholis, ul i foveri debebant, 
 reliquerint. Nee altius repetam. Magnam sibi existimationem conciliarat Vir eximus b. 
 d. Tappertus doctrinac inprimis latins et grsecae, et flagitium sit meum detrahere ejus 
 manibus. Hie tamen roganti mihi quondam de Sexto Empirico et Luciano (puer enim 
 legeram StoUii histeriam) : latini inquit, sunt et plura sciscitantem ablegabat ad Fabricii 
 bibliethecam latinam. Heredianum et Xiphilinum in scriniis ofiFendi mucere et situ 
 obductos. De ceteris somnium." 
 t *'Griechische Orakel der Spreestadt." — Justi, vol. i., p. 34 — See also Appendix. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 99 
 
 Rome, moving amongst cardinals and princes on a footing of 
 equality, interchange of books was made between him and Damm; 
 and when Damm's well-known " Etymological Dictionary " was 
 ready, Winckelmann willingly spread abroad in Rome an an- 
 nouncement of its issue. * 
 
 But the rector, most probably moved to jealousy at the friend- 
 ship of the conrector and the young tutor, made himself so 
 unpleasant that we are hardly surprised to find Winckelmann 
 early in 1736 accepting a similar post at Salzwedel.t He had 
 hoped to gain from the rector at Salzwedel some aid in his Greek 
 studies, but in this he was grievously disappointed. What he 
 could not find here he did not, however, lose the hope of finding 
 elsewhere ; and when he heard of the sale of the library of the 
 famous polyhistor, J. A. Fabricius, who died at Hamburg in April 
 1736, he set out to make the journey to Hamburg, that he might 
 have the pleasure of looking at and handling some rare editions 
 of the Classics, even if it should be wholly beyond his power to 
 acquire any of the beautiful volumes. Another point of attraction 
 there was: From the catalogue Winckelmann discovered that in 
 the library was a gigantic work — materials for a History of Greek 
 Literature — which Fabricius had compiled, in order that succeed- 
 ing scholars might find their task easier and access to materials 
 more convenient. Winckelmann earnestly desired to look at this 
 work. A school-fellow, Uden, has given the following account 
 of his adventurous journey : — 
 
 " Almost without money, he set forth on foot, commending himself 
 while on the way with such simple trust to better-off people and to 
 preachers, that he was received by them in the most friendly manner, 
 and so well entertained that he completely carried out his project. He 
 arrived at Hamburg, procured one of the books he had most earnestly 
 wished, and came joyfully back to Berhn with his treasure. May we 
 not guess how his teacher — not knowing all— might regard this ad- 
 venturous undertaking only as a proof of his unstable disposition. 
 We, on the other hand, can perceive therein an early foretaste or 
 evidence of that effort and struggle which, in the not very distant future, 
 should discover to him his own proper sphere and render him famous." 
 
 It would seem that in Hamburg he presented himself to the 
 son-in-law of Fabricius, and compiler of the catalogue, the dis- 
 
 * Winckelmann erinnerte sich spater Damm richt gut und war bereit, ein Ankundigung 
 seines etymologischen Worterbuches in Rom zu verbreiten, 
 
 t It was not Rector Tapper! or Rector Paalzow that wrote of Winckelmann In the " School 
 Album," Homo vagics et inconstans, but this Bake. 
 
loo WINCKELMANN. 
 
 tinguished scholar, Samuel Reimarus, and that the impression 
 produced was so favourable that he was freely allowed to examine 
 such of the books as he desired. 
 
 At another time he performed a similar tour to Dresden, where, 
 under the Elector of that day, a magnificent collection of art 
 treasures had been gathered ; and Winckelmann's longing to look 
 on and to touch them, drew him as if by some secret magnetism. 
 
 In the year 1737 he returned to Stendal, there to finish his 
 school training, and to take a place in the church choir, with the 
 hope of securing a small stipend as a student at the university. 
 During this residence in Stendal he became prsefect of the singing 
 choir, which intimates that he had gained some knowledge of 
 music and skill in singing ; and as praefect he drew a small salary 
 of some sixty thalers. The post relieved him from reading 
 lessons : he gave half of the time at school giving elementary 
 instruction, and the other to teaching singing. Here he seems to 
 have made right good use of his time. 
 
 In 1738, when he was in his twenty-first year, he went to the 
 University of Halle. He felt that the only chance for him to 
 penetrate the inner sanctum of learning was by means of a college 
 course ; but he was for a time much divided between theology 
 and medicine, as he had convinced himself that the latter might 
 sooner yield him an income to allow him leisure for his studies. 
 For it needs to be said at once that Winckelmann never pretended 
 to have felt any call to the Lutheran ministry or to theology. It 
 was wholly out of respect to Rector Tappert's good advice, and 
 to the wishes of his parents, who had stinted themselves on his 
 account, that he entered the Faculty of Theology. He found the 
 lectures dry and uninteresting, but persisted in regular attendance 
 for a time ; then he fell oif, and addicted himself to the study of 
 classics in the libraries with such steadiness and persistency as 
 attracted some attention. He was as tried by poverty as he had 
 been when a scholar, and underwent many deprivations. Still he 
 was cheerful, even gay and hopeful, and drew round him a circle 
 of admiring companions. With one or two of these he formed 
 friendships that had something of a Platonic vein in them ; and 
 to these relationships mainly we owe it that we know so much of 
 Winckelmann's earlier days, for he wrote admirable letters. His 
 enthusiasm for books was literally uncontrollable. Out of the 
 small sums he earned by doing themes and exercises for wealthier 
 
WINCKELMANN. loi 
 
 Students he could save as much as buy a book now and then. 
 And here it may not be out of place to note that there is no 
 record of his ever having been in debt in spite of the distressing 
 narrowness of his means all through his early manhood. 
 
 At the end of two years at Halle he received no more than a 
 pass certificate. He did not venture on any public disputation, 
 nor did he graduate. His great knowledge of books, however, 
 had procured him the work of cataloguing the library of Ludewig, 
 the chancellor of the university, which in six months he did so 
 thoroughly to Ludewig's satisfaction, that he was strongly recom- 
 mended for a situation as tutor in the house of Rittmeister von 
 Crollman, near Jena. This enabled him then to enter on univer- 
 sity studies there, which were more to his taste than those at 
 Halle had been. Here, however, as Jahn tells us, his poverty 
 stood greatly in his way. Before the year was out he had resolved 
 to go to Berlin and seek some kind of suitable work. On the 
 journey he heard that a tutor was wanted by Obermann Lamprecht 
 at Hadmersleben, near Halberstadt. He applied for the place, 
 and got it. His duties were to instruct an only son, between 
 whom and Winckelmann there speedily sprang up one of these 
 romantic friendships in which he was so fond of indulging with 
 younger men, and which in this case, as in some others, did 
 not turn out wholly to his peace or profit afterwards. Another 
 attraction of Hadmersleben was an acquaintance he formed with 
 Herr Weltmann, a Danish gentleman who resided there, and had 
 an extensive library, specially rich in French Uterature, as well as 
 many works of art. Dr Justi tells us that " between the jovial 
 old Weltmann and the poor candidate there soon grew a deep 
 and most cordial friendship ; " and that the association brought 
 a pleasant relief to Winckelmann's dull and contracted life here. 
 He it was that made Winckelmann acquainted with Bayle and 
 other French thinkers, whom at this time Winckelmann studied 
 with great care and interest. Many pleasant evenings did they 
 pass together over a glass of wine, discussing the topics of the day 
 and any new book in the pleasantest way. Through their separation, 
 we are enriched by a unique correspondence. Wmckelmann 
 regularly wrote to the old man ; and some of the Latin letters 
 which remain show on Winckelmann's part a tone of the utmost 
 familiarity and trustful humour. He loved to reheve the dull 
 hours of his sohtary evenings by filling up a sheet with small 
 
102 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 talk and jokes to his friend, and always received news and good 
 advice in return. 
 
 It does not appear, however, that Winckelmann's circumstances 
 in any way improved as time went on. We find Boysen, who had 
 been a fellow-student at Halle, writing thus on the loth August 
 1743 to Gleim : — 
 
 "As I returned from my journey to Magdeburg, I found in 
 Hadmersleben a candidate called Winckelmann, who studied with 
 us at Halle, and whom we had often seen in the library there. 
 Because he is so needy he is not able to procure books.* He was 
 so indifferently clad and so changed in appearance that I hardly knew 
 him. In Halle he had often gone to the Buchsaal of the Wassin- 
 hause of the university there to study the writings of the ancient 
 Greeks. With a feeling, that melted my heart, he told me of his cir- 
 cumstances, and I engaged to do what I could to obtain for him the 
 situation of conrector at Seehausen. I did so, speaking of the 
 remarkable proofs he had already given of talent and of his great love 
 for the Greek literature. Everybody in Seehausen believed that I cared 
 more for Winckelmann's interest than for that of the school ; but to 
 my great joy, Herr Retter, after seeing his testimonials, engaged him." 
 
 • His life at Seehausen, which had from the first been sombre 
 enough, by and by became one of unreHeved monotony and 
 \vretchedness. The rector Paalzow f was a pedant and a dull 
 disciplinarian, and orthodox to the core. Winckelmann had not 
 a congenial companion near him. His great resource was his 
 Greek, but in that he got no encouragement. We can easily 
 sympathise with him when we are told that he would take a Greek 
 poet with him into the church and contrive to read it during the 
 rector's wearisome sermons. Others with far less excuse have 
 tried the same thing. 
 
 Winckelmann unfortunately was found out and severely 
 rebuked. ■ He had done all that he could to ward off suspicions 
 of heterodoxy — took the communion "with his colleagues as often 
 as he was requested to do so ; " but after that rebuke for sur- 
 reptitiously reading Homer in church, the rector tried to make his 
 position more and more oppressive, and whenever he could, 
 added to his duties. He was withdrawn from teaching the upper 
 classes on the plea of inability, and condemned to an endless 
 
 * Weil er sehr durftig ist, konnte er sich keine Bucher anschaffen. 
 
 t In an otherwise able article in the Quarterly Review for January 1874 (voL 136), much 
 confusion is caused through the writer confounding Rector Paalzow of Seehausen with 
 Rector Tappert of Stendal, the result being a sort of Doppelganger of a rector who 
 in this record appears at once as a worthy man, and a petty, tyrannous pedant. 
 
WINCKELMA NN. 1 03 
 
 routine of nidimentary instruction. It indicates something of 
 simplicity and genius for managing and attracting children, that 
 Winckelmann even in these circumstances gained influence with 
 his pupils and won their affections. But the position was harsh 
 and uncongenial in the extreme. The endless teaching and drill 
 ing of classes through the long day, left him no time for his 
 favourite pursuits. These, however, only attracted him the more 
 powerfully. He resolved as soon as possible to be free from the 
 bondage. As a means to this, he reduced his meals by one-half, 
 that so he might the sooner save enough to justify him in quitting 
 the place, and also to accustom himself to the utmost self- 
 restraint and physical endurance. Justi tells us that for one whole 
 winter he never went to bed, and only gave himself four hours'' 
 rest in his arm-chair without a fire, putting on an old fur cloak 
 for warmth. At four he would light his lamp again and study till 
 six, when he had to make his way to the school-house. Thinking 
 that the study of modern languages might facihtate his finding 
 the kind of situation he was in search of, he devoted a good deal 
 of time to EngUsh and Italian, and resumed his French studies,, 
 which, however, he did not feel much attracted by. This is the 
 more surprising that journeys into France had often formed part 
 of great schemes of travel. " I have tasted a good deal that 
 was bitter," he wrote long afterwards, " but nothing could surpass 
 in bitterness the slavery of the life I led at Seehausen." And this, 
 was exactly what he had said at the time: "I have struggled 
 to play the schoolmaster well, and taught the scurfy-headed 
 children to learn the ABC, when, through it all, my one wish 
 was to attain the knowledge of the beautiful, and when the similes 
 of Homer were sounding in my brain." 
 
 All his salary here was 120 thalers a year, equal to some ;^ 18,, 
 yet out of that slender income he managed not only to scrape 
 enough to purchase a volume now and then, but was able to 
 do the part of a dutiful son in more substantial forms than 
 sympathy. His father, unable any longer to work, was now in an 
 hospital at Stendal, and so long as the old man lived, Wmckel- 
 mann was faithful with his help. At a time when he was himself 
 very miserable and needy, he regularly sent his contribution to 
 procure little comforts for his mother who was then lymg ill of a 
 deadly disease, though every thaler that he parted with seemed to 
 lessen any little hope that remained of his ever bemg able to ful- 
 
I04 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 fil the great wish of his heart* His mother died in 1747, and 
 his father about, a year later; and their loss he most sincerely 
 mourned, and never forgot their goodness and their piety. 
 
 And amidst the depressing influences with which he could so ill 
 contend, he was visited by another burden in the shape of- his 
 erewhile pupil, Lamprecht, who took advantage of Winckelmann's 
 affection for him to quarter himself at Seehausen for a consider- 
 able period during some difference or misunderstanding with his 
 own people. Justi tells us that they lived in a small room that 
 was at once study and bed-chamber. It is quite evident that 
 Lamprecht did not altogether deserve the affection lavished on 
 him by Winckelmann, being in most respects a selfish and cal- 
 culating young gentleman. But Winckelmann's feelings towards 
 him were those of an indulgent father to a son. 
 
 Even so early as the 8th April 1745, we find Boysen writing to 
 Gleim : " Winckelmann, so long as I cannot go to Bergen, will 
 remain in Seehausen, till he has gathered a little money, and then 
 he will go to Egypt, for the purpose of studying the pyramids and 
 ancient art there." This indicates that Winckelmann was already 
 full of plans for effecting his escape. But he had to wait for 
 nearly three years more before he was free of Seehausen. In 
 midst of his misery, he found a relief in pedestrian excursions for 
 which he had always had z. penchant. " He was a strong pedes- 
 trian,'' writes Jahn, " and regularly twice a year he walked the 
 eleven miles to and from Magdeburg, that he might visit his friend, 
 Boysen, to whom we have already referred. He always tried to 
 go to Leipzig once a year that he might improve his wardrobe, 
 and see any good book that had appeared. With no little effort 
 did he manage to lay by the money for the journey ; for which 
 he considered himself amply rewarded by seeing the treasures of 
 literature and art, to which his friends found him ready access." 
 
 During the latter portion of his residence in Seehausen, his 
 mind was continually occupied with plans for escape. He 
 was like a prisoner bent on outwitting his jailor — only that here 
 the jailor was Necessity, dowered with Argus- eyes. He actually 
 thought of going to England to try and find work there ; then he 
 fell back on the idea of becoming a piivat-docent, or lecturer, at 
 a German University — Halle or Jena — and, as we have seen, he 
 even seriously planned out a scientific journey into Egypt, during 
 
 * Jahn, p, 20. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 105 
 
 which, as he said, he should wander like a true pilgrim with staff 
 and scrip, and thus gain great results. None of these things were 
 to be. Another, and perhaps a better way was to open up before 
 him. 
 
 III. 
 
 In the beginning of 1 748, when on a visit to Stendal he chanced 
 to meet with a young man who had just quitted a position in the 
 libraryof the Count Biinau,the ex-Saxon Minister at Nothenitz near 
 Dresden. Count Biinau, who was well known as a historian, and 
 a liberal patron of art and science, had been superseded in the 
 favour of his sovereign by the more diplomatic and wily Count 
 Bruhl. On this he retired to Nothenitz, and there devoted him- 
 self to the collection of original documents as a foundation for a 
 great history of Germany. Lessing said that he only needed to 
 be able indefinitely to extend time, or to have at least the lives of 
 twelve men, to do thoroughly what he had purposed. He kept 
 several assistants constantly employed in cataloguing and in copy- 
 ing. Winckelmann listened with repressed excitement to all that 
 he heard about this great scholar and his library and the work 
 done in it ; and though with much trepidation he wrote to the 
 Count offering his services. Without gloss or varnish he told the 
 story of his struggles, his ambitions, his disappointments ; and 
 expressed his conviction that, were he but lifted out of his ob- 
 scurity, and could meet with employment near the metropolis, 
 "he could do something hereafter that would prove useful to the 
 world." " Oh, employ me," he wrote, " in whatever way it please 
 you. Willingly will I devote myself to your Excellency's service; 
 only place me in a corner of your library to copy anecdotes." This 
 memorable letter is written in French, of by no means immaculate 
 form ; but it is so very touching in some of its turns, and is in 
 every respect so characteristic of the man, that our readers may 
 perhaps be glad to have it here in its entirety : — 
 
 " MONSEIGNEUR,— J'ose ici faire avancer cette Lettre du fond de 
 ca poussiere d'dcole devant les yeux ^clairf^s de Votre Excellence. 
 Votre indulgence qui se communique aux besoins des gens de Lettres 
 m'enhardit, et c'est par ou je crois justifier ma tementd. 
 
 " Depuis que j'ai etudid cette admirable Histoire de I'Empire de 
 Votre Excellence, je n'ai k rien aspire qu' ^ Lui tdmoigner, que je 
 veuiUe aussi avoir quelque part k la veneration, que tout le monde a 
 
io6 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 congu pour un savoir si vaste, et si rare dans une personne de si 
 haute distinction, et dans un Ministre si parfait. Hureux qui sont 
 attaches aux services d'un si grand Genie, et plus d'un homme de 
 vertu, et meme je me suis mis en tete d'ambitionner cette gloire. Je 
 suis un homme qui ne desire qu' \ se consacrer aux dtudes, et c'est Ik 
 oil se bornent mes voeux, ne me laissant jamais ^blouir par des con- 
 ditions favourables dans I'Eglise. Dans cette vue je me suis abim^ 
 depuis cinq ans dans I'^cole de ma patrie, afin d'y enseigner les belles- 
 lettres. Mais I'dtat deplorable de toutes les dcoles de nos contr^es. 
 m'en a tout k fait degout^ et inspird en meme tems la pensde i forcer, 
 pour ainsi dire, mon destin dans une Acad^mie. Je commengai d'y 
 reflechir murement et m' dtudier moi-meme dans la carrifere que j'ai 
 couru jusqu' ici, pour hazarder ma fortune dans un Si^cle m^ta- 
 physique, oil les belles-lettres sont foul^es aux pieds. Me voyant 
 aprfes tout sans ressource et depourvii des secours Strangers k me 
 pousser, j'ai aussi abandonnd ce dessein-ci. On ne compte rien a 
 present sur la Litterature grecque, k laquelle je me suis adonnd, autant 
 que j'y puis penetre dans la cherts et disette des bons livres. Peu de 
 jeunes gens s'appliquent k I'etude de la langue Italienne et Angloise, 
 et on ne manque pas de maitres. La langue Anglo-Saxonne est un 
 champ sterile a labourer. L' Histoire ne se peut profiler sans permis- 
 sion, et toutes nos Academies fourmillent de jeunes Savans qu'on voit 
 paroitre sur le th^itre avec un port des bras pour etablir les principes. 
 de la Philosophie, revetus de la dignity du Maitre, afin qu'on ne s'y 
 peut ingerer. Que reste-t-il a faire ? Je ne trouve ressource qu' k 
 avoir recours k la grace d'un des plus grands hommes du Si^cle, dont 
 I'humanite qu' il fait dclater de tous les traits de ses dcrits immortels, 
 nous inspire une si haute idde, qu'on ne se peut dispenser d'en esperer 
 bien. Monseigneur, je demande pardon d'une ostentation de mon 
 peu de capacity. Disposez-en. Je suis pret de ma sacrifier aux ser- 
 vices de Votre E.xcellence. Placez-moi dans un coin de Votre Biblio- 
 theque, pour copier les rares anecdotes, qui seront publides, comme 
 on dit. J'envisage le raion d'une efficace protection qui se repandra 
 sur moi et qui fait d^ja reluire dans mon coeur la douce esperance de 
 me familiariser davantage avec les Muses. 
 
 "Peut-etre deviendrai-je k I'avenir plus utile au Public, quand, tir^ 
 de I'obscurit^ par quelque voye que ce fut, je trouvois dequoi vivre 
 dans la Capitale. 
 
 "J'implore Dieu qu'il veuille jetter un regard gracieux que la haute 
 destinde de Votre Excellence et qu'il veuille agrees tous les souhaits 
 ardens du Public, qui soupire aprfes la continuation d'une Histoire si 
 acheve. Je suis, Monseigneur, de votre Excellence, le trfes-humble 
 et trfes-obeissant Serviteur, Winckelmann." 
 
 " k Seehausen, dans la vieille Marche, (de Brandebourg,) 
 "le i6de Juin 1748." 
 
WINCKELMANN. 107 
 
 Biinau was moved by this letter, and though he did not ab- 
 solutely at once engage Winckelmann, he invited him to come on 
 trial, and thus began a connection that lasted for upwards of six 
 years. There was a touch of irony in the circumstance that the 
 section of the library given to Winckelmann to catalogue was 
 precisely that in which he had least interest. It was not Greek 
 antiquities or ancient history, but church history and the lives of 
 saints and martyrs. The able man, however, is always in his 
 place ; and Winckelmann succeeded in giving Count Biinau com- 
 plete satisfaction, and in securing his confidence. Besides his 
 cataloguing work, he was latterly engaged in making extracts and 
 in hunting out material for Biinau's " History of Laws." For six 
 years he worked on thus — sorted, catalogued, and sweated over 
 his toil. " I spent," said he, " the whole day over documents 
 and chronicles and the lives of the saints ('Leben der Heiligen'), 
 and the nights over Sophocles and his comrades." 
 
 But even this account of himself does not exhaust the range of 
 his studies. From the epitomes of his note-books which Herr 
 Justi presents, we learn that he studied largely in English and 
 Italian authors, and made extracts from them. Burnet, Claren- 
 don, Shaftesbury, and Milton were mastered; Butler, Pope, 
 Cowley, Congreve, Addison, and Thomson passed for his lighter 
 reading ; and he found more or less of delight in pieces from 
 Shakespeare, though these were probably only read at secondhand 
 in books of extracts. And he was now a member of a cultured and 
 graceful household ; his hard work was done with the sense of 
 some progress being made towards the realisation of a great 
 object ; and his trials were sweetened by the consciousness of a 
 friendly respect entertained for him by his noble employer. 
 
 The escape from Prussia — which at that time was ruled by the 
 most rigid parsimony and relentless petty despotism — into Saxony, 
 was to Winckelmann like escaping from a frozen Spitzbergen 
 into the genial summer clime of a southern isle. The lack of 
 sympathy or aid may have helped to intensify his bitterness to- 
 wards Prussia, for he was at heart a true patriot. Those who 
 affected a classical indifference to the affairs of their own time, 
 might have been reproved by much in Winckelmann's correspond- 
 ence in which we have the warmest expressions of national feel- 
 ing and now and then keen remarks on political questions. But at 
 this time he hated Prussia, though he was a Prussian. " My 
 
io8 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 country is Saxony," he said, " I recognise no other ; there is not 
 one drop of Prussian blood in me. . . . My skin shivers all over 
 when I think of Prussian despotism and of that plague of man- 
 kind, that will continue to be an object of universal hate, and to 
 blast as with an eternal curse the country already blighted by 
 nature, covered with Libyan sand." 
 
 One day in 1752 the Papal Nuncio Archinto paid a visit to the 
 library at Nothenitz, over which Winckelmann had been deputed 
 to conduct him. He returned again and again, always taking 
 care to engage Winckelmann in conversation on the subject of 
 Greek and Roman art. Archinto was surprised at the great 
 knowledge of the Greek art which Winckelmann showed, and 
 coming to learn the secret aspirations of the learned librarian, he 
 suggested a visit to Italy as that which was sure to supply what 
 his soul longed for. The word was the utterance of Winckel- 
 mann's secret wishes which for years he had cherished. At last, 
 it was suggested that something practical could be done to aid 
 him in this object. 
 
 The court of Saxony was catholic, though the country was protes- 
 tant ; and though the Roman element added something to the life 
 of the court, it was an ever-present source of irritation to the people. 
 The Italians were pleasure-loving, self-seeking persons, who com- 
 bined a refined dissipation with a very earnest proselytism. It is 
 said that this very Count Archinto, though a priest, was far from 
 celibate. He was, it is evident, a crafty worldling who never 
 proceeded in anything without purpose ; and as proselytism was 
 a serious element in the lives of these courtly busybodies, he 
 deemed that it would be a fine thing to have in his net a scholar 
 who was likely yet to distinguish himself. But, like many simple 
 natures, Winckelmann could detect diplomatic glosses, and was 
 determined not to be caught without the proper bait. Though 
 he had let it be understood that change of religious creed would 
 not form any great difficulty, he was decided in giving the 
 impression, that he could not afford to make the change without 
 some kind of provision, instead of the salary he would have to 
 forego. Count Biinau, of course, was a staunch protestant, but 
 in this point he had the Count's sage and friendly support. 
 Biinau advised him to be careful not to surrender without some 
 material guarantee ; and, as afterwards the Papal courtiers 
 showed themselves shifty enough, Biinau was wholly in the right. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 109 
 
 It was owing to the diplomacy of the courtly party indeed that 
 Winckelmann was m a position to receive Biinau's advice. They 
 had spread abroad a report that Winckelmann was about to em- 
 brace the cathohc faith ; and afraid that this might come to 
 Count Biinau's ears and prejudice him there, Winckelmann, 
 under the advice of his friend Berendis (the young Count's 
 tutor), wrote to Biinau frankly telHng him how matters stood, 
 only instead of plainly saying anything about creed, mentioning 
 merely that he entered on negotiations with a view of becoming 
 librarian for some years to Cardinal Passionei, a great book- 
 collector, and a man of European reputation. Count Biinau 
 knew of course what that implied, and in the most friendly 
 manner spoke to Winckelmann on the subject. Instead of 
 Winckelmann having ever raised any charge, as has been said, 
 against Biinau for lack of consideration or neglect of his interests, 
 Winckelmann to the end expressed the deepest gratitude to the 
 " protector, benefactor, and friend, who, on my own application, 
 plucked me out of darkness without having any knowledge of me." 
 Winckelmann wrote often to Biinau from Rome, and very sin- 
 cerely mourned his death.* 
 
 Meantime he found that his catholic friends were more 
 plausible than generous. They made advances and held out 
 general inducements ; but they were slow to come to any definite 
 proposals, and Winckelmann was in misery. It is true, that pro- 
 bably no man ever meditated a change of religious faith with less 
 of earnest conviction, but those concerned were not men of deep 
 religious convictions ; they were men of the world, and quite 
 understood and professed to appreciate the motive that passion- 
 ately impelled Winckelmann towards Italy. Poor Winckelmann ! 
 child-like at heart, devoted to his ideal, and ready to sacrifice for 
 its sake everything that is most prized by such men, he now Hved 
 for months a sorry life of vexation and uncertainty. Before he 
 had been compromised by that untimely report, he had been 
 much divided in his mind as to the propriety of adopting such a 
 course. Herr Jahn frankly says that the doubt, which caused in 
 him a long battle, was properly neither religious, nor dogmatic. 
 He felt that the first and hoHest duty which God had given him 
 
 * These letters, breathing the most perfect gratitude and confidence, will be found com- 
 plete in Winckelmann's " Briefe an seine Freunde," and various extracts from them will 
 hereafter fall to be made. 
 
1 1 o WINCKELMANN. 
 
 to fulfil, was to realise his destiny and develop his genius. " God 
 and nature," wrote Winckelmann, " would have me a painter, a 
 great painter, and in defiance of both can I be a priest ! Now, 
 both painter and priest are spoiled in me. My whole heart in- 
 chnes to the knowledge of painting and antiquity, which I must 
 attain through great labour. Had I still the fire or more of the 
 cheerfulness which, through incessant studies, I have lost, I would 
 readily go into Art. I find no place so suitable as Rome, and the 
 thought of it impels me to strive my very utmost. It is by far 
 the best that I can look forward to, the realisation of that hope 
 would be a great good fortune. The love of knowledge is that 
 alone which supports or can support me amid these daily bufifet- 
 ings of adversity." 
 
 At last, after a great deal of manoeuvring, through the good 
 offices of Rausch, the king's confessor, who was, and to the end 
 remained, a true friend of Winckelmann, an arrangement was 
 made by which Winckelmann was named librarian to Passionei 
 at a salary of a hundred florins a-year. Soon after he was re- 
 ceived into the church ; but it is very remarkable that he could 
 immediately after, in giving his friend Berendis an account of his 
 reception, add these telling words : — " By our sacred and ever- 
 lasting friendship, my brother, I here solemnly affirm that if I had 
 but known of any other way, I would not have taken it. For 
 what do I care for the court, or for these rascally (hundsfbttische) 
 priests." 
 
 There spoke the heart of the man, who, at all events, was no 
 hypocrite. He was playing a game with worldlings, and found 
 it a very hard one. His course might, from a lofty moral, and 
 religious point of view, have been more blameable if he had not 
 firmly felt (as he had before told Count Biinau) that, by get- 
 ting to Italy, he could do the world some service in the future. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In October 1754 he was therefore relieved from Nothenitz 
 and the service of Count Biinau and went to Dresden. It was 
 necessary that he should reside there for a timie to prepare him- 
 self in certain respects, and he had already written a portion of 
 his work, " Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works," which he 
 
WINCKELMA NN. 1 1 1 
 
 wished to publish before leaving Germany. Very soon we find 
 him writing to a friend ; — 
 
 " In the beginning of this month (October) I go to a front room 
 which Mr Oeser has given up to me, for two thalers, 12 groschen 
 monthly, but without bed-chamber. My lodging is in the Frauen 
 Gasse, in Ritchel's house, beside Herr Oeser, three stories high.'' 
 
 His friendship with Oeser was of great service to him, as later 
 it was to Goethe. If Oeser was not a great artist, if his longings 
 were far above his attainments, and if he dealt a little too much 
 in what must be called unintentional parodies of old Greek art, 
 his perception of principles was clear, and his exposition of them 
 often eloquent. If it is only with some deductions that we can 
 receive Herr Jahn's opinion of Oeser, Winckelmann himself hits 
 a true medium. Jahn says, " With an uncommon talent for art, he 
 united sharp observation, which again was combined with a clear 
 understanding, and power of keen critical analysis. The energy 
 of his character, and his practical sense, secured him great 
 influence." * But Winckelmann wrote: — 
 
 " Oeser is a man of the greatest talent for Art, but he is lazy ; 
 and he has now no public work in hand. His drawing lacks the 
 severe correctness of the ancient, and his colour is not ripe 
 enough ; but he is a man who has a great and a quick under- 
 standing ; and so one may learn much from him, especially out 
 of his large store of Italian knowledge." 
 
 What is abundantly clear is that Winckelmann could not 
 then have found a more suitable or inspiring companion. Oeser 
 was well fitted to appreciate Winckelmann' s learning and his 
 burning desire to master the true principles of art ; and with the 
 genuine warm-heartedness of a true art-lover, he set himself to 
 forward Winckelmann's studies, accompanying him often to the 
 Dresden Gallery, where together they discussed the best works of 
 the masters. 
 
 In the Bruhl Library, where he worked incessantly, Winckel- 
 mann became acquainted with the celebrated Heyne, and 
 out of that acquaintance grew a genuine attachment. Hage- 
 dom, too, became a warm friend, to whom he could look for 
 support, and counsel. Amid such congenial circumstances, and 
 in the society of such friends the time speedily passed ; his book 
 
 * Otto Jahn gives a very interesting account of Oeser in his essay " Goethe and Oeser " 
 in his " Biographische Aufsatze," pp. 351-372- 
 
1 1 2 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 at last was ready, well illustrated by Oeser; and, through the 
 influence of Rausch, the King had allowed it to be dedicated to 
 him. On reading the book the king exclaimed — " This fish shall 
 get to swim in his proper water," and awarded him a grant of 200 
 thalers a year — which stood Winckelmann in good stead later, 
 when the priests approved themselves stingy and forgetful of pro- 
 mises. Winckelmann 's stay in Rome was to be for two years ; 
 but ultimately, as things turned out, chiefly the prolongation of 
 his stay and the war between Prussia and Saxony — ^the grant was 
 extended to six years at a reduced rate — Winckelmann receiving 
 for the last three years only 100 thalers per annum. 
 
 Everything being ready at last, on September 24th, 1755, 
 Winckelmann set out for Rome, going through the Tyrol, by 
 Verona, Venice, Bologna, and Ancona. The loveliness of the 
 scenery in the Tyrol was a delight to him. " I felt," he writes, 
 " happier in a village at the bottom of a vale, surrounded by 
 snow-clad mountains, than ever in Italy." He reached Rome on 
 November the i8th, and found his way smoothed for him in some 
 way by Rausch's friendly offices. At first he met with much that 
 was uncomfortable and disagreeable — the cooking was bad, and 
 the food dear, and the incessant noise in the streets kept him 
 from sleeping. But before long he found mitigation in habit, and 
 had compensation in new friendships. He wrote thus to his 
 friend Francke, the librarian to Count Biinau, on the 17th De- 
 cember 1755 : — 
 
 " My greatest good fortune has been a letter to Herr Mengs, who, as 
 the most attached friend, has served and still serves me. His house 
 is my refuge, and I am never more pleased than when with him. I 
 am still free, and believe I will remain so. I go in the old fashion, and 
 live as an artist, moving about mostly in the parts of the city where 
 one has perfect leave to study among the young artists, as in the 
 Campadoglio. Here is the treasure of antiquities, statues, sarcophagi, 
 busts, inscriptions, &c., in Rome ; and one goes about here with all 
 freedom from morning till night. One wears merely a roquelaire 
 without any ceremony ; for this is the fashion here. I eat with loud 
 German and French artists, and we indulge in the homely German 
 fare. In the mornings and evenings we go to a Saxon coffee-house, and 
 drink a cup at 6 pfennings in common money. One can still manage 
 quite well without fire, and my window stands open for the greater 
 part of the day. But because I do not sleep well, and rise early, I 
 make me a wood fire and drink tea."* 
 
 * Winckelmann's " Briefe an seine Freunde," i. pp. 57-8. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 1 1 3 
 
 But by the following May he confesses, " The longer one lives 
 in Rome and the more he knows of it the better he comes to 
 like it." On May 6th we find him writing to Francke : — 
 
 " Now is the time to see the gardens in and around Rome. My 
 friend, it is impossible to describe how lovely nature is in this land. 
 One walks in the shadow of laurel-woods, and in alleys of high 
 cypresses, and in lattice-work of orangeries, a quarter of a mile wide 
 in many villas, particularly in the Villa Borghese. The more one 
 comes to know Rome, the more one likes it. I wish I could con- 
 tinually remain here. But I must now make some effort to find my 
 necessary bread. Generally a man who visits not and is not 
 visited, is in Rome thought of as a solemn Abbate. Write to me soon 
 and give me your judgment on my writings. Of my journey into 
 Naples (with Herr Mengs) I cannot yet speak definitely. It is pos- 
 sible he will not be able to go till his great altar-piece is finished. It 
 is not advisable for me to go alone. My acquaintanceship with Herr 
 Mengs is my greatest good fortune in Rome." 
 
 He feels more and more the delight of the freer unconventional 
 life of the artist, and the privilege of being in unrestricted associa- 
 tion with men wholly devoted to the study or the practice of Art. 
 Winckelmann, therefore, was not yet among the magnates of the 
 Church. That was perhaps as well for him in view of his studies ; 
 but had it not been for the Saxon King's pension he would often 
 have fared but poorly. Winckelmann however was, even in his 
 worst straits, always blessed with a few attached friends who 
 would gladly have denied themselves, on his account, and this 
 resource did not fail him now. Mengs, who was still engaged on 
 his great and historical altar-piece for the Diresden Court Chapel, 
 found in Winckelmann the companion spirit that he needed ; 
 while to Winckelmann Mengs was all that Oeser had been in 
 Dresden, and more. Though now-a-days Mengs's works are not 
 greatly appreciated, but are generally, by critics, regarded as dry 
 and laborious copies of classic masterpieces, cold in colour, 
 and sometimes full of affectation — yet he exercised no slight 
 influence on the art of his day, and he was himself a genuine 
 enthusiast. Through the careful education his father had given 
 him, he had a very fine feeling for the antique, and he was equipt 
 thoroughly in all the technique, and able to communicate much 
 to Winckelmann. To Winckelmann again it was given, by his clear 
 insight into principles and his knowledge of the historical develop- 
 ment of the culture of art and antiquity, and by his philosophical 
 
 H 
 
114 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 contemplation of art and the beautiful, to stimulate and to suggest 
 many new views to Mengs. The two men were admirably suited 
 to each other ; and in much were complementary. Their rela- 
 tion from first to last almost realises those old classical ideas of 
 friendship, of which Winckelmann was so enamoured. Friend- 
 ship to him, indeed, stood for love, which it would appear that 
 he never experienced. " Many are the hours we spend together," 
 says Winckelmann ; " he nourishes me with his knowledge, and, 
 when he is tired, then I begin to expound my ideas.'' As one 
 result of this association we must recognise the suggestion of 
 Winckelmann's great work, " The History of Greek Art," which 
 was now begun. 
 
 [It is not necessary for us to detail the circumstances under 
 which, at a somewhat later period, Winckelmann's friendship 
 with Mengs was finally broken off. Enough that the ostensible 
 reason arose out of a kind of hoax which Mengs had tried to 
 play upon the critics and connoisseurs by giving forth a " Gany- 
 mede in Jupiter's Embrace," as a genuine relic found in Hercul- 
 aneum. Winckelmann, as fate would have it, fell a victim to 
 the trick. Other circumstances of a more peculiar character, 
 which, after all, are surrounded with some elements of doubt, it 
 is not needful for us to recapitulate.] 
 
 We find Winckelmann writing to Francke on the 5 th March 
 
 1757 :— 
 
 " If I could but come by a more assured support, Rome with a 
 steady competence, would be a paradise to me, and I could not leave 
 it without tears in my eyes. My health remains good, if I take care 
 not to eat too much, which is no difficult matter when I eat alone ; 
 for I do not allow myself time to indulge in that way. To drink well, 
 which I am sometimes led to do, is to me a medicine. 
 
 " Cardinal Albani is just now building a villa, which is a wonder of 
 art in all men's eyes. Oh, that you could see it, or that I could 
 describe it ! He is the greatest antiquarian in the world ; and brings 
 to light what has long lain buried in the darkness, and pays royally. 
 Should such a lover of antiquities come to the Papal chair (though, 
 unfortunately, Albani not being very spiritual cannot be raised to 
 that !) he would, through the help of the Cardinals, reveal many 
 treasures of far greater value than those we have, since now we know 
 well the places where to seek for them." * 
 
 In order to understand the circumstances in which Winckel- 
 
 * Briefe an seine Freunde, p. 77. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 115 
 
 mann lived during the first year and a-half in Rome, it is needful 
 to explain that before his arrival in Rome, Archinto had been 
 made governor, and promoted to the purple; and that when 
 Winckelmann visited him, he met only with amiable patronage 
 and expressions of good-will. He determined never again to 
 trouble the ecclesiastics and to live on his slender pension. He 
 himself says : " I waited for some time to see what proposals 
 would be made, and seeing that nothing followed and only 
 caresses were given me, while I heard that the Cardinal was 
 boasting of the great German, the distinguished Hellenist, who 
 was to be his librarian, I let things remain as they were for 
 months.'' Meantime the good elector, in spite of straitened cir- 
 cumstances, was able to send the half-year's salary of one hundred 
 thalers, which enabled him to go on for a month or two more in 
 peace. For fully a year he thus kept aloof; but the sudden 
 changes in Germany affected him too. When Prussia victoriously 
 crushed Saxony, he feared that all hope of his pension was gone ; 
 and now necessity compelled him to look elsewhere. Through 
 GiacomelU, the Pope's domestic chaplain, a friend of Mengs, 
 he was now introduced to Passionei — that eccentric child of the 
 Church, who delighted in practical jokes and received the 
 most distinguished visitors in deshabille, parading the "Pro- 
 vincial Letters" of Pascal, and ostentatiously professing himself a 
 Jansenist, chiefly in order to vex the Vatican, and sometimes 
 making himself the victim of practical jokes, instead of suc- 
 cessfully victimizing others. Passionei was delighted to receive 
 Winckelmann, made him free of his delightful villa on the Alban 
 Hills, and introduced him to the choice spirits who gathered 
 there. Winckelmann wrote enthusiastically of the footing of 
 freedom on which he stood. For a time Winckelmann thus 
 lived and worked. But he soon began to perceive that Passionei 
 was not the kind of man to aid him by patronage ; and through 
 the ever ready aid of the dexterous Giacomelli, who managed to 
 work on the pride and jealousy of Archinto, Winckelmann was 
 at last nominated his librarian, and took up his residence in the 
 Cancellaria Palace. This position opened to Winckelmann 
 many doors hitherto closed. For this privilege, however, he had 
 to pay certain penalties— the assuming of a priest's dress and the 
 tide of Abbate. So he was to be seen going about in a black 
 velvet robe with a silken mantle and white neck-band. 
 
Ti6 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 V. 
 
 It was the great discoveries made in the excavations at Her- 
 culaneum that drew Winckelmann from his cultured retreat. He 
 procured introductions to members of the Neapohtan Court at 
 Portici, and made his way thither. For the sake of knowledge 
 he submitted to be snubbed by an ignorant and pretentious 
 keeper, Paderni, a man who had failed as a painter, under whose 
 clirections the work was carried on. This man, however, he 
 humoured, and secured his object. A circumstance yet more 
 worthy of note is that he struck up a friendship with Father 
 Piazzi, who had succeeded in unrolling the charred Papyri which 
 had so long defeated all comers; and he had just begun a 
 systematic study of the pictures and antiquities of the whole 
 district, when he was recalled by the news that Pope Benedict 
 XIV. had breathed his last, and that Archinto was likely to be 
 elevated to the Papal throne. He hurried to Rome, to find that 
 any hopes he may have had through the elevation of Archinto 
 were doomed to disappointment. But he could no longer make 
 himself at peace in Archinto's Palace. He was glad of a pretext 
 to escape. An invitation had been given him sometime before 
 by Baron Stosch, the correspondent of Walpole, the great con- 
 noisseur, the spy, the courtier, to go to Florence to examine 
 and to catalogue a unique collection of intaglios which he pos- 
 sessed. Winckelmann had introduced himself to Baron Stosch 
 shortly after his arrival in Rome, through the presentation of a 
 copy of his first publication. Stosch not only replied in terms 
 the most friendly and appreciative ; but expressed his willingness 
 to serve Winckelmann by introducing him to persons of distinc- 
 tion in Rome ; and it was through Stosch, indeed, that he was 
 first brought to the notice of his future patron — the Cardinal 
 Albani. 
 
 The Baron had died ere this time, but the invitation had been 
 renewed by his nephew, a young man of parts, who had some 
 idea of disposing of the collection.* Winckelmann now availed 
 himself of this chance to escape for a time from Rome. The 
 younger Stosch welcomed him warmly, and was assiduous to gratify 
 his every wish. He found much to delight mind and eye in Flor- 
 
 * The collection was afterwards bought by Frederick the Great for what was thought 
 then a very large price. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 1 1 7 
 
 ence. The city itself he did not cease to admire. There he saw and 
 studied the great works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, with 
 very conflicting feelings as to their merits and relation to classic 
 art. Though he admired the purity of form and the vigour of 
 Raphael, he declared of Michael Angelo that he had laid the 
 foundations and constructed the bridges leading to vitiated taste 
 in sculpture. "It is the loveliest spot," he said, "that I have 
 seen in my life, and much to be preferred to Naples." After a 
 stay of some ten months, he returned to Rome with boxes of 
 manuscripts and paste impressions, finding that his task was far 
 heavier than he had bargained for. " My labour," he says, " is 
 big enough to break an ass's back, and I do not know whether 
 I shall ever finish .it." 
 
 While he was patiently working on at his task, Archinto died, 
 and he was called to a duty of stern and practical kind — the 
 search for a patron. As he had now nothing to depend on save 
 the hospitality of Baron Stosch, and his Saxon pension, which, 
 as we have said, had been extended to six years, but cut down to 
 one-half, this was the more imperative upon him. Luckily, his 
 ever active friend and benefactor, Giacomelli came to the rescue. 
 He recommended him to the Cardinal Albani, who was delighted 
 to secure Winckelmann, and from the moment of his entrance on 
 the office, Albani remained his faithful friend. Albani was a 
 man who could appreciate his knowledge and his worth. He 
 was a passionate art-lover and collector. He was himself an 
 artist, and had acquired no little versatility and power of execu- 
 tion. He had devoted the intervals of a long life to the study of 
 ancient art, and as regards many questions was considered an 
 authority by artists and scholars. The two— patron and artist- 
 became as brothers.* 
 
 In 1758— not long after he had taken up his residence at the 
 Villa Albani— appeared Winckelmann' s description of the grand 
 gems of the late Baron de Stosch, dedicated to his eminence 
 Monseigneur le Cardinal Alexandre Albani, par M. l'Abb6 
 Winckelmann, Biblioth^caire to his eminence. 
 
 * Er fasse zu ihm eine wahrhaft vaterliche Neigung und Winckelmann fand dadurch, dass. 
 erin das nachste personlicheVerhaltniss zu ihm trat, seine Unabhangigheit m Ke.nerWe.se 
 verletzt. Die Dankbarheit, welche er ihm zollte, war seiner Seele em Bedurfmss. . . . Noch 
 heute ist die Villa Albani, ihre gemeinsame Schopfung, durch .hre Kunstsschatze, w.e 
 durch die Erinnerung an Winckelmann eine geheiligte Statte, welche der Freunde, der alte.Y 
 Kunst nur mit Ehrfurcht betritt.— 7a/m, pp. 34-S- 
 
1 1 8 I VINCKELMANN. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The last eight years of Winckelmann's life under the roof of 
 the Cardinal Albani form a kind of Indian summer for Winckel- 
 mann's biography. Hitherto uncertainty had always dogged his 
 steps, the possibility that to-morrow he might be in want. Now, 
 he was secure from the chilling sense of insecurity or of depend- 
 ence, for in everything he was treated as an equal. The Car- 
 dinal was a friend and not a master. " I raise my hands in 
 thankfulness every morning to Him, who kept me from shipwreck, 
 and brought me safely into this land, where I enjoy peace and 
 my own self, and can live and act according to my desires." 
 His relations with the Cardinal were most confidential. " I open 
 to him," says Winckelmann, " the most secret corners of my 
 heart, and I am favoured with the same confidence from him. 
 He is to me at once friend, companion, and confidant." They 
 were engaged in the reconstruction and re-arrangement of the 
 villa — a task which did much to cement their friendship and 
 bring out their identity of tastes. This very fulness of enjoy- 
 ment sometimes distressed Winckelmann. " One gets spoiled 
 here," he writes ; " but God owed me this, for in my youth I 
 suffered too much." And very touching it is to come on traces 
 of the truly affectionate and homely heart. Now, when he was 
 received among the most select, praised, petted, and looked up 
 to by Princes, rustling through the most fashionable rooms and 
 art-galleries of Rome in the silken robes of the Abbate, he would 
 rise in the early summer mornings and solace himself on the roof 
 of the Albani Villa with reading his favourite hymns from the 
 familiar copy of the Old Lutheran hymn-book, out of which he 
 had sung when a schoolboy at Stendal ! The heart of the true 
 ■German man was there. 
 
 And though he had in young days brought himself to hate 
 Prussia, under the sense of the eternal sergeant-major drill, and 
 the cruel exactions of an era that cannot be called evil altogether, 
 only because it was the parent of one so much grander and more 
 fruitful, yet his thoughts often turned tenderly to Stendal. 
 Squalid and poverty-stricken as had been his rearing there, he 
 loved to think of it often. 
 
 There is nothing in Winckelmann of the isolated and isolating 
 
WINCKELMANN. 1 1 9 
 
 self-indulgence, which is often said to be a necessity of the neo- 
 pagan or art-for-art culture in our day. His interests seemed 
 narrow, only because his circumstances were so long chilling 
 and adverse that he had resolutely to subdue all secondary im- 
 pulses in order even in httle to gratify the ruling instinct of his 
 nature. It is beautiful to see how, as circumstances grow more 
 and more congenial, he mellows, ripens, any little prejudices he 
 may have entertained fall away from him and his area of kindly 
 interests and sympathies softly expands. There was something 
 child-like, reverent, devout, beautiful in the inmost heart of the 
 man. Even of Prussia, he could not continue to think un- 
 patriotically any more than Lessing, when the new and better 
 era had dawned — when it became more and more evident to him 
 that the " Flayer of Nations " might possibly be working for a 
 wider idea than appeared at first sight, and had driven the 
 French in disaster and dismay before him. Winckelmann could 
 not help a thrill of pride passing over him for his country — even 
 for that Prussia he had once despised and hated. It was the 
 same in other matters. His classicism was not an empty wor- 
 ship of the form. He perceived that mere imitation is the worst 
 of all slaveries. It is very curious indeed to find that in France, 
 where a bastard classicism was supreme, Winckelmann could find 
 nothing to attract him. The literature of France, as well as its 
 political and social life, so repelled him during his later years 
 that we find him writing — " Amidst other things that I praise 
 God for is this, that I am a German and not a Frenchman." 
 
 His correspondence during this period bears the marks of a 
 nature kindlily ripening and cultivating generous interests in every 
 direction. He loves to remember old friends, and has many 
 plans for improving the position of such of them as had been 
 less successful than he had been. His hfe did not verify the 
 thought of that fine verse of Mr Matthew Arnold's, which attri- 
 butes generally a hardening of nature to wealth, success, and 
 fame : — 
 
 " For these are all their own reward, 
 And leave no good behind ; 
 They try us, oftenest make us hard, 
 Less modest, pure, and kind."* 
 On the death of his old master, Count Biinau, in June 1762, 
 
 • " Stanzas in Memory of the late Edward Quillinan Esq." Poems i. p. 207. 
 
120 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 we find him writing a most touching letter to his friend Francke, 
 gratefully recalling all the Count's kindnesses to him ; in another 
 letter about that time he dwells on the difficulty of getting 
 English books at Rome, for which he greatly longed ; and in 
 January 1763 we find him thus recording his contact with a dis- 
 tinguished Englishman : — 
 
 " A week ago, I had something to do with an English Lord, Balti- 
 more, who is the most extraordinary Englishman among many that I 
 have become acquainted with. He is wearied of everything in the 
 world, and could not admire even St Peter's and the Vatican Apollo. 
 Out of sheer desperation he would set off for Constantinople. He 
 was in such a degree intolerable to me that I gave my opinion very 
 plainly, and would not go near him again. He has ;£30,ooo a year 
 income, which he does not know how to spend. In former years 
 the Duke of Roxburgh was here, a man of much the same type." 
 
 In a note to Baron von Riedesel on 12th October 1763, we 
 get hint of a purpose which throws a peculiar light on his ideas 
 in one direction : — 
 
 " My wish remains at all times to take a journey into Germany if 
 my great work were finished, and I have also as part of this intention 
 my eye on a well-formed boy whom I would take to my heart and 
 educate, in order that he might stand to me for pleasant society in 
 the future." * 
 
 On the nth January 1764 we find him writing to Baron von 
 Riedesel, still intent on the idea of elevating and informing his 
 own Germans : — 
 
 " The work in the Vatican Library, which takes up the whole 
 morning, leaves me httle time for correspondence, and that little that 
 remains I gladly give if I could improve in any way the taste and 
 knowledge of our countrymen.'' 
 
 Still more characteristic perhaps is the following letter, of date 
 the 13th April 1765, to War-Minister Marpurg, in which he 
 makes anxious enquiries after his old pupil Lamprecht : — 
 
 " I would anxiously beg of you to send me, if you possibly can, 
 among other things, news of my friend Herr P. F. Lamprecht, who 
 formerly was my best friend, and by whom through my removal to 
 this distance, I seem to have been allowed to pass into forgetfulness. 
 I wish much to see a few lines from himself as a sign that he lives 
 and of my being kept in remembrance by him, and I pledge myself 
 
 * Briefe an seine Freunde, p. 224. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 121 
 
 with true love and devotion duly to answer him. I have heard 
 nothing else of him than that he is in Berlin, and is a Councillor. I 
 await one and the other through your intervention. ' He was my 
 friend, the truest friend on earth.' — Cowley!' * 
 
 In a letter to Hofrath H , bearing date the 28th December 
 
 T 765, we find the following reference to another Englishman of 
 note fully a century ago : — 
 
 " At last the celebrated Wortley Montague is come back to Italy 
 from his Alexandrian and Sinaitical journey, and is now in Pisa. 
 I have a copy of his essay on his journey which he sent to the Eng- 
 lish Society, and through my intervention the Prince of Mecklen- 
 burg was favoured with another. The chief portion contains the 
 inscriptions on Mount Sinai, which, as an expert scholar in the 
 oriental tongues, he has translated with great exactness, but not 
 wholly explained. Montague half inclines to rank them as Hebraic 
 and indeed of later times, and I am of his opinion." 
 
 On the loth September 1766, we find him thus acknowledging 
 to Francke receipt of Lessing's Laocoon : — 
 
 " Herr Lessing's Essay I have received : it is beautiful, and written 
 with great acuteness ; but upon his doubts and discoveries he has 
 much need of instruction. He ought to come to Rome, that would 
 be the proper place to speak with him." 
 
 But even amid all the favour of the Villa Albani, Winckel- 
 mann worked under adverse conditions. His schemes were so 
 gigantic, and his taste so exacting that he needed help. " His 
 History of Ancient Art," on which he had been at work for eight 
 years, cost him vast labour and self-denial. The drudgery of 
 copying might, one would think, have been spared to him if the 
 ecclesiastics had been as fond of art and scholarship as they 
 affected to be. In March 1762 he wrote somewhat despondently, 
 " I lose the time, and I have but one hand ; for other writers 
 have at least help to copy ; and this makes the work very hard 
 to me. How many times have I not transcribed the ' History 
 of Art,' and how many copies of the first draught have I 
 piled up." 
 
 And he never could rest content with one endeavour. A 
 crowd of related topics were always being treated at the same time. 
 As a result of this we find that while the " History of Ancient 
 Art " was in progress, the following works appeared : — 
 
 In 1761 the "Erklarung schwerer Punkte in der Mythologie und 
 
 * Briefe an seine Freunde, ii. pp. 159-60 
 
122 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 in den Alterthumerin " was issued, the Cardinal Albani having 
 produced it at his own cost. 
 
 In January 1762, Winckelmann, in the Society of Count 
 Briihl, had made the second of two journeys into Naples, and 
 the result of this journey was the "Sendschrieben von den Her- 
 culanischen Entdeckungen," which was published in Dresden in 
 the beginning of 1764, and out of the same tour came the 
 " Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen," 
 which was published at Dresden in the same year. 
 
 His great work, " The History of Greek Art," appeared in 1 764, 
 in two quarto volumes, and made an era in literature. Its success 
 was complete. Translations in English, Dutch and French im- 
 mediately followed. It has been well said that what Niebuhr did 
 for Roman history, that Winckelmann did for antique art. In 
 particular points, it must be admitted, Winckelmann has been 
 superseded; but it still remains true, as Goethe said, that he 
 revealed a new world, or brought a new organ to the comprehen- 
 sion of an old one. He at all events created a new sense. His 
 great success did not lull him into ease ; he did not live for fame, 
 but for the ideal ; and after a reception such as might have 
 tempted most authors to rest on their laurels and leave well alone, 
 he went on systematically adding to and improving his work 
 under the deepening sympathy and friendship of Albani and 
 others. 
 
 The next work in which he exhibited his peculiar power was 
 entitled " Der Versuch einer Allegoric besonders fur die Kunst." 
 which appeared without his name in 1766. 
 
 It is worth noting that, notwithstanding the romantic fervour 
 of his nature, and his craving for that deeper friendship which with 
 him stood for so, much, Albani was the only man, not a German, 
 with whom he allowed himself to come into terms of confidential 
 friendship. Sometimes a strong yearning would arise in him to 
 look once more on the haunts of his youth, and to visit his old 
 friends in Germany — those in and around Stendal as well as else- 
 where. It was an intense yearning of this kind that sent him on 
 that last fatal journey. 
 
 On the loth April 1768 he left Rome with his friend, the dis- 
 tinguished sculptor, Cavaceppi, who had become much attached 
 to him. They purposed going direct to Berlin, as Winckelmann 
 was desirous of seeing Stosch there, then their plans were to go 
 
WINCKELMANN. 123 
 
 on to Brunswick and Dessau, and finally to Dresden. In all these 
 places Winckelmann had friends whom he longed to see. The 
 news that the great historian of ancient art was coming stirred a 
 thrill of expectancy and delight in many hearts, in which Goethe, 
 as he tells us, was a participator. Suddenly when they had 
 reached a certain point in their Alpine journey; Winckelmann 
 was seized with a strange reluctance to go any further, and 
 desired to turn back at once. His companion was so struck by 
 the change of countenance and the distracted air that he feared 
 the mind had gone wrong. But Winckelmann allowed himself to 
 be persuaded to go on to Munich, and after that to Vienna, 
 where the two travellers unfortunately separated; Winckelmann 
 mtending in a few days to proceed to Trieste and return by ship 
 to Rome. Distressed and wearied in body and mind he was 
 taken ill after reaching Vienna, and lay there for some days in 
 bed. As soon as he recovered great honours awaited him. 
 Queen Maria Theresa sent for him, and made him promise next 
 year to return and arrange her collection of antiquities. Requests 
 followed on all sides from the most distinguished persons that he 
 should remain for a time. But to these he would not listen, and 
 hurried on to Trieste, to engage a passage in a vessel to Rome. 
 Unfortunately the sailing of the vessel was delayed for some days, 
 from one cause or another, and during this time he was much in 
 the company of a stranger who had made his acquaintance about 
 the quays. Winckelmann was not only so unwise as to consort 
 with this man, but spoke of his interview with Maria Theresa, and 
 actually showed him some gold coins. These excited the man's 
 cupidity. He resolved to rob Winckelmann, and for this purpose 
 made his way into Winckelmann's room on the night that he was 
 to sail, armed with a noose and a knife. Winckelmann was 
 engaged in writing when the stranger entered and asked to be 
 allowed to examine the coins. Winckelmann declined to do this 
 and as he was turning round, the noose was slipped over -his 
 head, and then a wild struggle ensued, during which he was 
 stabbed five times in the breast and twice in the stomach. The 
 noise brought help, but all too late ; the murderer fled, but was 
 speedily captured. Winckelmann was lucid in mind and still 
 able to speak, and dictated, though he was unable to sign, a will 
 devising his whole estate to Cardinal Albani, with the exception 
 of a legacy of 350 ducats to the engraver Mogalli, and another of 
 
124 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 loo ducats to the Abbate Peranesi. He died after six hours of the 
 greatest agony. Whether it was that the people at Trieste were 
 unable to determine his rank, he was buried in a common grave 
 amongst paupers. His murderer was one Archangeli, a native 
 of Tuscany, who had been a cook, and later a hotel-waiter, 
 and finally an adventurer and rogue. He expiated his crime 
 by being drawn on the wheel on the 20th of July 1768 the same 
 day of the week as that on which he had committed the murder. 
 
 "Nobody," Winckelmann had written once, " has anything to 
 expect of my death ; for I go out of the world as light-footed a 
 traveller, with cheerful heart, and as poor as I came into it."* 
 But as we have seen, this was hardly the case. 
 
 On the 13th December 1786 we find Goethe writing from 
 Rome : — 
 
 " To-day have I sat with Winckelmann's letters, which he wrote 
 from Italy, in my hand. With what emotion have I read them ' 
 One and thirty years ago he came here, a still poorer fool than 
 I ; he was also so thoroughly in earnest about the foundations and the 
 trustworthiness of antiquity and art ! What brave and good work he 
 did ! And what is there now for me but the memory of the man in 
 this place ? One remark particularly pleases me : ' One must seek 
 after all things in Rome with a certain apathy, otherwise one will be 
 taken for a Frenchman. Rome, I believe, is the high school for all 
 the world, and I also am refined and improved.' That remark fully 
 expresses my feeling. Out of Rome one has no understanding, whereas 
 one here is most certainly schooled. One must, so to say, be born again, 
 and then one sees as with his better intellect, as if he had come back 
 from a child's school. The common man will become something here ; 
 at least he will lay hold of an imcommon idea, if he does not also in 
 some respects become superior to his proper individuality." 
 
 vn. 
 
 The obtaining note of Winckelmann's genius is simplicity of 
 motive, controlling extreme susceptibility and passionate enthu- 
 siasm. Without the restraining power of the former, indeed, we 
 should probably detect something hectic and morbid in him, 
 such as is now and again felt in closer approach to our own 
 Keats. But his instinct is so true, and so completely controls 
 
 * Niemand hat sich nach meinen Tode etwas zu versprechen , denn ich gehe wie ein 
 leichter Fiisseanger mit frohlichen Gefechte am der Welt und arm wie ich gekommen 
 bin. — yakn, p. 64. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 125 
 
 the senses on every side, that it may almost be said he has affinity 
 only for what is in harmony with it. So sincere is his confession 
 of regret that he was not bom to such a position of independence 
 as would have enabled him from the first to gratify his passion 
 for beauty, that we attribute nothing of egotism to the claim that 
 is thus implicitly put forth. The capacity to set aside once and 
 for ever what did not freely range itself alongside of his ideal, gave 
 poise and undoubting direction to his individuality. It would 
 seem as though the very defects and limitations of his nature 
 aided his genius ; empowering it to triumph over obstacles where 
 the least distraction arising from lower impulses might have 
 proved fatal. His passionate love of beauty for example, was 
 wholly dissociated from anything sexual — indeed it seems to be 
 a matter of surprise to him that on account of the emergence 
 of this element, men generally fail truly to observe the beauty of 
 manly form, and accommodate themselves too readily to that 
 which is conventionally accepted as the typical beauty in the 
 female form; whereas with Winckelmann the ideal type were still 
 imperfect but for the marriage of the two, a point which so far 
 explains his peculiar admiration for the hermaphrodite examples. 
 From the first moment we make acquaintance with Winckel- 
 mann, we find in him a perfect sense of his own destination and 
 possibilities. He has no youth in the sense of a period of indefinite 
 purpose and vague, flaccid aspiration, though the triumphant sim- 
 plicity of motive maintained in him a vein of fresh and true 
 youthfulness to the last. His unrest arises from the bar set in 
 the way of his finding the treasure which his divining genius tells 
 him is to be found not far off, if he could but transport himself 
 thither. His inner world is prophecy and assurance to him of a 
 "world reaUsed" already in forms of beauty. These early wander- 
 ings among the Bradenburg Hills — how touching, how suggestive 
 they are, as witnessing to the assurance he had that his dreams were 
 realities ; that he might indeed some day see, touch, fondly handle 
 the figures and forms that passed continually before his imagina- 
 tion. And when at last he does touch and examine these 
 precious reHcs of early Greek art, there is no sense of distraction, 
 as of a sudden discovery or awakening. A calm, self-satisfying 
 joy as over a lost treasure found, is his. They are, as it were, but 
 centres, round which fresh configurations and groups harmoniously 
 arrange themselves in the most natural order ; and still he must 
 
126 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 seek until he has found. His happiness Hes in this search — the 
 freedom of unrestrained self-development in the test and guaranty 
 of his own deep-laid intuitions. Goethe well signified this when 
 he said : " A poverty-stricken childhood ; miserably insuflicient 
 instruction in youth ; broken and distracted studies in early man- 
 hood ; and then the dreary burden of school-teaching ! He was 
 thirty years of age ere he enjoyed a single favour of fortune ; but 
 immediately he attained an adequate condition of freedom, he 
 comes before us serene and entire, complete as a true-born 
 antique man." 
 
 This suggests how independent he was of extraneous helps. 
 The old culture did nothing for him, and he showed no ingrati- 
 tude in always speaking of it as a hindrance. It sought to divert 
 him from the real world toward which he had set his face, and 
 would fain have quenched in the ashes of dead learning the 
 passion for that life in which lay all his consolations. A Greek 
 in very spirit and desire, he stood from the first in direct opposi- 
 tion to conventional and classical culture, and could gain nothing 
 from it. It was because of this imperious demand in him that 
 he overthrew these old traditions of scholarship and criticism, 
 and brought the world face to face with a new revelation. His 
 genius was passionate, penetrating, re-ascending to its true source 
 as assuredly as the waters re-ascend into the atmosphere. 
 
 And as his genius was simple, so also was his character in all 
 relations. His friendships were informed and coloured by the 
 antique sentiment. Love, as a tumultuous and stormy influence, 
 never disturbed them, any more than it did in the case of the 
 early Greek sages. As a patriot, too, we see the same self-con- 
 sistency and rectitude through all the disturbing clamours of the 
 time. For religion, as some influence separate from and opposed 
 to the idea of beauty and aesthetic enjoyment, and thus ministering 
 a great sadness and self-questioning, he has no sense. This arose 
 from the primeval simplicity of his nature. He was one with the 
 early men whose religion was still interfused with poetical and 
 mythical conceptions, answering to an undivided imagination. 
 The radical distinctions of modern theology must have been un- 
 inteUigible to Winckelmann. In him, we may say, that spirit and 
 sense knew no opposition. That grand inward struggle — ^hal- 
 lowed by Christian association and history — which results in 
 mystic reverie, repentance, remorse, sense of pardon, rapture, the 
 
WINCKELMANN. 127 
 
 joy of victory over sense and appetite considered as evil, could 
 hardly have had any real significance for him. Retreat from the 
 world as something degrading, as the source of temptation, he 
 could never have realised as dictated by anything but an unsound 
 mind, yet all the earlier virtues were real to him and were ap- 
 proved by him. Temperance, fortitude, self-denial at the call of 
 friends or of country, Winckelmann not only understood, but 
 practised, and would in certain circumstances have approved him- 
 self a hero. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 At a time when German literature was still formless, without 
 that direct comprehension of a great purpose, which can only 
 result from undivided interests, the appearance of such a man as 
 Winckelmann was richly significant. To say that he was a reformer 
 would sound very paradoxical, remembering Luther ; and yet, 
 like Luther, he made an end of tradition. The revolt against 
 the old hard-and-dry classical rules and precedents, which was 
 impUed in his aims from the beginning, and was so grandly 
 brought to fruition by his later works, made possible the vital 
 classicism, which, through Goethe and Schiller, contended with 
 the romantic or Gothic element, and finally set the purest flower 
 of it, select, serene, on the crown of a classicism, imbued with 
 the deepest feeling of modern life and its mysteries. And this 
 combination was so far made possible by Winckelmann — the 
 more that in one respect he still departed from the severe ideal 
 of the Greeks. This was in the place which he allowed to alle- 
 gory as a real and necessary element in a representative art — a 
 point on which he has been attacked by great critics, and also 
 well defended by critics as great. M. CherbuUez, for instance, 
 has this passage : — 
 
 " Winckelman ^tait pour les artistes un conseiller dangereux. II 
 avait en deux maitres, un grand homme et un homme mddiocre. Le 
 grand homme ^tait Platon, I'homme mediocre un peintre Allemand, 
 Oeser, que Rumohr appelle brutalment le plus cadavdreux des manier- 
 istes. Oeser et Platon inoculferent I'un et I'autre ^ Winckelmann la 
 coupable faiblesse qu'il eut toujours pour I'allegorie. ... La 
 doctrine de Winckelmann fourvoyait I'art dans les regions glacdes du 
 
128 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 symbolisme la doctrine du Laocoon le conduit k I'academisme, aux 
 types convenus."* 
 
 The famous Heyne, again, has said something very different on 
 this head : — 
 
 " That allegory may furnish a rich and superior source for the in- 
 vention of our artists, and supply them with subjects demanding an 
 exacter elaboration, is undoubted ; and Winckelmann has also opened 
 up for this, field new possibilities, which must be followed, however, 
 with less of artificiality and more of simplicity than is shown at 
 present." t 
 
 The truth is that the idea of allegory in Winckelmann's mind is 
 far less an artificial one, than it is a necessity of the very thought 
 and universality of reference, which, like Damm, he was compelled 
 to see in Greek art. Others have found themselves almost un- 
 consciously compelled to admit the same thing while repudiating 
 it in words. Goethe, for example, in 1832, only a month before 
 his death, said to Soret, " The Hercules of antiquity is a collective 
 being, the great bearer of his own deeds and the deeds of others" — 
 which certainly imports into the " content," if we may name it so, 
 of that famous work, a secondary or symbolic idea. 
 
 One of the great sources of this lay in Winckelmann's tendency 
 and his great desire to see all the various manifestations of Greek 
 art united under the light of one pervading idea. That thought 
 recurs often in his works, and is more and more urgently expressed 
 in his later than his earlier ones. It may be summed up thus : — 
 " The highest beauty is in God, and our conception of human 
 beauty becomes more and more perfect as it is realised in harmony 
 with that highest existence that is conceived by us as that unity 
 and individuality which we distinguish from matter. This idea of 
 beauty is like an essence extracted from matter by great heat ; it 
 seeks to beget unto itself a creature formed after the likeness of 
 the first rational creature formed in the mind of the Divinity. 
 The forms of such a figure are simple and flowing and various in 
 their unity ; and for this reason they are harmonious, precisely 
 as a sweet and pleasing tone can be extracted from bodies whose 
 parts are uniform. All beauty is heightened by unity and sim- 
 plicity, as is everything which we do or say ; for whatever is great 
 in itself is elevated when executed or uttered with simplicity." 
 
 * Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 
 t Lobschrif t auf Winckelmann von Chr. Gott: Heyne in Litterarischer Chronik. Erste 
 Abtlieilung. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 129 
 
 The Art of antiquity, as he holds, to be truly understood must 
 be comprehended in its completeness, in its essential aim, as the 
 necessary expression, the highest representation of the human 
 spirit embodied in the highest and most beautiful of bodily forms. 
 Every individual work of art must be seen to be, as it were, but a 
 limb or function of this extended range of artistic possibility and 
 endeavour, and be estimated only in this sense. It is very in- 
 teresting to observe how this thought grows ever clearer and 
 clearer in Winckelmann's mind. 
 
 And yet while he is very faithful in seeking in man's spirit for 
 the pervading idea that animates Greek art, he never fails to turn 
 to nature for the test and the seal of its faithfulness in form. The 
 two terms suggest the mutually-exciting impulses which deter- 
 mined all his activity. He drew unceasingly from the rich store 
 of intuition and imagination, by which he was guided consistently 
 from point to point ; he went as constantly to nature for the tests 
 of external line and curve and arrangement. It is very charac- 
 teristic that we should find him writing whole chapters in the 
 spirit of this sentence : — " The forms of a beautiful body are 
 determined by lines the centre of which is constantly changing, 
 and which if continued would never describe circles. They are 
 consequently at once more simple and more complex than a 
 circle which, however large or small, has always the same centre, 
 and either includes others or is included in others.'' 
 
 He never permits himself to behold a novel effect or the 
 slightest modification of form, without satisfying himself that he 
 has penetrated to the reason that existed in the artist's mind. 
 And broad distinctions and contrasts that trace themselves to 
 mediating social and moral influences, he is equally quick to 
 detect. How characteristic it is of him that he should trace to the 
 humanity which the Greeks showed in their warfare as compared 
 with the Romans, a peculiar refinement and humanity in their 
 art. It is in such penetrating insight that Winckelmann proves 
 himself to be something more than a mere critic of art, as the 
 word is coming more and more to be understood. It was by 
 this elevation, this fine regard for the permanent and universal, 
 even more than by his minute and exhaustive descriptions, that as 
 Hettner has said—" He presented to the intelligence once more 
 clear and complete, as with the gracious demand of divine 
 forms, the eternal beauty of the Greek art, which had been 
 
 I 
 
I30 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 perceived only as by the eyes of men awakening out of dim 
 dreams."* 
 
 Winckelmann's reproductive or reconstructive power which 
 amounted to genius of the highest kind, went hand in hand with 
 the most perfect patience and attention to parts. Upon the 
 poetical description of the torso of Apollonius, which was pub- 
 lished in 1756, he thought for three whole months. Every part, 
 while still sufficing and harmonious in its place, became sugges- 
 tive of a thousand other developments, so that every beloved 
 work of art was to Winckelmann as the doorway into a thousand 
 chambers. It dissolved, spiritualised, as it were, before him, yet re- 
 mained intact, individual, to answer the immediate demand of 
 the eye. This double process is his secret — his gift— the seal of 
 his supremacy. The comparative anatomist reconstructs a whole 
 animal from the most insignificant fossil remains ; Winckelmann 
 from each separate part ascends to an idea, and builds around 
 it a new creation. A torso for him is as good as a perfect group. 
 The slightest hint, the curve of a hand, the lift of a heel, the 
 round of the cheek, the swell of the shoulder in pointing upward 
 — completely suffices. There is not perhaps in any language a 
 more completely characteristic performance than Winckelmann's 
 short description of the torso of the Hercules of Belvidere in 
 Rome. With the beautiful non-egotistic quahty of true genius, 
 he assumes as a common power in the spectator that by which 
 he is able to reveal and to restore, and claims no specific attitude 
 of discovery. In this consists his childlike charm here as else- 
 where. He writes : — 
 
 " Like the gaunt trunk of some great old oak felled and shorn of 
 its branches and boughs, the statue of the hero sits, mangled and 
 broken— the head, the legs, the arms, and the upper parts of the breast 
 wholly gone. The first glance will perhaps reveal to you only a mis- 
 shapen block of stone ; but if you can penetrate into the mysteries of art, 
 and will consent to contemplate with a quiet eye, you will here behold 
 one of its miracles. Then will Hercules appear to you moving in the 
 midst of his labours, and the hero and the god will simultaneously 
 become visible to you in the stone I see in the powerful out- 
 lines of this form the unvanquished might of the conqueror of the 
 powerful giants who strove against the gods, and were defeated by 
 him on the Phlegrsean plains ; at the same time, also, the soft flow of 
 the outhnes, which rendered the build of the body hght and supple, 
 
 * v., p. 434. 
 
WINCKELMANN. 131 
 
 suggest to me its rapid movements in the combat with Achelous, who, 
 in spite of his many changes of shape, could not escape from his 
 hands. Each portion of the body displays, as in a picture, the whole 
 hero active in some particular cause. I cannot look at the same 
 portion of the left shoulder, still visible, without being reminded that 
 on its outstretched strength, as though on two mountains, the burden 
 of the very heavens has rested 
 
 "Ask those who know all that is most beautiful in mortal forms, if 
 they have ever seen a side worthy to be compared with the side of 
 this torso. The action and reaction of the muscles are adjusted with 
 the most perfect measure of alternating movement and swift strength ; 
 and the body, because of this, had to be of the most massive build, 
 suitable for the work that he wished to do. As in the swell of the 
 sea, the surface, for a moment smooth, rises with a vague unrest into 
 rippling waves, one swallowing another, and again throwing it out 
 and rolling it forward ; so with the same soft rise and swell, the one 
 muscle passes into another ; while a third, that rises between, and 
 seems to give strength to their movement, is lost in the first, and our 
 gaze is, so to speak, swallowed up at the same moment. 
 
 " Fain would I stop at this point to give space for contemplation, to 
 impress on the imagination an indestructible image of this side ; but 
 the lofty beauties are held in an indissoluble union. What an idea 
 we can derive from these thighs, whose solidity shows that the hero 
 has never wavered, and never been subdued ! At this moment, in 
 spirit I survey the remotest regions of the earth that Hercules passed 
 through. I am borne to the very boundaries of his toils — even to the 
 mountains and the pillars where his foot rested, by the aspect of 
 those thighs, of such inexhaustible force and godlike length, which 
 have borne the hero over a hundred lands, even to immortality itself 
 As I was beginning to reflect on these distant features, my spirit was 
 recalled by a glance at his back. How charmed I was when I looked 
 at this body from behind. I was as a person who, after admiring the 
 splendid portal of a temple, is led to the top, where the vaulted roof 
 over which he cannot see, anew throws him into amazement. I 
 behold here the chief edifice of the bones of the body, the source of 
 the muscles, the ground of their arrangement and motion ; and all 
 of this looks like some landscape seen from the summit of a moun- 
 tain — a landscape over which nature has spread the lavish wealth of 
 her beauty. As its serial heights with gentle slope lose themselves 
 in hollow valleys, narrowing here and widening there ; so mani- 
 fold, magnificent and beautiful, swell the hiUs of muscle, round 
 which there wind, like the stream Meander, depths almost impercept- 
 ible, manifest to touch rather than to sight. 
 
 " If it should seem hard to conceive how power of thought can be 
 shown in other parts of the body besides the head, learn here how the 
 
 I 2 
 
132 WINCKELMANN. 
 
 skill of a creative master can even inform matter with spirit. To me, 
 it appears as though the back, which looks as if bent in lofty contem- 
 plation, supported a head which is busy with glad remembrances of 
 wonderful deeds ; and while such a head, full of majesty and wisdom, 
 rises before my eyes, the other absent limbs begin to take form in my 
 thought, an efflux from what is actually before me, gradually grows 
 and produces, as it were, a sudden restoration. 
 
 " The power of the shoulder suggests to me how strong must have 
 been the arms that strangled the lion upon Mount Cithasron, and my 
 eye essays to give form to those which bound and carried Cerberus 
 away. The thighs and the remaining knee give me an idea of the 
 legs, which were never weary, which chased and caught the brazen- 
 footed stag. By mysterious art, the spirit is borne through all the 
 deeds of his strength to the perfection of his soul ; and this torso is 
 the monument thereof — a monument such as no one of the poets, who 
 celebrate the strength of his arm alone, has erected ; the sculptor has 
 surpassed them all. His image of the hero leaves no room for a 
 thought of violence or of licentious love ; in the repose and quiet of 
 the body is represented the calm, collected spirit, the man who, from 
 love of justice, has exposed himself to the greatest dangers, who has 
 given security to countries, and rest to their inhabitants. 
 
 " This beautiful and noble form of a nature thus perfect is, so to 
 speak, wrapped round with immortality, and the form is but as a 
 vessel to contain it — a loftier spirit seems to have taken the place of 
 the mortal parts, and to have expanded in their stead. It is no longer 
 a body that has to contend with monsters and the destroyers of peace, 
 but that which has been purified upon Mount CEta from the dross of 
 humatiity, now cleared away from the original source of littleness to 
 the father of the Gods. Neither the loved Hyllus nor the tender lole 
 ever saw Hercules so perfect. Thus lay he in Hebe's arms, in the 
 arms of everlasting youth, and inhaled an undying spirit. His body 
 is nourished by no mortal fare or by any coarse particles ; he lives on 
 ambrosial food, which he seems only to taste and not to eat, and 
 altogether without being filled." 
 
 E! 7c£p Kev KoX <TfUKpbv iirl ff/UKpi^ KaraBelo, 
 Kai Bapxt tout ^p8ois.* 
 
 If, as has been said, the " Poem of the Understanding is 
 Philosophy," this kind of Art criticism is truly the younger brother 
 of Art. 
 
 * Hesiod, ** Works and Days." 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
"Das Kriterium der Wahrheit hat jedermann in sich. Weder die 
 Einbildung giebt es, noch die Speculation; im Gemiith, itn innersten Bewusst- 
 sein wohnt die Summe aller Wahrheit. " — Herder. 
 
One day in the summer of 1743, the third year of the reign of 
 Frederick the Great, there came footsore and weary a Jewish boy 
 to the Rosenthaler Gate of BerHn with the intention of making 
 his way into the city. He was small of stature, slightly deformed 
 in the shoulders, and he carried in his hand a small parcel. 
 His heart rose within him when he approached the gate ; for 
 now he thought I am near the end of my hard journey. And 
 hard journey it had truly been; for he had come from Dessau, 
 a distance of nearly thirty miles, and had been on the road some 
 days. Through any other than the Rosenthaler Gate he could 
 not have entered, for over the others in these days was inscribed 
 the cheerless legend, which meant so much, " No stranger Jew 
 admitted here." Humble and depressed he waited for the 
 porter, who at last appeared, and spoke so roughly that the boy 
 with difficulty could restrain his tears. At length came the Jewish 
 " Thor Schreiber " and put the formal queries, among them the 
 startling question whether the boy had the means of subsistence, 
 to which his information that he was a " scholar " did not seem 
 very satisfactory. His heart sank ; for his whole means — a few 
 groschen tied up in the parcel with his clothes — were hardly suffi- 
 cient for a single day. Luckily he bethought him to say that he 
 was going to see the Chief Rabbi David Frankel, who had been 
 his teacher in Dessau. The name acted like magic ; at once 
 the man's tone changed. " Wilt see the Rabbi ? " said the man. 
 " I pass you — go forward." 
 
 The boy was Moses Mendelssohn, who in this way made pain- 
 ful acquaintance with the cruel disabilities under which his race 
 suffered in Germany at that time. He was destined to do much 
 to relieve their condition.* 
 
 * Schmidt says in his sketch of iMendelssohn, " Fur das damalige Volk des Juden war 
 ein Moses nothig, der sie in das Kanaan besserer Zustande fiihrte. Und Gott fandte Ihnen 
 in Moses Mendelssohn, den Heifer, Retter und Fuhrer der all solcher freilich nich sofort 
 von des Wehrheit des Volkes anerkant ward." 
 
136 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 Mendelssohn was bom in a poor liut in the Spittal-Strasse of 
 Dessau on the 6th September 1729.* Only a short time before 
 — that is, on the 29th January of the same year — Gotthold 
 Ephraim Lessing had seen the light in the Parsonage of 
 Kamenz. 
 
 Mendelssohn's father was a poor Jewish teacher and tran- 
 scriber of the Talmud, Mendel by name. Both occupations 
 were miserably paid ; and Mendel had a sore fight to support 
 his family ; but he was industrious, and he was in some degree 
 cultivated, and was eager that his son should receive a good edu- 
 cation. His quick ways, his great eagerness to learn, had led 
 the old man, whilst he was yet a child, to form the idea of edu- 
 cating him for a Rabbi. " Yes, my son," he would say, " thou 
 shalt be what I willingly would have been, a light in the scattered 
 Church of Israel." 
 
 With this end in view, the boy's education was commenced 
 early. His father began to teach him to read Hebrew in his 
 third year ; and by the time he had reached his fourth he had 
 gone through the school book, and could read the simpler parts 
 of the Scriptures and follow the daily prayers intelligently. In 
 this, as is evident from many sources, his father had the full 
 sympathy of his wife, a woman of true piety, of deep and pure 
 feeling, quietly practical and as quietly patient, who exercised a 
 very powerful influence over all her household.t And there was 
 little likelihood of Moses disappointing the hopes of his parents 
 in this respect. 
 
 At the tender age of five he was sent to the Jewish Seminary, 
 where mere children were taught mechanically to prattle over the 
 intricacies of the Mishna and Gemara ; and here a teacher of 
 
 * Kayserling regards 1729 as being particularly remarkable as the birth year of the trio of 
 great and free spirits : Lessing, Reimarus, and Moses Mendelssohn. 
 
 t Before Kayserling's interesting volumes came into my hands, I had searched through 
 not a few of the notices of Mendelssohn in German periodical literature, in the hope of 
 meeting with some account of his mother, who must have been in many ways a noble and 
 beautiful character. Mendelsshon's own reserve about her may be accounted for in several 
 ways-, the most plausible certainly magnifying and not lessening her merits. But 
 curious, as I confess I was, I desisted from further effort, when I read the following in 
 Kayserling's second page, feeling assured that he had gone more thoroughly over the 
 ground than it was in my power to do. He writes; "Von Moses Mutter — sie wird, wo es 
 sich ura Einfluss auf das Kind handelt, billig zuerst genannt — ist kaum mehr als der Name 
 auf uns gekommen. Wir denken uns Suschen, so hiess die Gliickliche, als eine jener tief 
 und edel empfindenden, still thatigen und still duldenden jiidischen Frauen, denen man 
 nicht selten in den jiidischen Familien jener Zeit begegnet, und konnte iiberhaupt von einem 
 hShem Einfluss, welchen sie auf den Knabe iibte, die Rede sein," &c., &c., p. •£. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 137 
 
 the name of Hirsch seems to have become deeply interested in 
 the premature powers of the child. It is surely very touching to 
 read that, owing to the severity of the iirst winter and the boy's 
 weakly constitution, his father, after giving him a cup of tea, 
 would ^\Tap him up in a thick wool mantle, and between three 
 and four o'clock in the morning carry him to the Seminary. 
 None of the ordinary diversions that children desire were sought 
 after by Moses. He never played with the other children; books 
 formed his whole world.* Unprompted he would sit up in bed 
 over his books as soon as daylight streamed in. " My Moses," 
 said his father, " is so quick of comprehension, quicker even than 
 children double his age, that already he has been placed in the 
 higher classes. In learning is all his joy; he will get up in his 
 bed in the early mornings to read ; we cannot hinder him." It 
 hardly needs to be said that great was the delight of father and 
 mother when the boy was advanced to the higher school. This 
 was to Moses a veritable wonderhouse. A man of rare intelli- 
 gence and lofty soul stood at its head — the Chief Rabbi, David 
 Hirschel Frankel. From him the scholars learned of the Holy 
 Father of the Jewish people, the law-givers and prophets of the 
 Old Testament ; and the treasures of the Talmud and its wealth 
 of commentary were unfolded before them. With the world 
 which he thus opened to his scholars, he did not fail to com- 
 municate something of his own pious ardour. As for Moses 
 Mendelssohn, he was so thoroughly in earnest that he soon made 
 himself master of the Text of the Talmud under Rabbi Frankel, 
 and had applied himself to study carefully the grammatical con- 
 struction of the Hebrew, as he even thus soon discerned that 
 much depended on nice distinctions of language and expression, 
 without which knowledge it would be impossible really to under- 
 stand any commentary. 
 
 Sometimes Frankel would read to his more favoured pupils 
 extracts from the " More Nebuchim," or " Guide to the Per- 
 plexed," by the famous Spanish Jew, Maimonides ; and, though 
 it is hardly possible that a boy of nine or ten could have fully 
 understood the writing, it awakened in Mendelssohn a sense of 
 the dignity of thought and the power of language. After some 
 time Frankel consented to allow Mendelssohn to take the book 
 
 * This reminds us very much of the late Mr Emanuel Deutsch's account of his own 
 early days. 
 
138 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 home with him ; and now his application became so intense, 
 that it brought on a nervous fever, which left its permanent 
 effects in a distortion of the spine, slightly deforming the back 
 and shoulders. This disease caused him much pain and many 
 deprivations, and had a powerful influence on all his future. 
 
 "This Maimonides," he often remarked facetiously when 
 speaking of this time, " have I to blame that I am so weakly in 
 body. He alone is the cause thereof, but still I love him 
 deeply, for if he has made many hours of my life troubled and 
 weary ; he has also on the other hand, converted many hours 
 into hours of delight the purest. If he unwittingly weakened my 
 body, he also invigorated my soul." 
 
 He had the feeling for the beautiful, and without this, indeed, 
 enthusiasm of the kind he showed is hardly possible, and it ever 
 remained to him a source of much pleasure. The lyric poetry 
 of the Hebrews had so inspired him that in his earliest youth he 
 attempted poetry. He himself tells us that already in his tenth 
 year he composed verses from which, though he says that he 
 derived no satisfaction afterwards, he drew at the time a pleasant 
 relief and fresh impulses to the study of Maimonides. " I have 
 no genius for poetry," he often said in later times ; " my mind is 
 more disposed to penetrate into the deep recesses of the under- 
 standing, than to roam in the lighter regions of fancy ;" but 
 nevertheless his quick perceptions and his power of entering into 
 the feelings and thoughts of others, imparted a certain poetic 
 grace and freedom to his writings. 
 
 In spite of the languor of his body, and a lack of appetite 
 which caused his parents' concern, all went well with Mendelssohn 
 for some years. He lived well on the food that he derived from 
 the writings of the wise masters of Israel, and from the teachings 
 of Frankel. Then there came sad news from Berlin. Frankel 
 had been chosen by the congregation there to become their chief 
 Rabbi, and must leave Dessau. Only a few days before this 
 Mendel had said to his son : — 
 
 " Thou wilt learn all from wise Rabbi Frankel that he himself 
 knows ; he will give thee all his treasures, and shew^ thee the way to 
 even more than he himself can give ; and so there will at last come a 
 day when thou wilt be even as he is, and wilt become a light in the 
 church like him." 
 
 Now it seemed as if all the boy's hopes had been suddenly 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 139 
 
 quenched. The day after the news came, Moses went to the 
 Rabbi and besought him with tears to take him to Berlin with 
 him. This, however, the Rabbi could not promise to do, be- 
 cause for one thing the boy was so weak and sickly. At last 
 came the day when Frankel was to leave Dessau. The Church 
 gave him a train of escort. All were in tears. But when Moses 
 was sought for he was not to be seen. All wondered where he 
 had gone, and the secret was not found out till the Rabbi was on 
 his way. The boy had left the town in the morning, and walked 
 some two miles out on the road that his beloved master must 
 go, and took up his station by the side of a graveyard, and 
 waited there till the Rabbi came forward, the tears streaming 
 down his pale cheeks. When Frankel caught sight of him, it 
 went to his heart. Moses was at length pacified by the Rabbi 
 saying, that later, when he was stronger, and when his father 
 could make up his mind to part with him, he would let him come 
 to Berlin, and be included among his Talmud students. Moses 
 covered the master's hand with kisses and tears. After the 
 teacher had gone on his way, the boy stood on the spot watching 
 till the travellers were lost amid the woods. 
 
 By-and-bye it became necessary for the Mendelssohns to think 
 seriously of the business in life to which Moses should betake 
 himself. His own ideas on the subject were clear, and willing 
 though he always was to listen to reasonable and practical coun- 
 sel, in this case arguments made no impression upon him. To 
 hawking and peddling, which were then almost the only pursuits 
 to which a poor Jew in Germany could turn, Mendelssohn had 
 an inveterate dislike. He therefore proposed to his father that 
 he should be allowed to go to Berlin to join Rabbi Frankel. To 
 this his father at first seriously objected : but as the boy con- 
 tinued his importunity, he consented at last, and Moses, as we 
 have seen, started to walk to Berlin with hardly so much in his 
 pocket as would procure him a day's food. 
 
 II. 
 
 Once through the gate, with quick steps he bounded up the 
 Rosenthaler Strasse, and was soon in the presence of Frankel, who 
 received him gladly, but not without some surprise. In answer 
 
I40 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 to the very natural question how he was to live, Mendelssohn 
 said that he would eat bread with salt and drink water, sleep 
 upon the hard earth, and cheerfully bear a life full of hardship 
 and privation, if he were only with his teacher. 
 
 " That is all very good, Moses," said the Rabbi, quietly, " but 
 bread and salt throughout the year will cost a piece of gold, and 
 even a hard bed that a Talmud student would be content to lie 
 on need not be sought for in the street." But the Rabbi's heart 
 melted to the boy, and he said at last, " We must do what we can, 
 our God will not forsake us if we do the right : and what I do for 
 thee is for His cause." Then he took Moses kindly by the hand 
 and led him into the house, and had food set before him. Without 
 loss of time he spoke to some of his friends on behalf of Moses. 
 One of these, Heimann Bamberger by name, a member of the 
 S3magogue, agreed to give Moses a garret for a bed-chamber 
 and a free table one day a-week : while on the Sabbath and on 
 feast days he was to have a place at Frankel's table. 
 
 Moses was assiduous in his studies and steady in his attend- 
 ance on the Rabbi's teaching. He never suffered from the 
 drowsiness apt to be induced by a plethora of creature com- 
 forts. When he could earn a few groschen by copying out 
 Hebrew texts or passages from the Talmud he was happy. He 
 tells us that with the money he thus earned he would purchase a 
 loaf, and notch it into so many parts ; in this way, eking it out 
 to its very utmost. He indulged in only two of these poor meals 
 a-day — ^breakfast and supper, and when the free table day came 
 round his bread was often reduced to a little bit no bigger than 
 one's finger. He did not eat according to his appetite, but 
 according to his hopes of earning more groschen. Not every day 
 of the week did he have a warm dinner to strengthen and cheer 
 him ; he was too often reduced to what he himself had reckoned 
 as a Talmud student's fare — " Bread, salt, and water." Herr 
 Schmidt may well ask, " What would many young students say 
 if they had to live for one week as Mendelssohn lived for years ? " 
 
 With that peculiar and discreet foresight which is as remarkable 
 in Mendelssohn as his depth of thought and independence of 
 mind, he now began to try and make a careful study of German, 
 in the conviction that to be able to correspond freely and in a 
 good handwriting would be greatly in his favour. And it is very 
 noticeable that in his deepest distress and poverty, he never bore 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 141 
 
 himself as though he were ill-used and neglected by those who 
 could help and patronise. " What am I," he would say, even at 
 this time, " that people should concern themselves or burden 
 themselves with me, because I have set my mind on learning. 
 No, I must work hard and fare hard to make myself worthy, and 
 then I may gain good men's favour." 
 
 His German books soon began to be a consolation to him. 
 He often sat over them far into the night. The first philosophical 
 German book that he read was Reinbeck's " Betrachtungen der 
 Augsburgischen Confession." But his grief and surprise may be 
 guessed when, having been seen one day by a co-religionist, with 
 a German book under his arm, he received a severe reproof, and 
 was threatened with more efficient penalties, from which, how- 
 ever, it is to be inferred that Rabbi Frankel saved him.* 
 
 Even at this time, and amid all his sufferings, Mendelssohn 
 found it in his power to benefit others. This, no less than the 
 great risks he ran, is well brought out by an anecdote which a 
 well-known liberal Jew was wont to tell later in life, of his 
 association with Mendelssohn in their juvenile days. 
 
 " In the year 1 746," he says, " I came as a poor fourteen year 
 old boy to Berlin, and found Moses Mendelssohn in the Jewish 
 Educational Institute (Moses Mendelssohn had come to Berlin 
 three years earlier). He took a great interest in me, taught 
 me to read and write, and often shared with me his miserable 
 allowance of bread. Out of gratitude to him I was glad to 
 render him any little service that I could, and so he would 
 often send me to bring him a German book. On a certain day 
 a Jewish overseer met me with one of those books in my hand, 
 and immediately cried to me, ' Ah, what have you there ? actually 
 a German book ! ' At the same moment he snatched it out of 
 my hand and dragged me before a magistrate, who gave the 
 order to put me out of the City. Mendelssohn, who soon 
 heard . of my fate, spared no trouble to secure my recall, but 
 hopelessly." 
 
 It is a somewhat remarkable circumstance that, though the 
 Polish Jews were more numerous by comparison with the natives 
 than those in most other European countries, and had enjoyed 
 immunity from many of the penalties and persecutions imposed 
 
 • It is with regret we learn that Rabhi Frankel died at a comparatively early age, having 
 passed away at Berlin on the 4th April 1762, in his ssth year.— Kayserling, p. 9. 
 
142 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 on their brethren elsewhere, they were yet, as a class, narrow, 
 illiberal, and prejudiced, inclined to visit with great severity any 
 new idea that seemed to conflict with traditional notions, and all 
 too decisively proscribed those who were so bold as to announce 
 them. A young schoolmaster of Stary-Samosz, named Israel 
 Ben Levi, had, through his excess of frankness, made himself re- 
 pugnant to the Talmudists there, and found his position so un- 
 comfortable, that he came to Berlin to teach. For a long time 
 he lived in great distress ; but at length he got the friendship and 
 the favour of the rich and distinguished David Itzig, who im- 
 proved his circumstances. It was by a lucky chance that 
 Mendelssohn got acquainted with this worthy Jew, who was now 
 known as Israel Samosz. He was a man of fine intelligence, parti- 
 cularly expert in the mathematics, on which he had written some 
 able books.* Moses now began the study of mathematics under 
 Samosz, and soon found that Euclid opened up to him, as it 
 were, a new world. He had his hours for private lessons, and 
 also attended lectures which Samosz delivered to small audiences 
 of Jews. Samosz could at this time speak no other language than 
 Hebrew, so that Mendelssohn had recourse to a Hebrew transla- 
 tion of Euclid by Samosz, to which the translator had added 
 many problems of his own invention. In return for this instruc- 
 tion in the mathematics, Moses taught Samosz German as far as 
 he could; Samosz was also well acquainted with the religious 
 philosophy of Maimonides and Rabbi Albo, and the common 
 interest felt in these subjects formed a new bond between them. 
 Many were the topics they discussed together, with great mutual 
 benefit. The influence of Samosz was very powerful in the de- 
 velopment of Mendelssohn's mind. The new field of thought — 
 rich and stimulating as it was — opened up by the mathematics 
 and the Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages, aroused in 
 Mendelssohn a strong desire to learn the classical tongues. To 
 most it would have seemed as though in the circumstances 
 Mendelssohn had already enough work in hand, and would have 
 
 * Kayserling writes : — " Israel Samosz, ein treff licher Kopf und grosser Mathematiker,' 
 durch seine Commentare zu ' Ruach Eben,' zum Talmud und zum ' Kusari ' ruhmlicbst 
 bekannt,"p. 14. We learn further that Samosz, notwithstanding the great liberalisation 
 which soon came over Judaism, and the more friendly atmosphere which he found in Ber- 
 lin, never got over the depressing effect of his proscription in Poland. Mirabeau tells us: — 
 " The excitement and vexation induced by the persecution of his co-religionists sank Sam osz 
 into a profound melancholy which terminated his days by a premature death." — 
 Mirabeau, p. 5. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 143 
 
 been wiser to direct his attention to something that might have 
 brought him money. But he was quite content with his two 
 frugal diets a-day and his garret bed, if he could but procure 
 knowledge. Out of his small earnings he was even able to save 
 a trifle to buy books. He laid groschen to groschen, and it was 
 a happy day for him, we are told, when he carried home an old 
 Latin grammar and a tattered lexicon. To these he applied him- 
 self with the greatest eagerness ; by and bye he was able to pro- 
 cure two other old books, — one a volume of Cicero, and the 
 other a Latin translation of Locke's " Essay on the Human 
 Understanding." At these he worked away assiduously. For 
 most words in the latter he had to hunt in his lexicon ; but he 
 was resolute and turned the work into German, thus gaining at 
 the same time a very fair idea of the philosophy of Locke. 
 
 Meanwhile, he had found a helping hand. There had just 
 come to Berlin from Prague, a young Jewish physician named 
 Kisch, who, in the Jesuit College of his native place had been 
 well instructed in Latin and Greek. On the representation of 
 Israel Samosz, Kisch agreed to give Mendelssohn a quarter of an 
 hour a day to explain any difficulty he met with in the Latin 
 grammar or in the rules. Moses believed that this language would 
 prove very difficult to him ; but Kisch assured him that it would 
 come easy to a good head,* and he gladly availed himself of the 
 aid that was offered, remaining an attached friend of Kisch so 
 long as he stayed in Berlin. After fully a year's residence in Berlin, 
 Kisch returned to Prague, where he laboured in season and 
 out of season for the culture and the emancipation of his 
 brethren, t 
 
 In a few months, through Kisch's friendly aid, Moses was able 
 to read Plato and Socrates in good Latin translations, and his 
 soul was filled with joy over the great thoughts of these " Masters 
 of those who know." As he began to understand the Latin 
 better, he came to perceive that it was the foundation of all the 
 modem languages ; and he studied with the greater devotion be- 
 cause he now saw that it was the key by which he might the more 
 easily unlock the treasures of the French and EngHsh. 
 
 * Moses glaubte, dass diese Sprache viel Schwierigkeiten haben wurde; aber Kisch 
 versicherte, dass sie einem guten Kopfe leicht wiirde.— ^. Schmidt. 
 t Wo er fur die Verbreitung der Bildung unter seinen Glaubensgenossen thatig war. 
 
r44 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 III. 
 
 After the peace of Dresden in 1745, the King of Prussia made 
 his triumphal entry into BerHn, and there were great festivities. 
 The Jews had resolved to be in no whit behind their neighbours. 
 They decorated their synagogue and prepared for a special ser- 
 vice. Chief Rabbi Frankel composed an address for the occa- 
 sion, and a very fine Hebrew poem had also been produced, 
 which had been set to music. In order that their Christian 
 fellow-citizens might have the best token of their loyalty, they 
 wished to have this poem translated into German. They com- 
 mitted this task to a young Berlin Jew, called Aaron Emerich, 
 who was then a student of medicine, and who later became the 
 well-known Dr Aaron Salomon Gumpertz. It was here that 
 Mendelssohn and he first met, discovered in each other attrac- 
 tive qualities, and speedily became close friends. That friend- 
 ship was fruitful for both. If Mendelssohn had not met Gum- 
 pertz at the time he did, he might never have been what he be- 
 came. Gumpertz, besides his eminent knowledge of medicine, 
 was an expert mathematician — that was one point for interesting 
 associations ; but he was also well read in German literature, had 
 studied Liebnitz and Wolff and Thomasius, knew the outs and 
 ins of German speculation, and had listened with eager interest 
 to the lectures of Gottsched at Leipsic. He was an accomplished 
 linguist speaking several European languages — among them 
 French and EngHsh. To him belongs the merit of having en- 
 couraged Mendelssohn to a careful and critical study of the Ger- 
 man language, and of first really interesting him in the problems 
 of modern philosophy. About a year after the death of Gum- 
 pertz in Hamburg, Mendelssohn wrote — " Through my fortunate 
 meeting with the lamented Doctor it was that I have any taste 
 for metaphysical study." Gumpertz willingly devoted time to teach 
 him French and English, directed him to the best books, and 
 was ready to lend him volumes from his own store, sparing no 
 cost or labour to help and to cheer his friend. He was indeed 
 to the young Mendelssohn as a mine, that being opened, proved 
 to be full of sparkling ores. But had Mendelssohn not been 
 eager in his application, it is hardly to be expected that Gum- 
 pertz would have taken so much thought and trouble to instruct 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 145 
 
 him. He introduced Mendelssohn to many of the younger men of 
 the Joachimsthal Gymnasium, with whom he could practise him- 
 self in the art of speaking French and English, and exchange 
 thoughts about books. 
 
 Mendelssohn was now in his one-and-twentieth year. For- 
 timately, when he began to think that the future only darkened 
 the more the more that he worked and struggled, the clouds 
 parted and the sun shone, never again to withdraw its countenance 
 from him. A rich silk merchant, Isaac Bernhard, a member of 
 the synagogue, wanted a tutor for his children ; Mendelssohn 
 was recommended to him, and won his regard. Instead of the 
 squalid garret with two stinted meals a-day and a free table once 
 a week, he was now installed in this rich man's house with a fair 
 salary, a beautifully furnished room, free access to books, and 
 good society. Dwelling, table, and a handsome sum of money ! 
 Is it possible ? said Mendelssohn to himself. He fancied that 
 he dreamt as he looked round the room that he was told was his 
 own. On the wall there hung a beautiful engraving — Jacob and 
 Laban. He thought, as he looked at it, that as Jacob served his 
 seven years, so he had served seven years for the freedom, the 
 comfort, and the peace that were now to be his. His duties he 
 found to be, in the best sense, congenial. In spite of his shy- 
 ness, he soon won the hearts of the children, who would have 
 done anything for their tutor. Out of a salary that to him was 
 ample, he could buy books, and in his spare time carry on undis- 
 turbed his little projects of translation and composition. During 
 the first year, he was chiefly occupied with philosophy ; he re- 
 newed his study of Locke, perused Leibnitz, and lived so com- 
 pletely in speculative ideas that modern languages were some- 
 what set aside. Instead, his metaphysical studies led him back 
 to Plato and Aristotle ; and now he became possessed by a wish 
 to master Greek. He bought a grammar and some books, and 
 laboured on for a time, but made so little way that he was fain to 
 relinquish the attempt — he who, unaided or with but little aid, 
 had mastered so much. 
 
 But with all his passion for knowledge and his philosophizing, 
 his duties were always faithfully done. In nothing was he per- 
 functory. His master soon observed his methodical and careful 
 ways. He noticed too that he wrote a very neat hand, and was 
 good at figures. Just when he was about to complete his fourth 
 
 K 
 
146 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 year of tutorial life, Bemhard met him with a proposal, which was 
 equally flattering and profitable. It was that he should become 
 a clerk in his silk factory. Mendelssohn assented, and thus be- 
 gan a connection which was life-long. In a short time he was 
 made cashier ; after a few years he became manager, and was by 
 and bye admitted a partner — proof enough that his studies did 
 not unfit him for a faithful and judicious discharge of the duties 
 that were required of him. 
 
 Already had arisen in Mendelssohn's mind the desirability of 
 doing something to awaken his co-religionists to the advantages of 
 a wider culture than was at that time common among them. The 
 bulk of the Jews in Germany then knew no language but their own; 
 German they spoke in a manner so broken as to make them 
 ridiculous. Only the learned knew their own Hebrew gram- 
 matically ; and they generally devoted themselves to the worst 
 kind of casuistical quibbling, instead of endeavouring to recall the 
 earlier and better traditions of the rabbinical life. As for modern 
 science, it was held as something to be protested against. With 
 the hope of doing a little to mend matters in this respect, 
 Mendelssohn joined with a friend, Tobias Bock, in the writing 
 and publishing of a little weekly print, in Hebrew, called 
 " Koheleth Nussor," or " The Moral Preacher," of which, 
 unfortunately, only two parts appeared. It consisted chiefly of 
 short essays on subjects in natural history, with moral reflec- 
 tions on the beauties of nature and the wise adaptations 
 apparent in it, together with notes on striking passages in 
 the Talmud and other rabbinical writings, framed in the most 
 reverent spirit and the most attractive manner. But even this 
 was too much for the Jewish magnates of these days. They 
 interfered and threatened, and the timid Mendelssohn, dis- 
 inclined to strife or to notoriety, urged on Bock to discontinue 
 it for peace's sake. The circumstance is very significant of the 
 bigotry of the Jews in these days, and of the repressing effects of 
 the conditions of separation and alienation in which, chiefly 
 owing to the oppressive measures directed against them, they 
 then lived. They were fearful of any contact with Gentile science 
 and learning; and deemed it the only safe course for their 
 younger people that they should be kept apart from such in- 
 fluences. There is much to be said in excuse for them, but 
 nothing is to be said in their praise. Their policy was of the most 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 147 
 
 short-sighted kind. They were, by providence, placed in the 
 midst of Gentiles and in daily contact with Gentile science and 
 learning; and the bar thus put on the development of the Jewish 
 intellect did not a little to maintain the disabilities under which 
 they groaned. How utterly irrational, for example, was their dis- 
 like to the study of German and German literature. That a 
 people with such a capacity for worldly affairs should for so 
 long a time have declined to take advantage of the key that was 
 most likely to open the door for them in this respect, and that 
 for religious and national reasons, however falsely conceived, is a 
 tribute to their conscientious honesty and unwavering devotion, 
 rather than to the qualities with which the race are more 
 commonly credited. 
 
 , Bock and Mendelssohn, by their " Moral Preacher," dropt a 
 seed by the way, which in course of time sprang up and bore 
 good fruit. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Just about the time when Mendelssohn was transferred to the 
 coimting-house at the silk factory, Lessing came to Berlin, and 
 took up his quarters near the Nicolaikirchhof, or Nicholas church- 
 yard. Besides some lesser plays he had already produced " Die 
 Juden ; " it had been acted and had raised quite a storm of 
 excitement. He was busy with many plans, and revolved in his 
 mind new plays, that should sustain and extend his fame. But 
 it was, as we have seen, a necessity of his nature that he should 
 be social. He was therefore very glad regularly to meet a ie.yf 
 congenial friends — among them, the " Kleine Bauzner " Nau- 
 mann — light and flighty as a butterfly; but a cheerful com- 
 panionable fellow, much respected in spite of his volatility, and 
 " determined to make a figure in the world ; " von Breitenbach ; 
 the musician Kimberger (who was later to be Mendelssohn's 
 teacher in piano-playing) ; Muchler ; and Doctor Gumpertz, who 
 was now secretary to Maupertius, president of the Royal Academy. 
 They discussed the topics of the day, the newspapers, new books, 
 and whatever else was of interest ; and as all liked a game at 
 chess, they formed in reality a kind of chess club. 
 
 Gumpertz conceived the friendly design of surprising Lessing 
 by introducing Mendelssohn into the party, with no further revela- 
 
148 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 tion of his merits and attainments than that he was a good chess 
 player. He was certain that the poor Jew from Dessau, who had 
 made himself famiUar with English and French, and had studied 
 Wolff and Leibnitz, Spinoza and Locke, and was so quiet 
 and modest and eager to learn, would assort well with the German 
 scholar who had given proof at once of his great powers and of his 
 boldness by directly laying siege to the citadel of German pre- 
 judices against the Jews. Gumpertz had reckoned rightly. The 
 two men soon discovered each other and became fast friends ; 
 and though they continued to play chess, that was but a secondary 
 interest in their relationship. The whole ifield of philosophy it 
 was their habit to traverse at these meetings. Lessing was 
 delighted with the clear, calm penetration, the loftiness of thought, 
 and the retiring modesty of his friend ; while Mendelssohn was 
 moved to admiration of Lessing's great culture, his candour, the 
 combination in him of depth and simplicity, and his remarkable 
 force of character. Very soon the two men had signified their 
 high estimation of each other. Within a few months, we find 
 Lessing writing thus to Michaelis, telling him, among other 
 things, of a new aquaintance : — 
 
 " He is actually a Jew, a man of some twenty years of age, who 
 without any aid whatever has made himself expert in languages, in 
 mathematics, in philosophy and in poetry. I already discern in him 
 the future honour of his nation, if only his co-religionists, who have 
 always exhibited an unfortunate spirit of persecution towards people 
 like him, would let his great gifts come to ripeness. His honesty and 
 his philosophic spirit make me regard him as a second Spinoza." 
 
 By and bye they met almost daily. Either Mendelssohn went 
 to Lessing's rooms or Lessing came to his; occasionally the early 
 morning hours were devoted to this intercourse ; mutual help and 
 counsel in matters of doubt or difficulty were given and received 
 with the freedom and generosity which great souls only know. 
 Towards the end of 1754, Lessing, who in much was able to 
 direct the studies of Mendelssohn, gave him a treatise of Shaftes- 
 bury to read. After a time Mendelssohn returned the book, and 
 to the question what he thought of it, replied, " Very good ; but 
 I think I could do something like it myself." " Indeed," said 
 Lessing, "then let us see the something.'' In a short time 
 Mendelssohn, by way of fulfilment of his promise, brought to 
 Lessing a manuscript to look through. He waited for a few 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 149 
 
 months somewhat anxiously, and when at last he asked whether 
 Lessing had read the manuscript, he was put ofif with an excuse. 
 But the next time that Mendelssohn went to see Lessing, he was told 
 that the writing had been read ; and he was now presented with 
 the printed proofs of it, and a small honorarium was also handed 
 to him for the copyright, with the remark that it might be found 
 useful. This was Lessing's practical appreciation of the writing; 
 he had made all the arrangements for its publication. It was in 
 this way that the " Philosophische Gesprache " was presented 
 to the public. In it Mendelssohn makes no ambitious attempt to 
 indicate a system : he merely seeks to set forth the leading points 
 in the philosophy of Leibnitz and of Spinoza, and to criticise them 
 faithfully ; sometimes showing an unexpected delicacy and in- 
 cisiveness". Certainly to few has it been given to comprehend 
 more fully or to interpret with finer sympathy the aims of the 
 philosophic Jew of Amsterdam.* 
 
 Mendelssohn doubtless showed too great an ingenuity to find 
 in Spinoza's the forecast of Leibnitz's " Pre-established Har- 
 mony," as well as the suggestion of leading ideas in the systems of 
 other philosophers ; and he himself soon became alive to this ; 
 but his penetration is wonderful, his language lucid, and his 
 presentation of the subject wholly worthy of the man who later 
 was to write the " Phaedon.'' 
 
 Lessing, as we have seen, was, especially in the earlier period 
 of his life, the slave of impulses which constantly demanded change 
 of scene, circumstances, associates; sometimes leading to very 
 sudden disappearances from circles of loving companions. To 
 the regret of his Berlin friends and to the great loss of Mendelssohn, 
 he left Berlin for Leipsic in the earlier part of 1755. Their depri- 
 vation is, however, our profit. A series of characteristic letters 
 which at different times he wrote to his Berlin friends remain for 
 our study. And before he left he introduced to Mendelssohn a 
 fi-iend who was to form a firm link between them, and to do much 
 for the fame of both. This was Frederick Nicolai, a bookseller, 
 who later became the well-known publisher of Berlin. He was 
 some four or five years younger than Mendelssohn ; but he was 
 thoughtful, and deeply interested in the same topics. He had been 
 
 -* Mendelssohn bediente slch urn Spinoza zu Ehren und Ausehen zu bringen, des feinen 
 Kunstgriffs, Leibnitz auf Spinoza zuruckzufiihren ; er woUte beweisen, dass die vorher- 
 bestimmte Harmonie, der Fundamentalbegriff des Lcibnizischen Systems, Spinoza's 
 Eigenthum und von ihm zuerst der welt bekaunt gemacht szl—Kayserling, p. 45. 
 
ISO 
 
 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 ^^. 
 
 .kJ^"' 
 
 educated partly at a gymnasium in Halle and partly at the Real 
 Schule in Berlin, and had then passed on to Frankfort-on-the- 
 Oder to learn bookselling, with a view to taking a share in his 
 father's business in Berlin. But here he sought the society of 
 students and professors, for the sake of culture, and was then, as 
 he confesses, more intent on mastering the contents of books than 
 on learning how to sell them, though he did not altogether neglect 
 that matter either. Mathematics, history, and philosophy he had 
 specially studied, and had formed a particular affection for the 
 EngUsh literature. From early morning till midnight he sat over 
 his books ; sometimes the return of dawn found him still busily 
 turning over the pages of a new favourite. He had published 
 some letters on the present position of Belles-Lettres in' Germany, 
 which in the end of 1754 brought him acquainted with Lessing; 
 and having read the " Philosophische Gesprache," soon there- 
 after he begged Lessing to introduce him to a man who was " in 
 the highest sense of the words, the honourable and excellent 
 Mendelssohn."* In a short time they were on terms of the fullest 
 intimacy, seeing each other twice or three times a week. Men- 
 delssohn could aid Nicolai in his philosophical studies, and 
 opened up to him many new fields of thought, while Nicolai 
 helped Mendelssohn in the Greek which he had once more 
 taken up ; only, however, to become a second time dubious of his 
 capacity to succeed in it. In after years — ^for Nicolai long out- 
 lived his two friends — he was very fond of recalling these earlier 
 days of their association, and has left little fragments pertaining 
 to it in several of his publications, besides what he has said of it 
 in his autobiography. This is one of his reminiscences of these 
 earlier meetings : — 
 
 "Lessing and Moses were like each other in their free-hearted 
 throwing aside of all prepossessions, like each other in their pure- 
 heartedness, like each other generous and free of all pretension, like 
 each other acute in sharply following minute distinctions and clear 
 definitions of ideas. Lessing was more vivacious in his searches 
 after truth, and not seldom showed his sagacity very effectively ; only 
 he was at all times ready to refute or to defend what did not appear 
 to him to have been strongly enough refuted or defended. Moses was 
 more deliberate, with a more distinct determination towards definitive 
 results. Nicolai was at least like them in lively love of truth, in good 
 wiU and open-heartedness ; like them eager for every ray of new 
 knowledge, that might be gained through greater clearness of idea. 
 
 * Nicolai: Ueber meine Gelehrte Bildung (Berlin 1799), p. 40. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 151 
 
 All three were truly cheerful spirits, so that their conversation was 
 generally lightened up by wit and humour, but always associated with 
 such fairness and consideration that though during their many years' 
 acquaintance, they had not a few disputes, never a misunderstanding, 
 not to speak of dissension, arose to mar the harmony of their inter- 
 course. Absent, as well as present, they ever remained bound in the 
 ties of reciprocal good-will and affection ; and stood in the most open- 
 hearted interchange of thoughts and feelings."* 
 
 As Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Nicolai with other friends were 
 together one evening, it was agreed that, by way of pleasant pas- 
 time, each of those present should celebrate his defects in rhyme. 
 Mendelssohn wrote as follows : — 
 
 Demosthenes, the great call ye ? . 
 
 The stuttering Athenian orator he ! 
 The hunchback jEsop hold ye for wise ? 
 Within your circle, before your eyes, ' 
 
 One you have doubly great and wise. 
 For in union you have — a great surprise ! — 
 What separately one beheld in them — 
 Hunchback and stutterer in one frame ! t 
 Mendelssohn's chief anxiety for Lessing was that he should have 
 a settled life. He was ready to sacrifice much on his own side to 
 aid in the attainment of this for his friend. He was more likely 
 to appreciate fully the strong moral (sittlich) element in his 
 character, than the restless, and what we might almost call over- 
 social impulse in Lessing, which nevertheless did so much to 
 make him the unique man he was. It is touching and at the same 
 time almost amusing to read Mendelssohn's letters of gentle re- 
 proof and warning against Lessing's free-and-easy intimacy with 
 players while in Leipzig. He urges that Lessing's strong moral 
 nature could not be gratified by association with people, who 
 " first in the new time of freedom had been ready to appear in the 
 most frivolous aspects on the stage." % 
 
 * Nicolai's Selbstbiographie in " Berlin Savants," p. i6. 
 t Here is the German : — 
 
 Gross nennt Ihr der Demosthen, 
 
 Den stotternden Redner von Athen, 
 
 Den hockrigen ^sop halt't Ihr fur weise- 
 
 Triumpf I Ich werde in eurem Kreise 
 
 Doppelt gross und weise sein, 
 
 Denn Ihr habt bei nur in verein 
 
 Was man bei ^sop und Demosthen 
 
 Hat getrennt gehort und gesehen. 
 t Carl Lessing's Leben, p. i79- 
 
152 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 When Lessing intimates his arrangement to travel with young 
 Winkler, Mendelssohn does not know whether to rejoice on 
 account of his friend being thus removed from the society of 
 the Leipsic actors ; for there is certainly the fatal disadvantage 
 still of the " rolling stone that gathers no moss ;" and he writes : 
 
 " You have never any permanent abiding place ; but if you must 
 ' even roll like the quicksilver, I wish you every happiness therein. 
 Journey ever. Travel the world through. Get to know the thousand 
 fools who let themselves be the laughing-stocks of still greater fools ; 
 get to know the thousand wretched ones who still can be moved to 
 compassion for the yet more wretched. . . . Heaven knows, I 
 have right little leisure, but much weariness." 
 
 V. 
 
 The Royal Academy of Berlin had in the year 1753, given 
 out as the subject for the prize essay in the philosophical class, 
 the philosophical system of Pope, especially as unfolded in the 
 well-known line, " Whatever is is right," and in relation to the 
 philosophy of Leibnitz. Lessing judging rightly, had at once 
 come to the conclusion that the choice of this subject was due 
 to the president, Maupert^s, who was a declared enemy of the 
 philosophy of Leibnitz, and hoped thus to deal it a hidden blow. 
 Prfmontlral who was also a vigorous opposer of the Leibnitz- 
 Wolffian philosophy would, as was natural, readily enough second 
 such a proposal, and Sulzer and the rest very probably did not 
 exercise their own minds on the matter ; for as we shall in a 
 moment see, they failed to perceive the importance of the action 
 of Lessing and Mendelssohn, and had, in fact, little or no real 
 interest in its result. The two friends discussed this choice of 
 subject on the part of the academy, and were agreed that such a 
 choice should never have been made. They resolved to write 
 alittle treatise on " Pope as a metaphysician," which should 
 indirectly do something to restore the balance. The burden of 
 this essay, which was published in beginning of 1755, was this, 
 that a poet cannot develop a metaphysical system, without so 
 far sacrificing his character as poet, that his aim is unity and 
 vividness of impression, not abstract consistency; that even 
 though a poet may endeavour to embody in his work a system, 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 1S3 
 
 it will be inefficient as such, precisely in the measure that 
 imagination and poetic impulse prevail. Pope, it is true, affirms 
 many propositions in his " Essay on Man;" but he was in his 
 degree a poet, and these propositions are not logically scrutinised ; 
 they are indeed often contradictory of each other, insufficiently 
 supported by proof; and in fact, after you have set them together, 
 done your best to chp and pare them into something like a 
 positive and self-consistent body of truth, you have made a 
 philosophy of your own, not of Pope. Leibnitz and Pope are 
 proved to have little or nothing in common, and the origin of 
 Pope's leading ideas are traced to Shaftesbury and Archbishop 
 King — a portion of the work which is no doubt due to Lessing. 
 The criticisms on some of the separate lines and couplets is 
 hardly to be approached for keen penetration and philosophic 
 refinement. 
 
 Though the essay is clear, masterly and interesting, it did not 
 obtain a large sale. The authorship was kept strictly secret for 
 a long time ; and it is almost amusing to read such passages as 
 this, in a letter to Lessing on 19th November 1755: — "Will 
 nobody read 'Pope, a Metaphysician?' Professor Sulzer has 
 already asked me more than once, whether there was any good 
 in it ? I assured him that the little writing had pleased me, and 
 if I did not err, this brought a little red to his face. He gave 
 me to understand that he was neither pleased with this work nor 
 with the prize essay."* 
 
 Very striking is the note at the beginning of this essay to the 
 following effect : — " This writing has two authors, and therefore 
 under no sentiment can it more appropriately appear than under 
 this one — ■ 
 
 Compulerant greges Corydon et Thyrsis in unum." 
 
 And it may not be out of place to note here — since in other 
 places besides the Comhill Magazine we have recently seen 
 " Pope, a Metaphysician," spoken of as though it were exclusively 
 the work of Lessingt — the shares of the respective authors in it. 
 Mendelssohn contributed the philosophical thoughtand apparatus, 
 as for instance, the Baumgartenlike elucidation of a poem as 
 oratio ferfecta sensitiva (p. 10), which he also in his later works 
 
 * Kayserling, p. 55. 
 
 t Even Mr James Sime, in his " Life of Lessing," says that it was substantially the work 
 of Lessing; an advocate of Mendelssohn might more justly say that it was substantially his 
 work. 
 
 > 
 
154 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 brought to fuller application (i. 294, and iv. i, 230), as well as the 
 idea of comparing Shaftesbury with Leibnitz (p. 31), and the 
 tracing of the first principles of Pope to Malebranche (p. 11). 
 Form and general structure were due to Lessing. 
 
 While this work was in course of being printed, the volume of 
 essays titled " Briefe ueber die Empfindungen," was published. 
 Mendelssohn's remarkable intellectual activity, no less than his 
 insight and penetrating delicacy, is conspicuously seen in these 
 letters, several translations of which speedily appeared, though it 
 was reserved for Abbt to translate them into French.* 
 
 His mathematical studies led Mendelssohn to an interest in 
 musical mathematics. He had read the great work of Euler, 
 but in order that he might the better understand the subject he 
 now took lessons from Kirnberger, who seldom could have had 
 a more eager or a more innocently puzzling pupil. Very amus- 
 ing certainly are some of his discussions with his master on the 
 identity or the non-identity of the | and | time, Mendelssohn 
 holding firmly that, as a mathematician he knew no % which was 
 not also I, and very ingeniously justifying his positions, some- 
 what to Kirnberger's dismay at the first, t 
 
 Mendelssohn at this time composed many poems. One of 
 them — a hymn of thanksgiving translated from the Hebrew — 
 was greatly praised by Lessing. Perhaps the best of them was 
 the " Psalm for the day of Atonement," which he composed for 
 Kirnberger to set to music ; but all the poems of this time were 
 surpassed by the " Ode to the Praise of God," which is still to 
 be found in selections of sacred poetry. 
 
 At the end of the year 1755, some friends of Nicolai and 
 Mendelssohn joined with them to establish a kind of coffee- 
 house, where they could meet and talk and play a game of chess. 
 There were a hundred members, amongst them, Euler, the 
 mathematician, Martino, Alpinus, Lieut. Jacobi, Kirnberger, 
 Gumpertz, Bamberger, and Wilke, who was later secretary to the 
 Swedish Academy of Science. 
 
 Play and amusement were not the only objects of this society. 
 
 * Under the title of" Recherches sur les Sentiments." — Geneva and Berlin, 1764. 
 
 t " Als ich Musik lernen wollte," schreibt Mendelssohn noch im August 1764 an Abbt 
 (v. 33i)> "und im Spielen sehr oft wider den Takt sundigte, sagte mein kluger Meister." 
 Mein Gott 1 Wiseen Sic denn nicht, dass §, soviel sindals H? Pragen Sie sich das doch 
 ein— 5, I, H- I^er Gute Mann 1 Theoretisch wusste ich es so gut und wohl noch besser 
 als er. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 155 
 
 Papers on mathematical, physical, or philosophical subjects were 
 read by the members ; and once a month, a meeting of a more 
 important character was held when papers of more special 
 importance were read. Mendelssohn prepared one of these and 
 read it. A member of the society, a Scotchman named Middle- 
 ton,* chanced to come in just as the reading was begun. After 
 he had listened for a while, he placed himself next to Mendels- 
 sohn and asked in a whisper who was the author of the paper. 
 Mendelssohn warned him not to interrupt the reading, but 
 added that the reader was the author. On this Middleton only 
 shook his head, because he did not believe that any member 
 could write such a paper — a point on which, as justifying the 
 cautious scepticism of his race, he for a while refused to be con- 
 vinced. Mendelssohn was in reality the author, and the essay 
 was that " on Probability" (Ueber die Wahrscheinlichkeit) 
 which appears in his collected works. 
 
 Lessing and Mendelssohn had already become seriously alive 
 to the necessity of opposing the stream of self-interested, and as 
 they thought, Frenchified commonplace with which the German 
 reading public was now at all times assailed. Their idea was to 
 pubUsh a weekly sheet, which under cover of conveying extracts 
 and epitomes from books, would by and bye admit of more 
 original and efficient work. The title proposed was " The Best 
 out of Bad Books " (Das Beste aus schlechten Biichern). The 
 first part was soon ready, so far as manuscript was concerned. 
 We find Mendelssohn writing to Lessing on the 17th February 
 1755 as follows : — 
 
 " I should like to know if you are still in the full intention of 
 actually issuing the periodical, and whether I should forward to 
 you the Recension of the Psychologic which you sent to me to 
 read through for this purpose. You wished three and a half 
 manuscript sheets, and I beheve that you will be tolerably well 
 pleased with it."— " Sammlung," p. 182, edited by Heinemann. 
 
 On the 1 8th February Lessing repUes :— " I hope within three 
 weeks again to be in BerHn, and I will only say to you before- 
 hand that we shall immediately begin to print our work t in some 
 such form as your " Philosophische Gesprache." The projected 
 journal proceeds likewise certainly to a good issue. You shall 
 
 * I have been unable to find any trace of who this Middleton was. 
 
 t This was probably the essay on "Pope a Metaphysician," which, though written, was 
 not printed till this time. 
 
 Tvi 
 
156 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 see the first sheet printed in about eight days. . . . Send me 
 your Recension of the Psychology by next post. Have you not 
 also still something else that you could lay by for me ? Be so 
 good as to ask Herr Gumpertz, with my best compliments, 
 whether he likewise has not something." * 
 
 Mendelssohn speedily despatched his work, as we find from 
 the following notice in a letter of Lessing's of this date — " My 
 friend Moses has sent me a pair of beautiful essays out of a bad 
 compendium of the Cartesian Philosophy." 
 
 We cite these letters to show how deeply in earnest the friends 
 were in this matter, and ready at their own risk to lead a forlorn 
 hope against the prejudices of the day. Though it is thus clear 
 that two or three numbers were actually prepared, we cannot fiiid 
 trace of any having ever been published ; and it is more than 
 probable that the whole thing was merged in the " Bibliothek der 
 schonen Wissenschaften," which ere long followed, and of which 
 we shall speak anon. 
 
 Mendelssohn did not, any more than his contemporaries, 
 escape the insinuating influence of Rousseau ; and though he was 
 always clear enough on the evils of the anti-social tendency of 
 Rousseau's writings, he deeply admired the clearness, the sug- 
 gestiveness, and the simplicity and force of his style. Rousseau 
 presented a very interesting problem to Mendelssohn, who care- 
 fully studied all that he wrote, t It was Rousseau's essay on the 
 origin of the dififerences amongst men t that now occupied his 
 attention. It was like the pained outcry of some deeply moved 
 and noble human heart. Still, as before, to Mendelssohn it 
 seemed that Rousseau had only in his eye the shady side of 
 culture. In answer to a letter of Lessing's, dated 8th Decem- 
 ber 1755, asking how he gets on with Rousseau, he writes : — • 
 
 " The translation of Rousseau will soon be ready.§ Still some- 
 where about three sheets are to print. I can be at variance with 
 
 * Though we may in some respect regret the loss, yet it is with a sense of satisfaction we 
 learn that Dr Gumpertz married a rich Jewish lady in Hamburg, and so far relinquished 
 philosophy, though it is pleasing to know that he was always delighted to hear of the pro- 
 gress of his" erewhile scholar. 
 
 + Later he contributed to the '' Literary Letters " an essay on " The New Heloise." — 
 Theil X., Schriften IV., pp. 260-278. 
 
 X Rede von dem Ursprunge der Ungleichheit unter den Menschen. 
 
 § The work was brought under the notice of Rousseau himself by Weisse, who some 
 years afterwards visited the author of "Emile," and presented him with the translation 
 together with a copy of the " Phffidon," and asked him to read them. Rousseau replied 
 that, though now he read no books, he would read the translation, because they had been 
 sent by Moses Mendelssohn. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 157 
 
 Rousseau in very few points, and shall no more vex myself when 
 I, in philosophical mood, demonstrate to my own satisfaction his 
 inconsistencies about necessity and reason. If only he would 
 not deny all morality to the civilised man. For that I am indeed 
 sincerely sorry, as need is." 
 
 It is possible to detect a tone of dehcate raillery in the 
 following written to Lessing about this time : — 
 
 "Write always, if I may beg of you, your long letters to Herr 
 Nicolai. He has the good fortune that you always write the best 
 letters to him. In truth, the short letters to Nicolai contain better 1 "jTyl, 
 ideas than the longer ones that fall to my share. I send you back 
 your last letter, because in discussion I believe I could take it to 
 pieces — only I beg of you to return it to me. The man who believes 
 he can defend me with such bad weapons, should bring me to a sense 
 of humiUty ; for he proves what a weak enemy I must be." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Bemhard had as good reason to be satisfied with the book- 
 keeper, as he had had to be pleased with the private tutor. The 
 young man had commenced his work with the greatest spirit, 
 and did not shirk hard labour. In the winter of 1755, ^6 '^^^ 
 at his desk from eight o'clock in the morning till nine at night. 
 But soon his hours were made shorter, as his great value was 
 perceived. Already in March 1756, he wrote to Lessing — "You 
 will perhaps learn with pleasure that I propose this summer to 
 make the change in my way of life, to which you had so often 
 recommended me.* I do not now work longer in the office than 
 six hours, from eight in the morning till two ip the afternoon. 
 All the remaining hours are for my own studies — indeed the 
 whole time is for myself, but especially these spare hours, in 
 which I shall think of you, journey with you in the spirit, and 
 through your intercourse try more and more to improve myself 
 and to find enjoyment. To old acquaintances as well as I can 
 find opportunity, I pay my visits. I here refer more particularly 
 to Herr Professor Sulzer and to Herr Nicolai. With the last I ■ 
 have made more than acquaintanceship ; I beUeve that he has / 
 
 (^ 
 
 * Probably warnings given by Lessing that he was risking serious injury to his health 
 by close confinement. 
 
158 
 
 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 t 
 
 already come to friendship with us, and first really merits • of 
 us, that we seek his intercourse."* 
 
 His " Philosophische Gesprache," and the "Briefe iiber die 
 Empfindungen," had appeared anonymously, as well as his con- 
 tributions to the journals, because his intention was that "nobody 
 beyond a very few friends should know him for anything more 
 than a book-keeper." But his first eiforts had been so well 
 received, that many asked after the author, and, in spite of 
 himself, his name was already known in a wide circle. Many 
 visitors from various parts of Germany found their way to 
 Bernhard's factory to see and to speak with the little dark-eyed 
 Jewish clerk. 
 
 Professor Miichler said in a letter to Dr Heinemann : — " When 
 I first became acquainted with Mendelssohn, I called one day 
 and found him very busy in the house of the silk merchant 
 Bemhard. Close by him in the office stood a little book-case, 
 in which I noticed Klopstock's Messiah and a Bible with the 
 New Testament. I asked him, if he then had really read the 
 Messiah? He answered. Why not? As I read Homer and 
 Virgil, so I read the Messiah, prizing the beauty that 1 see in it ; 
 and in the New Testament what particularly pleases me are the 
 letters of the Apostle Paul, because they are so full of ethico- 
 religious ideas." t 
 
 The effect of his first advancements in Bernhard's service 
 naturally enough was to pre-occupy him ; so that for some time 
 he was comparatively unproductive. He himself in his quietly 
 cheerful way takes notice of this circumstance in a note to Von 
 Breitenbach on 19th April 1757 : — 
 
 "You are right," he then wrote, "my life in the kingdom of learn- 
 ing seems not to have lasted long. But I am not quite dead yet ! I 
 am at present much occupied with business, and creep along ; but 
 when this is over, who knows, whether I may not again take to my 
 wings." 
 
 "Business, business !" he writes to another friend; "how am I 
 prostrated with weakness, pain, and many labours ! It seems as 
 though, through my whole life, I must dream over projects never to 
 be realised ; and sometimes I fancy that nature may perhaps have 
 destined me only for a parade horse. What can one do, my dearest 
 friend ? We will be to one another help and cheer. So long as our 
 love for knowledge does not fail us, have we not a good hope ? " 
 
 • * Samralung, edited by Dr Heinemann, p. 196. 
 t Sammlung, von Heinemann^ p. 15, footnote. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 159 
 
 * 
 
 Poetry formed a great attraction when time failed him for 
 more ambitious philosophic studies. But, in spite of his pre- 
 occupations, we find him before long at work in conjunction 
 with Professor Miichler in writing for a journal called the 
 " Zeitschrift," which Miichler edited. These were chiefly trans- 
 lations from the Hebrew, of such pieces as might make the 
 German public in some degree acquainted with Hebrew litera- 
 ture. For this purpose he published pieces out of " Penini 
 Bedrusis Priifung der Welt," and the excellent elegy of R. Jehuda 
 Halevi. Goethe said : " There is a glow of yearning in this 
 elegy, such as we find in few poems."* 
 
 Mendelssohn was already in such circumstances as to be able 
 to relieve his poor friends from the worst pains of poverty ; and 
 very cheerfully and delicately was that help communicated in all 
 cases. A short time later Leasing in his necessity wrote to 
 Mendelssohn asking for the loan of sixty thalers. Sixty thalers 
 were no small sum for the book-keeper. With the frankness of 
 true friendship Mendelssohn wrote at once, saying that at the 
 present moment he had no more than thirty thalers, which he 
 would gladly send, and that in a month or six weeks he would be 
 able to send the other thirty, and by this means the pressing 
 needs of Lessing were successfully met. 
 
 Already in the summer of 1 7 5 7 we find him living as a thorough 
 (richtiger) Berliner. " I have," he wrote, " a very beautiful 
 garden with summer house wherein you could lodge. It is not 
 far off from Herr Nicolai's, and you can have therein all comforts 
 that you may wish. I come out here at six o'clock every 
 evening, most often accompanied by a few friends, whom you 
 know would not derange anything." Regularly in the morning 
 at six o'clock he was joined by his friend Nicolai to pursue 
 common studies.! 
 
 The eminence which the young Mendelssohn attained, and the 
 honours which were heaped upon him worked favourably on the 
 leading members of the Berlin synagogue. They were proud to 
 rank him amongst them. He, on his part, made use of his in- 
 fluence solely in the cause of greater liberality and toleration, 
 which is attested by the remarkable fact that on the occasion of 
 the thanksgiving for the victory of Rossbach in 1757 he was 
 selected by the elders to prepare a German address, which was 
 
 * Aus Herder's Nachlass, i. 130. t Kayserling, p. 108. 
 
i6o MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 read under their auspices. We find him referring in the following 
 
 (terms to the matter in a letter to Lessing : — " It is akeady pretty 
 widely known that I have written a sermon (predigt) and have 
 praised a king." 
 
 VII. 
 
 We have already seen that for some time Mendelssohn had 
 been labouring to get some knowledge of Greek through hard 
 work with translations and originals before him' for purposes of com- 
 parison, but his progress had been very slow, and he got hopeless. 
 Luckily he had mentioned his desire to Nicolai, who had ere 
 this devoted some time to the study of Greek. Nicolai assured 
 him that with assiduity in two or three years enough could be 
 mastered to enable him to read and to understand Plato 
 thoroughly. Moses doubted this, because he had already found 
 that the language was unspeakably difficult. To this last Nicolai 
 would not listen, reminding Mendelssohn that he had in his 
 younger years learned Latin and English afterwards almost with- 
 out any assistance. "Yes," cried Moses, " I might learn Greek 
 in this way, if in the reading I had always before me a man who 
 would be a living lexicon." 
 
 Nicolai and Mjendelssohn therefore agreed to meet and study 
 Greek together. First, as Moses wished it, they tried Xenophon, 
 but they soon had recourse to Homer. So many difficulties met 
 them, however, that both regarded it as a happy thing that the 
 old Rector Damm,* on Nicolai's representation, agreed to come 
 to Nicolai's room for two or three hours on Wednesdays and 
 Sundays to teach them. So congenial did the old man find this 
 work that not seldom the lesson was prolonged for two hours 
 more on the Sundays. Fully two years they thus spent in read- 
 ing Homer, and then they got a taste of other Greek authors. 
 Damm was delighted particularly with the Homer studies ; since, 
 for a life-time, he had studied Homer and was able to throw 
 light on most points. It was, however, a frequent cause of 
 amusement to the scholars to notice Damm's blindness to poetic 
 beauty, and his impatience of any diversion in that direction. 
 His great concern was that they should grammatically understand 
 the text, and yet he had a great weakness for fine words. Nicolai 
 
 * See Appendix. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. i6i 
 
 naively remarks that the high-sounding vocables pleased him, 
 and that, when he read such a word as mXupXoielSoio, he uncon- 
 sciously licked his lips.* Damm was not only master of 
 etymology, but his excursions into the field of classical antiquity 
 were particularly instructive, though he could not generally pro- 
 ceed very far without dragging in some reference to his favourite 
 idea of an allegorical element in Homer, without regard to which 
 he held that it was impossible rightly to comprehend the poems. 
 With this allegorical idea — under which the leading characters 
 were made to personify moral qualities, as Juno, love of power ; 
 Minerva, wisdom, for example — he combined this other that 
 Homer was the courtliest (hoflichste) man that the world had ever 
 seen. Nicolai writes : — 
 
 " It is right to acknowledge that these little peculiarities in the good 
 old man many times made us laugh. He was withal so patient, so con- 
 siderate, so good-natured, so tolerant in his dogmatism, that one could 
 not help entertaining the highest respect for him. Often it happened 
 that we were delighted with the particular beauty of a passage, which 
 we would contrast with others perhaps to their disadvantage. Then 
 Damm would look serious, and say, with great deliberation, ' That is 
 quite true, but we in our.youth did not learn that, but went by the words 
 as they stand.' So it was not unfrequently with him when we, without 
 reference to his allegorical modes of interpretation, would put forward 
 the remarks of newer critics on this passage or on that, and then when 
 he urged his views, declared them hardly consistent. This he took 
 nowise ill, but quite in good part. ... By all his little weaknesses, 
 Damm won more and more our respect and affection the more we got 
 to know him." 
 
 This relationship endured till the beginning of the summer of 
 1759. After the Iliad and the Odyssey were finished, they read 
 Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates, Plato's Apology, and Sym- 
 posium. Towards the end of 1758, Nicolai, owing to the death 
 of his eldest brother, was called to more active duty in the pub- 
 lishing house. But Moses still persevered. When he began the 
 lessons with Damm, he could hardly read a sentence of Greek, 
 now he had mastered Homer, Xenophon, and Plato, and had 
 translated some portions with great grace and skill, t Afterwards, 
 
 * Nur besass er beinahe nicht den geringsten Sinne fiir poetische Schonheit, sondern 
 emzig nur fur Wortwerstand ; und ebenfalls fiir der Wohlklang der Worter. Wenn er ein 
 Worte wie z. B. 5roXu^X(M(rj3oio 'as, so leckte er unwillkttrlich die IXf-gw,— Berliner 
 Monatschrift- 
 
 t One of these appeared in the " Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek."' Book i. , sec. a, 
 
 L 
 
1 62 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 Mendelssohn was always ready to aid the Rector, and some 
 advice given to him in 1763 with respect to the publication of 
 his translation and commentary on the New Testament, was of 
 the greatest practical service to the old man. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The year 1761 was notable on account of a new acquaintance, 
 whose relation with Mendelssohn was in so many ways fruitful 
 that some space must be devoted to it. This was Thomas Abbt, 
 a young man of remarkable powers, who was now Professor of 
 Mathematics at Rinteln in Westphalia, and who later became 
 Privy Councillor to Count Schaumburg-Lippe at Biickeburg. He 
 had, while still a student, read Mendelssohn's "Esthetic Letters," 
 and when on a visit to Berlin in 1 761, he had been introduced 
 to Mendelssohn. The acquaintance soon ripened into the 
 warmest friendship. A close and steady correspondence was 
 kept up ; each deriving many impulses to production from the 
 other. While to Abbt was due, amongst other things, the first 
 idea of the Phaedon, Mendelssohn in the introduction to that 
 work has raised a fitting monument to the memory of a genius, 
 who died young, ere he had been able to show one half his 
 powers.* 
 
 Some of Abbt's letters to Mendelssohn from Rinteln, occa- 
 sionally with MS., are very quaint and full of fine hints. " Poor 
 me ! " he exclaims, on one occasion, " no wife, no son, nobody 
 to praise me ! Nevertheless, one day you shall see my name 
 s^^ \ ^^^'i^S i^ *he ' Journal Etranger,' and the one bringing his son 
 to me, and the other his wife. Shall I then be wholly stripped 
 both of the actual and the imaginary good things of life ? " 
 
 * Abbt was bom on the 2Stli November 1738 at Ulm. He exhibited great talents as a 
 child, and attracted the notice of Professor Miiller of the Gymnasium, where he was 
 placed. He then proceeded to the University of Halle, where he applied himself to 
 philosophy and mathematics, deserting divinity, for which he had been originally intended. 
 In 1760, he became professor extraordinary of philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and 
 there, in the very midst of the war, he wrote his remarkable treatise on "Dying for one's 
 Country," In 1761 he became ordinary Professor of Mathematics at Rinteln, and on a visit 
 to Berlin while there made the acquaintance of Moses Mendelssohn. He tired of academ- 
 ical life, and travelled in Switzerland and France for some time. In 1765, he became Privy 
 Councillor to Count Lippe at Biickeburg, and died there in 1767, in the 28th year of his age. 
 His great work " On Merit *' (Vom Verdienst), is full of fine and original thought, and 
 is written in a pure style. — See Nicolai's " Ehrengedachtniss Herm Thomas Abbt," and 
 Herder's " Predigt auf Abbt." 
 
 }f\ 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 163 
 
 After Lessing, Abbt was perhaps the dearest and the most 
 trusted of Mendelssohn's friends, — able not only to comprehend 
 his ideas, but to sympathise with him in his most intimate feel- 
 ings. The tone of complete unreserve, relieved now and again 
 by a little delicate banter, which marks their correspondence, is 
 very characteristic and attractive. Kayserling says, that their 
 five-year-long uninterrupted correspondence is the monument of 
 a genuine philosophical friendship, and merits in fact to be set 
 side by side with the admirable letters of the sages of antiquity.* 
 Abbt, like Lessing and Nicolai, was an enthusiastic student of 
 English literature, and able occasionally to throw light into the 
 bye-ways. The intimate acquaintance with English literary history 
 which he showed as a mere youth, is indeed enough to indicate 
 his claim to notice. Much in the earlier correspondence 
 naturally turns on English books and English authors. It is 
 evident, for example, that in the end of the year 1761 Mendels- 
 sohn had seriously set about a translation of Shaftesbury ; for we 
 find him writing to Abbt on the 3d November. 
 
 " I have begun the translation of Shaftesbury. This work attracts 
 me uncommonly, and in spite of my weakness I make progress. I 
 hope this winter, if God will, to press it on quickly ; so that I may be YA 
 able to send for your judgment the essay upon ' Freedom of Wit and 
 Humour.' I am really puzzled to think what our theologians would 
 say if they saw a lord, a merchant, and a professor — a freethinker, a 
 Jew, and a Christian — Shaftesbury, Moses, and Abbt, going hand in 
 hand. Truly a beautiful company. . . . The lord is a self-willed 
 Englishman, whom often no German clothes will suit." 
 
 What had no doubt materially helped to attract Mendelssohn 
 so strongly to English literature at first was the marked tendency 
 towards a proper respect for his race, which was even then ex- 
 hibited in it, — a thing with which Abbt fully sympathised. This 
 tolerance, this sense of fairness, this aspiration after a completely 
 equitable distribution of political rights without respect to race or 
 religious belief, was first expressed, with full force of logic and of 
 measured conviction in English literature, relieving itself from 
 the sentimental and abstract air, which so intimately associated 
 itself at that time with the same class of writing in France, and 
 which was hardly likely to impress so deeply the calm and 
 philosophic mind of Mendelssohn. Nicolai, in one place in the 
 
 * Kayserling, p, 139. 
 
i64 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 "Berlinische Monatschrift," records, with touching simphcity, 
 Mendelssohn's report of the effect exercised on him by the first 
 reading of the passage in Locke, where it is said — " I would not 
 have so much as a Jew or a Mahometan excluded from the civil 
 rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion." Mendels- 
 sohn was so moved that the tears came into his eyes, and he 
 could read no more that night because of gladness that the great 
 philosopher had written such hopeful and prophetic words. 
 
 In the correspondence with Abbt English literature is a staple 
 interest. The two exchange ideas on books read, and communi- 
 cate plans of authorship. " Tristram Shandy " is minutely dis- 
 cussed, and its merits carefully analysed by Mendelssohn ; and 
 the characteristics of Shaftesbury's style receive full celebration 
 from both sides. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Though Mendelssohn had fully appreciated some of the traits 
 in the character of Frederick the Great, it could not be expected 
 that he should be moved to complete admiration of him either 
 as a man or as a king. Frederick instead of relieving the Jews or of 
 making them equal sharers with his other subjects in the benefits 
 that accrued from his accessions of territory, only laid heavier 
 burdens upon them. Frederick's desire to gain for himself a high 
 character for complete toleration had, however, led to good 
 results in several ways. He would not listen to religious 
 fanaticism, and sometimes opposed it in the interests of the Jews, 
 as of others. For such benefits Mendelssohn was inclined to be 
 thankful — thankful that as compared with the Jews in several 
 other European states, they were tolerated, in some degree " let 
 alone.'' Mendelssohn was not a man readily to move in any 
 demonstration for the demand of fuller rights. He morbidly 
 shrunk from all noise and notoriety ; and, with the wise sub- 
 missiveness of his race in those days, was more inclined to make 
 the most of what privileges he had, than to risk the enjoyment of 
 these in the problematic strife for a complete abstract justice. 
 But, much as he would have shrunk from any political action 
 that would have secured himx the notice of the king, he was 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 165 
 
 destined to awaken a very special curiosity in Frederick's mind 
 through his literary activity. 
 
 When the "Poesies Diverses" was published Mendelssohn 
 was requested by Nicolai and Lessing to make it the subject of 
 one of the " IJteraturbriefe." This he did with very remark- 
 able success. He presented in the outset a very striking portrait 
 of the king, which, while wholly free from flattery, did full justice 
 to the more attractive points of his character. But he was not de- 
 terred from indicating firmly and conscientiously what he regarded 
 as defects both in the poetry and the philosophy of Frederick ; 
 and by a very short and efficient argument he met and disposed 
 of the gi-ounds on which the king denied the immortality of the 
 soul, remarking that here His Majesty cut so bad a figure that he 
 scarcely deserved to be answered ! " I think indeed," Mendels- 
 sohn wound up, "that a Frederick who doubts immortality is only 
 a great chimera — a square circle or a round square ! " 
 
 The letter would probably have passed without particular 
 notice, had it not been that a certain preacher, named Justi, 
 whose Psalms had been somewhat severely handled in the 
 " Letters " deemed it a good opportunity to revenge himself He 
 issued in Berlin a shameful writing, in which he charged it on the 
 " Literary Letters " that a Jew had been allowed to treat the 
 king's most august person with disrespect. An extraordinary 
 hubbub arose. Mendelssohn was near to being made a martyr. 
 His surprise may be imagined when he was summoned to appear 
 on a certain Saturday before the king at Sans Souci. 
 
 A very characteristic anecdote is told of this episode which 
 illustrates Mendelssohn's great readiness and his power to adapt 
 himself to circumstances. Being "Sunday," he could not employ 
 a conveyance, and therefore walked to the palace. The officer 
 at the gate, a young aristocrat, who would not probably have 
 treated him with any more respect, or been more inclined to pass 
 him in, had he known that this was the author of the " Philo- 
 sophische Gesprache," was somewhat cavalier in asking what this 
 littie Jew could want with His Majesty. To which Mendelssohn, 
 no doubt with a glance at his skill in chess, quietly answered, 
 " Oh, I am a great sleight-of-hand player ; " whereupon the 
 " Junker " succumbed, looked deferent, said, " Ah, that is quite 
 another thing ! " and at once procured him conduct to the king's 
 presence. 
 
i66 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 The article had by this time, however, been translated into 
 French by a merchant Benino, and sent to the king, who had 
 expressed himself not otherwise than pleased with it. The result 
 of the affair was a petition from Mendelssohn for admission to 
 certain privileges, which, after not a little delay and the interven- 
 tion of others, with a somewhat funny episode or two, were 
 granted to him. 
 
 Nicolai, as we have seen, had devoted himself to the study of 
 aesthetics as a science, and had written a little work on the sub- 
 ject. His keen interest in it suggested a new journal. In the 
 end of 1759 he founded the "Neue Bibliothek der Schonen 
 Wissenschaften." He was much encouraged in this venture by 
 the promised co-operation of Mendelssohn, whose letters to 
 Nicolai and other friends on books and literary questions afforded 
 a foundation on which much might be built. Mendelssohn 
 amply fulfilled the undertaking he had given. It is not generally 
 known in England that the " Bibliothek," so long as Nicolai 
 published it, was in great part written by Mendelssohn. No 
 part appeared which did not contain a contribution by him. 
 Besides his asthetic writings, most of which were published here, 
 he prepared extensive recensions of English productions, often 
 extending to three or four sheets — of such books for instance as 
 Lowth's Lectures upon the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 
 Akenside's Prose Works and Pope's Writings. 
 
 But Nicolai, like Lessing, had always ten irons in the fire at 
 once. With that insatiable passion for acting simultaneously on 
 many points, which has sometimes been the great support of 
 publishers, as in the case of Frederick Perthes, but too often 
 their bane and ruin, as in the case of many we could name, he very 
 soon divided his energies, and when the "Literary Letters " were 
 projected shortly afterwards, the " Bibliothek " began to suffer, 
 as indeed it might have been expected to do, since the " Letters" 
 took up and expressed ideas on similar topics in a more original 
 and effective manner. The very appeal to immediate interests, in- 
 the fact of their being professedly addressed to an officer engaged 
 in the Seven Years' War, which had just broken out, had a certain 
 piquancy and attraction. Their chief purpose was to develop 
 something of national spirit, and to excite and maintain a true 
 German sentiment in literature directly derived from the life of 
 the people. The intense interest taken in the matter by 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 167 
 
 Mendelssohn is abundantly shown in his letters to Lessing. Here 
 is a specimen of them : — 
 
 I have thought of writing upon the difference between the words ~ 
 Nature, Art and Sciences and on this idea I await your judgment. 
 You must, I am sure, by this time, read all the letters upon hterature 
 which are not wholly empty of ideas, as if they were addressed to you. 
 For my part, I assure you, that I have in my mind, neither the worthy \ « 
 officer nor the public, so often as I not only copy out, but even risk j I '\ 
 the thinking out. You are the man whom I address, and this convic- ; 
 tion holds in check my unripe ideas. Since I am thus robbed aiphtck, \ 
 you must consider well how you can best console me ; though it is 
 really all the same whether you print this thing or whether it should 
 never even come under your eye in writing. Think you it is no good, 
 then may the press have the pardon it groans for. The German 
 public is good ! " 
 
 The effect of the "Letters" had been very remarkable. Lessing, 
 who imparted not a little of his own character to the earlier ones, 
 let the supply from his own pen fail, however, shortly after his 
 settlement at Breslau, being engaged in so much else, and 
 though Mendelssohn and Abbt and Nicolai were still very active, 
 the interest gradually fell off and the demand lessened, notwith- 
 tanding that some of Mendelssohn's best writing found a place 
 there. Inevitably a kind of literature which is so constrained by 
 the form originally imposed upon it through arbitrary assumptions 
 as in this case, soon ceases to have the points, the surprises that 
 were at first so welcome and so piquant. 
 
 The " Letters " appeared weekly, the names of the authors 
 were kept secret, as such anonymity was thought likely to cause 
 the greater interest.* 
 
 On the cessation of the "Literary Letters" 1765, Nicolai, 
 with his usual ready resource, began the well-known " AU- 
 gemeine deutsche Bibliothek," which he carried on till 1769, 
 and to which Mendelssohn and Lessing and Abbt contributed 
 extensively. 
 
 X. 
 
 A very happy time for Mendelssohn had now arrived. He 
 was in the midst of devoted friends ; his means were substantial ; 
 
 * Gockingk in his Fr. Nicolai's Leben gives a list of the " Literary Letters" and their 
 authorship, with the various initials attached to each, pp. 26-27. Lessing wrote thirty-four, 
 Mendelssohn nearly thirty. 
 
1'' 
 
 1 68 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 he had plenty of time for Uterary production. Though he had 
 greatly missed Lessing, who, in the end of 1760, had assumed 
 that secretaryship to General Tauentzien at Breslau, where he 
 might have amassed a fortune by mint operations, but did not, 
 the void was in some measure filled up by other interests. In 
 Hamburg there was a Jewish merchant, Abraham Gugenheim, 
 to whose house Mendelssohn had been drawn by a special 
 attraction, which led him during the years 1759-61, to pay 
 frequent visits to Hamburg, where he made the acquaintance of 
 several men, of whom we shall hear again. The eldest daughter 
 of this Hamburg house was Fromet Gugenheim, " a blue-eyed 
 maiden" — of no striking beauty, but of affectionate, pious, and 
 quietly discreet character, a woman well fitted in every way to 
 be a helpmeet to a man like Mendelssohn. To her he was 
 betrothed in May 1761 ; and from Hamburg he wrote to Lessing 
 a very characteristic letter, informing him of the fact ; — 
 
 / " Our correspondence," he begins, " has been too long interrupted ; 
 
 ' I must now renew it. I would never have been so long in writing, if 
 
 / I had not made a journey to Hamburg, that has brought on me a 
 
 / thousand distractions. I have visited the theatre ; I have made the 
 
 f acquaintance of learned men, which to you will not be strange ; I 
 
 ' have had the folly in my thirtieth year to fall in love. You laugh ! 
 
 But who knows but you may yet fall into the same net yourself. The 
 
 thirtieth year is perhaps the most dangerous, and this you have not 
 
 yet got through. The lady that I am to marry has no fortune, is 
 
 neither beautiful nor learned, and yet I am so loving a fool as to 
 
 believe that I can only live happily with her. For the epithalamium 
 
 you shall still have a whole year's time, but then your rhyme-lazy 
 
 muse must once more seize the dusty lyre ; for how could I make my 
 
 1 marriage unbesung?" 
 
 Mendelssohn in his letters to his bride is wholly himself, a 
 bright frank man full of wit and tender playfulness, as his jokes 
 about the assumption of that "peruke'' abundantly bear witness. 
 More to the purpose for us perhaps it will be to give a specimen 
 of the more sedate humour with which he brightened up his 
 love letters. Some six weeks after his betrothal he sent this 
 letter for example to his bride : — 
 
 " Dearest Fromet, — I have made a discovery in your father's 
 letter that greatly pleases me. The good man assures me that his 
 daughter Fromet is as beautiful as she is virtuous. What means it ? 
 Can one believe the honest man on his word ? The good Herr 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 169 
 
 Abraham Gugenheim must know, that the philosophers also like that 
 beauty. I beg his pardon ; but I know his Fromet better than he 
 does. She is beautiful, but not beautiful as she is virtuous, but 
 beautiful as she is tender and affectionate (zartlich), I envy you, 
 dearest Fromet, for the happy wit with which you express your sweet 
 love. Your little letters are full of tenderness, full of feehng. The ' 
 language of the heart is your natural speech ; and your noble senti- 
 ments may well make up for frosty wit, whereby others disfigure their 
 letters so disagreeably. Go you on, dearest, and sweetest Fromet, ; 
 to please me with your charming letters ; so that it will be impossible 
 for a post-day to pass without my having written a letter to you, or , , 
 my having received one from you, to delight me ; and what is man if ' 
 he is not satisfied ? Nothing : so long as we must be separated from 
 each other, we will take advantage of every opportunity to think of i 
 one another. It makes me in no slight degree satisfied, if I can 
 think, now Fromet has received my letter, or now Fromet is writing 
 to me. , . . — In tenderest love, your MosES Dessau." 
 
 We can easily infer — though the pleasure of reading Fromet's 
 letter has not been given us — that she had been depreciating her 
 own letters as not being so intellectual or so witty as she could 
 have wished in order to please him. 
 
 He was married in the beginning of 1762, and thus he writes 
 to Abbt a short time afterwards ; — 
 
 " For a week I have spoken to no friend, written to no friend — 1 , ,-i 
 
 thought not, read not, nor put pen to paper, only played myself, i ^' 
 feasted, observed holy customs, gone here and there to show myself, 
 and amid a thousand other very significant trifles, the time has flown 
 
 away ; for the hour has come, my best friend, with which the muse I 
 of Abalard Birbii for a long time has made me familiar. A blue-eyed 
 
 maiden, that I now call my wife, has melted the ice-cold heart of | 
 
 your friend in the warmth of tender emotions, and involved his > 
 
 spirit in a thousand complications, out of which he must now by ! 
 
 degrees seek a httle to extricate it ; and thus come to himself again, j 
 
 As the best step to this, I seize this sheet and begin to write to you."* 1 
 
 XI. 
 
 In the year 1763, the Royal Academy of Berlin gave out as 
 the subject for the prize essay the question —" Whether such 
 evidence could be presented for Mathematical Truth as for 
 
 * Dr Heinemann's Sammlung, p. 355. 
 
I70 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 Metaphysical." The topic was one which was deeply interesting 
 to Mendelssohn. As he meditated on the matter, many thoughts 
 presented themselves, and he resolved to write, having however 
 taken counsel with Abbt, who, next to Lessing, was his most 
 trusted friend in such things. Even although Kant was a com- 
 petitor, to Mendelssohn was awarded the prize of fifty ducats. 
 
 Through Gleim, in that same year, he became acquainted with 
 the Jacobis and with Knebel, Goethe's friend, Lessing introduced 
 Weisse; and Wieland introduced himself, while Gessner and 
 Bodmer were made known to him by Sulzer, and Zimmerman 
 through his friends Abbt and Gleim. Though heretofore he had 
 been averse to historical studies, Abbt's recommendation sufificed 
 to set him upon a course of English history, of which we hear a 
 good deal in their correspondence. On his general ideas of 
 history, he thus wrote to Abbt : — 
 
 / "What know I of history? — What more than the names that 
 history takes ? — natural history, earth history, states history, learned 
 history, these have never come clearly into my mind, and I always 
 yawn if I must read anything historical, and even then it is the style 
 that attracts me. I believe that history is one of the studies which 
 are not to be learned without instruction." 
 
 His aversion to history had its root in his keen sensitiveness 
 and the unaffected sympathy he had with his race. He went 
 always with a troubled heart to a study, that seemed to promise 
 no point of usefulness, since he was a Jew, who believed himself 
 to be without proper fatherland and without home ; he could 
 take no interest in the fortunes of States, in which his brethren 
 were oppressed and robbed of all rights. Every page of history 
 reminded him of the suffering and the spoliation which his 
 kindred had through centuries patiently borne, and of his own 
 homelessness.* 
 
 Nevertheless, as we have said, he overcomes his aversion in 
 view of the English historians, and reads Hume ; and thus he 
 informs Abbt of his impressions in a letter, dated sth December 
 1763:— 
 
 / "I have read Hume's 'History of England!' Incomparable! 
 What I most admire in him is the art and wisdom with which he un- 
 
 * Jedes Blatt der Geschichte erinnerte ihn an die Leiden und Verfolgangen, welche 
 sein Stamm Jahrhunderte hindurch erduldet hatte, an seine eigene Heimatiilosigkeit. — 
 Kayserling, p. 27. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 171 
 
 folds characters and events. His sceptical spirit has here rendered 
 him excellent service. He exhibits both the good and the bad side of 
 his character, the previous determining and accidental causes of 
 every occurrence, and places them before the reader, mixed and 
 involved in one another, precisely as we find them in life and nature. 
 I am at all times mistrustful towards a historian, who presents the 
 characters with a fixed invariableness and causes and effects com- 
 pletely harmonized as in a romance. His style is incomparable. 
 Tell me whether or not I am mistaken in comparing him with 
 Sallust in consideration of his style — the same exact succinctness, the 
 same distinctness and energy, the same dignity in the sentiment." * 
 
 Abbt replies on the lotli with not a little critical pene- 
 tration : — 
 
 " I am glad that you are so well pleased with Hume's History, but 
 Sallust appears to me much more concise. Hume's style too is 
 much more given to the period ; and therein he appears to me to 
 come much nearer to Livy. I always think that history is still a field 
 for the Germans ! You should also read Robertson's ' History of 
 Scotland ; ' you will thank me for naming it. One distinction there 
 is between him and Hume, that Robertson often preaches." t 
 
 The year 1765 was particularly fruitful alike in new friends and 
 in work. Gleim, who had desired to make his acquaintance on 
 the appearance of the " Briefe uber die Empfindungen," visited 
 Berlin in this year owing to ill-health, and spent much time with 
 Mendelssohn. Frequently after this Gleim went to Berlin mainly 
 that he might spend some time with his friend, the " Kleinen Jude." 
 
 Like many other of Mendelssohn's works, the " Phsedon " had 
 its suggestion in friendly correspondence, and was the product of 
 a long course of meditation and intercourse. Abbt had been 
 particularly interested in a work of the well known Professor 
 Spalding on " The Destination of Man " (" Ueber die Bestim- 
 mung des Menschen "), and he had consulted Mendelssohn about 
 some difficulties that had occurred to his own mind in the 
 pondering of^ certain passages — difficulties which he embodied 
 in an essay contesting Spalding's main positions. | Mendels- 
 
 * Heinemann's " Sammlung," p. 367. t Heinemann's " Sammlung," p. 371. 
 
 t Johann Joachim Spalding, a native of Triebsees in Swedish Pomerania, was one of 
 the most successful preachers of the i8th century, and an extensive theological writer. 
 From 1734 to 1749 he was engaged as teacher and educationist, then as preacher ; and he 
 became in 1767 incumbent of Nicholas Church, and later Chief Consistorial-rath at Berlin. 
 Through his simple, pleasing eloquence, and the sincere warmth of his style, he won all 
 hearts and inspired them. In like wise he exercised influence through his well-known 
 writings, among which the " Bestimmung des Menschen " and " Religion, eine Angelegen- 
 heit " stand most prominent. He died in March 1804 at Berlin. 
 
 '^m 
 
172 
 
 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 V' 
 
 sohn, in not a few of the points, inclined to side with Spalding ; 
 and thus arose a most interesting correspondence, which went on 
 for some months, in the course of which Mendelssohn's first 
 child, a girl of eleven months, died. This led to the following 
 affecting letter from Mendelssohn : — 
 
 "A domestic affliction has so overwhelmed and shaken me, that I 
 have been unable to engage in my ordinary business, and have had 
 no heart to write even to my dearest friends. For some days past I 
 have thus been compelled to forego the pleasure of writing to you, and 
 to suspend our discussion on the destiny of man. Death has entered 
 my dwelling, and robbed me of my first-born, an innocent child 
 of eleven months. Nevertheless, I give God praise for the happy 
 and serene existence she lived while here, and for the hopes which 
 filled our hearts. My friend, the dear innocent did not live these 
 eleven months beside us in vain. She had already accomplished 
 various designs here. That little soul was not sent merely to flit 
 before us for a moment without purpose, like some ethereal vision, 
 and then seen no more. Her spirit had in that short time made 
 most astonishing progress. From a mere animal existence, which 
 only sleeps and cries, she had passed so far as to give forth the rays 
 of a reasoning mind. As the points of the young grasses in spring- 
 time press themselves through the hard earthcrust, so in her one saw 
 the first emotions break out. She showed compassion, hate, astonish- 
 ment, understood the words that were spoken to her ; impatience, 
 pleasure, and reflection displayed themselves more and more in her 
 looks and gestures ; she increased from day to day in intelligence, 
 and became richer in the means of conveying her thoughts to others. 
 " You will laugh at my simplicity, and in this way will learn the 
 weakness of a man, and his desire for consolation which he nowhere 
 finds save in his imagination. I believe that I have sufficient self- 
 love to adopt that which promotes my peace of mind without flattering 
 my failings. I cannot believe that God has placed us on this earth, 
 as the foam is set upon the wave ; and since in the opposite opinion 
 I find less absurdity and more ■ comfort, I cleave to it and await with 
 firm foot the cruel enemy, who will bear me away at last. But let 
 this not, my best friend, in any way hinder you from freely giving 
 . me to know your doubts and difficulties. I have the greatest hope 
 ! still to feel the old necessity to correspond with you, and you will take 
 \ this after so long a silence, for a confession of it. But, pray, send 
 me back my last letter to you that I may know what I had written. " 
 
 Fromet till her death remained a true and sympathising help- 
 meet to Mendelssohn. This sad event took place in 1766, after 
 she had borne him four children. How deeply she was beloved. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 173 
 
 and how truly she was mourned, we may reahse from the follow- 
 ing words written to Abbt in July 1766 : — 
 
 " I have ever since the sad event Hved in the deepest affliction. 
 I have lost an aged father, and have laid in the grave a sweet child of 
 one month old ; I am in the sorest straits at the loss of my wife, 
 whom I loved more than father and child." 
 
 Abbt soon followed Fromet, to the great grief of Mendelssohn. 
 Much meditation on the subjects of death and immortality, in- 
 duced by these bereavements, intensified in Mendelssohn's heart 
 the desire to strengthen as far as might be done by arguments 
 the doctrine of the soul's immortality. The idea of the " Phaedon" 
 now took clearer shape, and he divided his time between writing 
 it and editing the remains and correspondence of Abbt, to which 
 he appended a set of notes, which are really a series of the most 
 suggestive and subtle essays, in which, for one thing, the dubiety 
 that rests on the word " Bestimmung " in the phrase " Bestim- 
 mung des Menschen," in respect that it may mean " determina- 
 tion " as well as " destination," is most conclusively exhibited. 
 This form of dialogue, which had been carried on for a time by 
 the two friends, suggested to Mendelssohn a complete treatise on 
 immortality and kindred subjects, which, as one of its purposes, 
 should serve for a memorial of Abbt, as the preface tells us in 
 the most touching words — 
 
 "These dialogues," Mendelssohn there writes, "were dedicated to \ 
 my dear friend Abbt ; but this plant was cut off while only in the bud. 
 Such was God's will. Short were his days here below, but great is his 
 fame. His essay on ' Merit ' (Vom Verdienst) will remain to the 
 Germans as an unforgetable monument of his own merits. When his 
 years are considered, posterity will regard this work with amazement. 
 And what fruit might have been hoped for from a tree whose blossoms 
 were so excellent. He had another work under the pen, which would 
 have come nearer to perfection, as he gained in experience and 
 spiritual power. Alas ! death has frustrated all our hopes. Germany 
 lost in him an excellent writer ; mankind a loving sage, whose feel- 
 ings were noble as his understanding was clear ; his friends a most 
 faithful friend ; and I a loveable companion on the road to truth, who 
 often guarded my steps from straying."* 
 
 Through the "Phaedon," Mendelssohn became a German' 
 celebrity. He was spcken of as the German Socrates, as the 
 German Plato, and men of learning and rank sought to know 
 
 ^ Kayserling, p. 151. 
 
174 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 him, to converse with him, to correspond with him. The Jews 
 saw their nation honoured through him, and now began to be 
 reconciled to some things which had heretofore but imperfectly 
 commanded their sympathies. 
 
 Herder, to whom the book had been made the dearer in that 
 the reading of it brought many happy hours to his bride, Caroline 
 Flachsland, as well as to himself, wrote : — * 
 
 n "No man in the world can appreciate Moses' 'Phsedon' more 
 
 / deeply than I do, or can have read it with more of heart and soul — 
 
 > ■)'•■ / not even Meinhard. Time after time have I promised myself, on 
 
 c^ j this account, to write to Herr Moses, but ever, since I am unlucky in 
 
 -^ ! my letters, the pen has lain still. But I shall brace myself to that 
 
 ^-pleasant task at once." 
 
 Winckelmann wrote to a friend from Rome, not foregoing his 
 
 ."flit at Frederick, and that sovereign's devotion to French 
 
 ^ literature: — "Your philosopher, the 'Phaedon' of Moses 
 
 ^ /C"" / Mendelssohn, is one of the best books I have ever read ; pity 
 
 ^v^!^ 1 that he is a German will the Potsdam hero say." 
 
 r-^fJ■ The " Phffidon " to be appreciated must be read. Though, in 
 
 the first part, Mendelssohn has restricted himself pretty closely 
 
 to translation, he passes by and by into a freer region, where his 
 
 own mind and heart have unfettered play ; and it is not too much 
 
 to say that in very few instances before had the German language 
 
 been moulded to such clearness of outline, and made to convey 
 
 a greater range and suggestiveness of thought. The following 
 
 passages will convey an idea — but only a faint idea — of the style 
 
 of this remarkable work : — 
 
 " In the compound we find nothing existing by itself, nothing that 
 
 is permanent or stable, so that we could say of it in the second moment 
 
 that it is what it was in the first. While I look at you, my friends, 
 
 the light of the sun, which is reflected from your faces, not only varies 
 
 its course, but your bodies, in the same interval, have undergone 
 
 changes innumerable in their form and texture ; all their parts have 
 
 changed from what they were . As the wise and happy of former 
 
 V' ' times have remarked, corporeal things are not, but only seem, they 
 
 p' spring up and decay, and have no durability ; they suffer from an 
 
 irresistible current of changes, by which every compound being is 
 
 U ceaselessly generated and dissolved. This Homer signifies when he 
 
 terms Ocean the father and Thetis the mother of all things ; he has 
 
 thus intended to demonstrate that all bodies in the visible world spring 
 
 * Herder Lebensbild (1845) iii. 50. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 175 
 
 up and perish through a series of constant changes, even as though \ 
 they were on a continually agitated sea, never remaining for one 
 moment in the same condition. ! 
 
 " If the compound substance is incapable of any duration in itself, 1 
 still less will it be capable of any perfection ; that we have observed i 
 can only be attributed to it by the thinking being. Hence it is that | 
 we see in inanimate nature, beauty fade and bloom ; that which is , 
 perfect decay only to appear again in other forms ; apparent regularity ', 
 and irregularity, harmony and discord, pleasant and what is un- ' 
 pleasant, good and bad, in multitudinous variety, succeeding each j 
 other, according as they are required, for the use, advantage, pleasure, | 
 convenience, or happiness of the living world, for whose benefit they \ 
 were produced. 
 
 " The living part of the creation consists of two classes : the one is 
 capable of feeling only, the other of feeUng and thinking ; but both [ 
 have this in common, that they are of durable nature, — that they can 
 possess and enjoy an internal self-subsisting perfection. . . . That 
 these animals, and merely sensual feeling creatures, will in time lose 
 their inferiority of condition, and, elevated by a glance from the 
 Almighty, rise to the realm of spirits, we can with no certainty pre- , 
 diet ; but in this I am much inclined to believe. ■ 
 
 "As rational beings hold a principal place in the great universe, so , 
 man holds the highest rank on the earth. Nature adorns herself for 
 this mimic lord of the creation in all her virgin beauty. What is 
 animated serves not only for his use, convenience, food, clothing, and 
 habitation, but also provides for his amusement, his pleasure, and in- 
 struction ; even the most distant worlds, the remotest stars which are 
 scarcely distinguishable by the eye, minister to his knowledge and 
 send their rays to light him to their spheres. 
 
 " If we would know the destination of man upon earth, we must ob- 
 serve what he does here. He brings with him on this stage neither 
 skill nor instinct, neither the means of shelter nor of defence. At his 
 first entrance he appears more naked and helpless than the irrational 
 beast. But no sooner does he enjoy the light of the sun than all 
 nature labours to make his faculties perfect ; one object sharpens his ■ 
 sense, imagination, and power of memory, another exercises his more 
 noble perceptions, cultivates his understanding, his judgment, his i 
 reason, and discernment ; the beauties of nature educate his taste, 
 and soften his feelings ; the sublime raises his admiration, and 
 elevates his conceptions above earthly things. Order, harmony, sym- 
 metry dispose the powers of his mind to that proper harmony which 
 is conducive to their perfection. Whenever he enters into society to 
 become useful to his fellows, he finds he is prosecuting the means of 
 his own happiness. Higher perfections are unfolded in him, which 
 hitherto lay hidden as in a bud. He acquires a sense of duties, of 
 
176 
 
 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 rights, of privileges, and obligations, which raise him in the class of 
 moral beings ; ideas of justice, equity, honour, and respect, form and 
 grow. His affections which were at first engrossed by his family and 
 kindred flow out in all sides, — patriotism and philanthropy take root ; 
 from the latent seed of sympathy spring up benevolence, charity, and 
 magnanimity." 
 
 I 
 
 XII. 
 
 In the beginning of April 1 763, the famous Protestant preacher, 
 Lavater, had visited Berlin in the course of a philosophical 
 journey, and was received by Mendelssohn in the friendliest 
 spirit. Somewhat aside from his custom, and out of a purely 
 friendly intention — a feeling of hospitality and respect — Mendels- 
 sohn was very frank in talking with Lavater over religious 
 questions, and was warm in expressing his high admiration of the 
 moral character of Jesus. What was his surprise, nearly six years 
 later, to have put into his hand a copy of Lavater's German trans- 
 lation of Bonnet's " Inquiry into the Evidences of Christianity," 
 with a " letter-dedicatory to Moses Mendelssohn," in which, on 
 the ground of the " great gratification, which, some years ago, I 
 had in your interesting society," freedom is taken to ask of 
 Mendelssohn to read the book and to acknowledge whether or 
 not the evidence was sufficient to cause him to decide in favour 
 of Christianity over Judaism, beseeching and conjuring him 
 before the God of truth publicly to refute the main arguments, 
 should he not acknowledge himself to have been so convinced. 
 
 Mendelssohn was excessively pained at being thus challenged 
 and dragged before the public, no less than at the wily use which 
 seemed to have been made of sentiments expressed in the privacy 
 of friendship, or say rather which had been dragged from him 
 under a sense of hospitality ; for he tells us that he tried hard to 
 turn the conversation from religious topics when Lavater had 
 visited him, and only permitted himself so far to fall into such 
 conversation, out of deference to his guest. When, after much 
 inward debate, he did reply to Lavater in a lengthened letter of 
 consummate power and penetration, he took care to emphasise 
 this fact, and in the course of the letter says : — 
 
 " If after so many years of investigation, my decision had not been 
 completely in favour of my religion, it would inevitably have become 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 177 
 
 known through my public conduct. I cannot imagine what should 
 chain me to a religion, which appears to be so severe, and is so com- 
 monly believed to be exploded, if in my heart I were not convinced of 
 its truth. Let the results of my enquiries have been what they may, 
 I would have discarded the religion of my fathers, had I convinced 
 myself that it was not the true one. Were I indeed convinced in my 
 heart that any other religion were the true one, in my opinion', 
 there could not be a more shameful depravity, than to refuse to it in 
 defiance of internal evidence, the homage that is due to truth. And 
 what should entice me to such depravity ? . . . What is there to deter 
 me from open avowal ? Fear of my brethren in the laith ? Their 
 temporal power is too limited for that to daunt me. What then .'' 
 Obstinacy or indolence? a love for use and wont? Having devoted 
 the greater portion of my life to the investigation, I may be presumed 
 to possess sufficient good sense, not to sacrifice the fruit of my 
 labours to such frivolities ! " . . . 
 
 And after saying how averse he was to religious controversy, 
 he goes on : — 
 
 " Yet, for all I cared, Judaism might have been confuted and con- 
 demned in every polemical treatise, and triumphantly sneered at in 
 every academic exercise, and I would not have entered into any dispute 
 thereon. Rabbinical scholars and rabbinical smatterers, might have 
 grubbed among antiquated scribblings, such as no sensible Jew reads 
 or knows anything of, and they might have amused the public with 
 the most fantastical idea of Judaism, and no contradiction would have 
 been forthcoming on my part. I wish, it is true, to shame the 
 opprobious sentiments commonly entertained of a Jew, but it is by 
 virtue and not by controversy that I would do it. My religious 
 beliefs, my philosophy, my station in society, all agree in furnishing me 
 with the most cogent reasons for refraining from theological contro- 
 versy, and for treating in my published works of those truths only 
 which are of equal importance for those of all creeds. 
 
 " Consonant to the principles of my religion, I am not to seek to 
 convert anyone who has not been born under our laws. This fever of 
 proselytism, which some would fain associate with the Jewish religion 
 as an essential part of it, is nevertheless, in direct opposition to it. 
 Our rabbins unanimously teach, that the written and oral laws, which, 
 together form our revealed religion, are binding only upon our nation. 
 ' Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the congregation 
 of Jacob.' * We believe that all other nations of the earth have been 
 directed by God to follow the laws of nature, or to accept the religion 
 of the patriarchs. Those who conduct their lives in harmony with 
 
 * Deuteronomy XXX. 4; Talmud Sanhedrim, folio 59 ; Maimonides on the Book of Kings, 
 chap. 8. sect. 10. 
 
 M 
 
178 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 the precepts of this religion of nature and reason, are called virtuotts 
 men of other nations, and are the children of .eternal salvation. . . . 
 
 " Thus, you see, the religion of my fathers does not wish to be 
 extended. We are not to send missions to both the Indies, or to 
 Greenland, to proclaim our peculiar doctrines to those remote peoples. 
 The latter in particular, who, if we are informed aright, observe the 
 laws of nature far more strictly, alas ! than we do, are, in our religious 
 estimation, a race to be envied. . . . 
 
 " Suppose there were amongst my contemporaries a Confucius or a 
 Solon, I could, in full consistency with my religious principles, love 
 and admire the great man, and I would never hit on the extravagant 
 idea of converting him. What should I convert him for ? As he does 
 not belong to the congregation of Jacob, my religious laws were not 
 framed for him, and on doctrines I think we should soon come to an 
 understanding. Do I think that there is any chance of his being 
 saved ? Most certainly I beheve that he who leads mankind to virtue 
 in this life, cannot be damned in that which is to come. And I need 
 not now be in fear of any reverend college, that would call me 
 to account for such a conviction, as the Sorbonne did honest 
 Marmontel. 
 
 " These are the reasons which my religion and my philosophy have 
 suggested to me for carefully avoiding religious controversy. If you 
 add to them my local relations to my fellow citizens, I am sure you 
 will justify me in this. I am one of an oppressed people, who have to 
 supplicate shelter and protection from ascendant races. These 
 boons, indeed, they do not obtain everywhere, indeed nowhere, with- 
 out more or less of restriction. Rights granted to every human 
 being, my brethren in the faith willingly forego, contented with being 
 tolerated ; and they account it no trifling favour, in that nation which 
 takes them in on bearable terms, since in some places, even a temporary 
 domicile is denied them.. Do the laws of Zurich allow your circum- 
 cised friend to pay you a visit there ? No. What gratitude then do 
 not I and my brethren owe to that nation, which includes them in its 
 general philanthropy, suffering them without molestation to worship 
 the Supreme Being after the rites of their ancestors .'' The govern- 
 ment under which I live leaves little to be wished for in this respect ; 
 and the Hebrews should therefore be scrupulous in abstaining from 
 reflections on the predominant religion, or in touching their pro- 
 tectors in points where men of virtue are most tender." 
 
 Lavater, by and by, answered this letter, in terms apologising 
 for the indiscreetness of his act, which had placed Mendelssohn in 
 such an embarrassing position, and intimating that thus friends 
 of his also viewed matters ; but since, added Lavater, " the thing 
 has been done, and is now beyond recall, I cannot altogether 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 179 
 
 regret it, if it leads to any fuller expression on Mendelssohn's 
 part, or to any modification of his views." To this Mendels- 
 sohn replied at some length ; in the course of his letter indicating 
 what he regarded as weak points in Bonnet's argument, one of 
 which was the appeal to miracles, which Mendelssohn held were 
 in themselves of no weight in view of the authenticity of a religion. 
 "According to my religious theory miracles are not indis- 
 criminately a distinctive mark of truth, nor do they yield moral 
 evidence of a prophet's divine legation." 
 
 Though a goodly number of pamphlets were cast forth, and 
 many articles written on the subject, Mendelssohn did not at 
 this time write further, save only to add to his latter letter an 
 appendix with some remarks on a pamphlet by Johann 
 Balthaser Kolbele, of Frankfort-on-the-Maine, which were per- 
 meated by a vein of delicate satire. But the fire kindled by 
 Lavater's imprudent zeal smouldered only, it was not extinguished; 
 and was to flare out again by and by. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The year 1770 was one in which much occurred to confirm 
 the influence of Mendelssohn. It is true, that his sensitive, 
 nervous system had suffered greatly through the discussion with 
 Lavater on the writings of Bonnet, and he had been laid aside 
 through general ill-health ; but he had satisfaction in the know- 
 ledge that he had made his position clearer, and had done some- 
 thing at once to interpret the true principles of Judaism in rela- 
 tion to citizenship, as well as indirectly to put forward pleas for 
 emancipation. That controversy had the very opposite effect 
 from what Lavater had intended. It directed to the philosophic 
 Jew the eyes of many in the highest places, who might not else 
 have felt so deep a personal interest in him. Among these was 
 the Prince Charles William of Brunswick, a nephew of the great 
 Frederick; a man who combined a vigorous practical char- 
 acter with great love for philosophic and esthetic studies. He 
 had read " The Phsdon," and was desirous to make Mendels- 
 sohn's acquaintance, which he did when on a visit to Berlin, 
 treating Mendelssohn with the greatest consideration, and receiv- 
 ing from him a promise to correspond about the " Phaedon." 
 
i8o MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 When a little later Mendelssohn sent the Prince a new edition of 
 that work, the Prince, in acknowledging it, said how much he 
 wished, if it were possible, that he could see its author at Bruns- 
 wick. He had been so deeply interested in the discussion 
 with Lavater that he had written to Mendelssohn with the utmost 
 frankness, while Mendelssohn, on his part, never more fully ex- 
 pressed his ideas on Christianity than he now did to the Prince. 
 The mother of the Prince, the beautiful PMUipine Charlotte, 
 sister of Frederick the Great, was so drawn to Mendelssohn, and 
 so impressed by the wisdom of his conversation, that " she hung 
 his portrait underneath that of her father, the King of Prussia.'' 
 
 After this Mendelssohn paid his memorable visit to Lessing at 
 Wolfenbiittel, when the two friends, who had been separated for 
 nearly three years, had much to communicate. It was at this time 
 Lessing showed to his friend some of those fragments of that 
 Reimarus, which were ere long to become so famous in connec- 
 tion with Lessing. It is almost needless to say that not a little 
 in the positions taken by Reimarus Mendelssohn was ready to 
 contest. 
 
 Leaving Wolfenbiittel, Mendelssohn passed on to Hanover, 
 where he was the guest of the rich banker, Michael David, at 
 whose hands he experienced most devoted kindness, and found 
 much pleasure in the society of Michael David's cashier, Moses 
 Phillipson, author of a " Life of Spinoza." * From Hanover he 
 went to Gottingen, where he made the acquaintance of Professor 
 Michaelis, who, before a few months had passed, forwarded to 
 him as a gift the first part of his remarkable work, " Mosaischen 
 Rechtes," and on his way home he stayed at Halberstadt and en- 
 joyed for a few days the congenial company of " Father Gleim.'' 
 While Mendelssohn was in Hanover Lessing sent to him " Ernst 
 und Falk," the famous dialogues on Freemasonry. These were 
 read with exceeding delight, though he was inclined to take Les- 
 sing to task for presuming on Freemasonry, under some ideal form 
 actually taking the place of Christianity. Whether the great 
 honour Mendelssohn had received on his journey worked upon 
 his fellow townsmen at Berlin we know not, but at all events he 
 was made a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin on the 17th 
 February 17 7 1. The years 1772 to 1774, embrace a period in 
 Mendelssohn's life over which hung the shadow of ill-health. 
 
 * Phillipson also wrote a book " Ueber die Verbesserung des Judeneids," 1797. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. i8i 
 
 During this trying period of sickness, his friends were eager to 
 bring reHef to his mind by constant change of scene ; and it was 
 on the occasion of a visit to Pyrmont that he made the personal 
 acquaintance of the great prince of a Httle German state, Count 
 William of Schaumburg-Lippe. Though in outward aspect a 
 rough soldier, — he had carried away war laurels in Portugal, as 
 well as at Minden, and had actually projected the great plan of 
 the levy en masse — Count William had the keenest interest in 
 literature and philosophy. He would recite whole passages from 
 Shakespeare with the deepest enthusiasm, Locke was his favourite 
 philosopher, and with fine philosophic insight he discussed the 
 deepest problems. Mendelssohn said that he was one of the 
 " finest Grecian souls in a rough Westphalian body." * 
 
 Though he had not read the " Phaedon," he had, at an earlier 
 time, heard much of Mendelssohn from his friend Abbt, and 
 later from Herder, and was acquainted with several of Mendels- 
 sohn's earlier writings. Now that he was brought into personal 
 contact with the author, he was the better prepared to appreciate 
 its beauties, when shortly after he read it in a presentation copy 
 from the author. Both the Count and his consort — a woman of 
 uncommon beauty and rare gifts of nature — were, during this visit 
 to Pyrmont, in deep grief on account of the death of their only 
 child, a daughter about three years of age. The first sharp 
 paroxysm of pain had in their hearts yielded to a sweet, longing 
 melancholy. With Mendelssohn they soon found themselves on 
 terms of the fullest confidence, speaking with him freely on 
 death and immortality, and deriving from his ideas on these 
 themes much consolation and aid. His thoughts were the more 
 efficient that he had himself experienced bereavement. His own 
 wounded heart was witness for him. 
 
 At this time it was too that Mendelssohn made the personal 
 acquaintance of Herder, with whom he had already corresponded, 
 and who, as court preacher and the wise adviser and friend of 
 the Countess, was now at Pyrmont. Writing to Lavater in the 
 end of July 1774, Herder says : — " I have also become acquainted 
 with Mendelssohn ; the clearest and cheerfulest head almost that 
 I have seen on a human body, strongly stamped by itself. But 
 I have, perhaps for the before mentioned reason, found as yet 
 
 * Die feinste Griechische Seek in einem rauhen westphalischen Korper.— Kayserling, 
 p. 242. 
 
1 82 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 little or no proper point of attachment to him ; yet I regard him 
 as very fortunate, though, as it appears to me, I know not how, 
 there is something of an artificial self-made, bulwark."* This was 
 the penalty Mendelssohn had to pay for the impression that his 
 excessive sh}rness and reserve made at the first on not a few, who 
 soon came to know him better. At the urgent wish of the Count, 
 Mendelssohn prolonged his stay at Pyrmont, and at the last it 
 was with the deepest regret on both sides that they parted. By 
 the Count and Countess Mendelssohn was held in the utmost 
 love and honour ; his portrait was hung up in the Count's room 
 with this Latin inscription — " Vir bonus et sapiens, quem vix e 
 minibus unum. . . tulit consultus Apollo." 
 
 Though a very friendly correspondence was kept up, Mendels- 
 sohn never saw the Count or Countess again. She died not long 
 after on her thirty-second birthday, and the Count, indefatigable 
 soldier though he had approved himself, sank deeper and deeper 
 into the melancholy which sapped the physical life, and he soon 
 thereafter followed her to the grave. During Mendelssohn's 
 earlier visits to Hamburg he had made the acquaintance of the 
 distinguished Reimarus, at whose house he met August von Hen- 
 nings, whose " Recollections of Dresden " and " Letters from 
 Dresden and Hamburg " afford such lively pictures of the literary 
 society of the period. Hennings afterwards lived in Berlin for 
 two years as Legation's-secretary, and was then an almost daily 
 visitor at Mendelssohn's house. The prospect of a reunion with 
 Hennings, who was now settled in an official position at Dresden, 
 may have had some part in determining Mendelssohn's accep- 
 tance of an invitation to visit the Count Oberforster Jung at Baruth 
 in Saxony. The Count was not a man of much culture, but he 
 was very thoughtful ; he read little, but what he read he digested, 
 and a perusal of the " Phsedon " made him seek the friendship 
 of the author. The visit was one that afforded Mendelssohn 
 unspeakable delight. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The satisfaction which Mendelssohn felt in his daily-extending 
 influence, and the enlargement of the circle of his correspondents, 
 
 * Aus Herders Nachlass, ii. p. 113. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 183 
 
 owed much to the cherished hope that this might finally become, 
 in his hand, a means for the further improvement and the eman- 
 cipation of his brethren. That thought was ever present with 
 him. But for it, indeed, it is doubtful whether he would have 
 overcome so far as he did his intense longing for complete quiet 
 and retirement. In spite of the most liberal ideas that had 
 begun to prevail, the actual condition of the Jews in many of the 
 European states was still most deplorable. In Posen in 1736 
 two worthy Rabbis had actually been martyred, giving up the 
 ghost under the fury of the mob. So late as 1772 edicts were 
 issued in Saxony breathing all the intolerance of the middle 
 ages; and in the autumn of 1777 a law was enacted, which 
 ordered the expulsion of many hundreds of poor Jews from 
 Dresden. This led Mendelssohn to write a memorable letter to 
 the Cabinet Councillor von Ferber, whom he had known for some 
 years. In that letter occurred this passage : — 
 
 " Gracious Sir, I learn by the last post that many hundreds of my 
 brethren will be driven out of Dresden. Among them I find many 
 whom I personally know, of whose uprightness I am assured, who 
 indeed have not the means and probably are not in a position to pay 
 off their burdens, but who assuredly through no blame, through no 
 extravagance or idleness, but only through misfortune, are brought 
 to this sad pass. . . . Good Almighty Father ! where shall these 
 miserable ones go with their innocent wives and children ? Where 
 find shelter and protection, if the land in which they have their little 
 all drives them out .'' This banishment is for a Jew the hardest of all 
 punishments ; it is more than mere exile ; it is almost the extermina- 
 tion of the household gods, to which with all sweet prepossession the 
 heart will turn back tenderly. And this hardest of all punishments 
 poor children without blame and without guilt shall bear only because 
 they hold to their principles, and are poor by misfortune. ... I have 
 stiU. hope ; in my heart's anguish I will still trust that that hope 
 is well founded. Under the rule of the best and most loving of princes; 
 under the administration of wise friends of humanity, it must be im- 
 possible that penalty without transgression should be feared; that 
 blameless poverty in whatever form should be denied, as moraUty 
 and religion dictate that they should receive — fire, water, and common 
 shelter. Forgive me, most venerable protector of innocence, if I do 
 not write to you as I ought to write. My heart is too full, my mind 
 too disturbed, and no deliberate composure is possible.'' 
 
 Switzerland, which had for centuries shut out the Jews alto- 
 gether, was hardly more hospitable than Saxony ; and Mendels- 
 
1 84 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 sohn did all that he could, through Lavater and others, to modify 
 the laws there by a judicious working on public opinion. There 
 is, indeed, some ground for Kayserling's remark, that where the 
 most generous tolerance was proclaimed towards the Jews the 
 least fairness was shown to them; that where art and science most 
 flourished, it was the more deeply felt that they must be driven 
 back into barbarism.* Even in Prussia, Frederick's " tolerance " 
 was cruel. We may note as one instance that in order to extend 
 and encourage his porcelain manufacture, it was enacted that 
 every Jew on his marriage must purchase three hundred thalers 
 worth of porcelain, the greater part of which most Jews could 
 not even once use ! To Mendelssohn's lot fell a number of mon- 
 keys, which, with oddest irony, have been preserved as heirlooms. 
 Jews were openly insulted and stoned in the streets of Berlin, and 
 their children were sometimes seriously maltreated. Mendelssohn 
 himself makes record : — 
 
 " Even here, in this so-called tolerant country, I nevertheless live 
 so uneasy — so surrounded by true intolerance on all sides — that 
 I must all day imprison my children whom I love in a silk factory. 
 I sometimes walk out in the evening with my wife and children. 
 ' Papa,' asks one innocent, ' why do the lads call after us ? Why do 
 they throw stones after us ? What have we done to them ? ' ' Yes, 
 dear Papa,' says another, ' they follow us always in the streets, and 
 insult us with " Jews, Jews." Is it as great a disgrace to be a Jew as 
 they mean .'' ' What answer can I give to this but cast my eyes to the 
 ground, and say in my heart, ' Oh, fellow-men, why must it be thus?' " 
 
 Even the dead were not exempt from the oppressive action of 
 the laws, and were hurried off for burial before the bodies were 
 yet cold. Great efforts were used by the more influential Jews 
 in Germany for many years before the law was loosened so as to 
 allow a Jew to keep his dead three days before burial. 
 
 The year 1781 was a memorable one for the Jews in Germany. 
 It was signalised by two great events in relation to their condition. 
 The one was the publication of the celebrated work of Councillor 
 Von Dohm, " Ueber die biirgerhche Verbesserung der Juden ; " 
 and the other, the promulgation of the Toleration Edict of the 
 Emperor Joseph the Second, which led the way to so many 
 ameliorations. Von Dohm's book was a wise and moderate plea 
 for the removal of all restrictions on the vocations of the Jews, 
 
 * Page 268. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 185 
 
 and their elevation to full civic rights and privileges, his clear 
 and efficient arguments being founded, on the one hand, on the 
 principles of justice and humanity ; and, on the other, on sound 
 political judgment and the laws of pohtical economy. In treat- 
 ing of this later point. Von Dohm showed a marvellous clear- 
 ness of logic and skill of appeal. The press of Germany agreed 
 that the burdens of the Jews ought to be lightened. Mendels- 
 sohn, while he rejoiced to see the subject so ably argued, and 
 such an effect produced on the public mind in favour of the 
 Jews, was anxious to correct several wrong representations Von 
 Dohm had made respecting the internal purpose and scope of 
 the Jewish congregation ; and in order to effect this, he set 
 about a translation from the English of Menasseh Ben Israel's 
 " Apology for the Jews," * accompanied by a preface, in which 
 he dealt shortly with the most salient points of Von Dohm's 
 book, particularly those in which, as he held, some injustice was 
 done to the principles of Judaism. In one place he wrote : — 
 
 " Mr Von Dohm as a wise and benevolent man, patronises the 
 Jews, as a prudent and patriotic statesman, he foresees and desires such 
 benefits as would accrue to civil governments from their naturalisa- 
 tion. Permanent prosperity, he knows, will be attained, when guilds 
 and corporations are done away, and trades and professions opened 
 up to all subjects. The wealth of a country really consists in the 
 industry of its people. What made Holland, originally but a cluster 
 of swampy and barren islets, one of the most productive and wealthy 
 states of Europe 1 Nothing but the liberality and wise tolerance of 
 its rulers. There many of those who in other parts of Europe were pro- 
 scribed and oppressed found a refuge ; the industrious and skilful had 
 scope for their talents, and there they accordingly settled, prospered, 
 and grew powerful, so that in half a century the desert was trans- 
 formed into a paradise But I cannot refrain from expressing 
 
 my surprise at Mr Von Dohm's idea of church government and the 
 ecclesiastical power. ' To the elders of the congregations,' he says, 
 ' is relegated the duty of keeping a strict eye on their congregations. 
 They are to be invested with the authority of punishing every Jew 
 who may lapse from the essentials of his creed with anathema, excom- 
 munication, and expulsion from the congregation.' I am at a perfect 
 loss what to think of an author, who thus holds forth the olive branch 
 in one hand and the torch of discord in the other." 
 
 • Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel was sent by the Amsterdam Jews to London to confer with 
 Cromwell about the settlement of a Jewish colony in England. He was the intimate friend 
 and correspondent of Hugo Grotius. He was a member of a distinguished family of Jews 
 at Lisbon, who emigrated to Holland to escape the tender mercies of the Inquisition. 
 
1 86 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 Yet he disclaimed any kind of political influence, modestly in- 
 dicating his position thus : — 
 
 " I am at too great a distance from the chambers of the great, and 
 whoever has influence there, to be able to co-operate in the great work 
 of reform. I hve in a country which is ruled by one of the wisest 
 sovereigns that ever lived, who has made the arts and sciences flourish, 
 and made rational liberty of thinking so universal that its effects 
 extend to the humblest inhabitant of the kingdom. Under his rule I 
 have met with opportunity to cultivate my mind, to meditate on my 
 own destination, as well as on that of my brethren, and to inquire, as 
 far as I am able, into man, destiny, and providence. But from the 
 great generally, and from any contact with them, I have kept myself 
 remote. I have all along lived a retired life, and felt neither inclined 
 nor called on to intermeddle with the affairs of the practical world. 
 From the first my society has been confined to a small circle of 
 friends, who pursued the same road with me. At that obscure dis- 
 tance I still stand, waiting with dutiful patience what it may please 
 an all-wise Providence to bring out of this." 
 
 The purpose of what followed was to demonstrate that, what- 
 ever of misleading impression may have been given by individuals, 
 the pure spirit of Judaism was utterly opposed to any system of 
 coercion, punishment, or anathema. " What sensible person,'' 
 he asks, " would pretend to reform his neighbour's thoughts, or 
 to chasten his heart by coercion ? If, in society, we meet with a 
 man of wayward disposition, with perverted notions on essential 
 doctrines of religion, we have no other power but to reason with 
 him in a patient conciliatory way, trying thus to persuade him to 
 leave his errors and return to sound doctrine, in which we may 
 persevere till we conclude that he has passed by such delusions. 
 . . . After the most careful study of the Talmud, and exhaustive 
 search through the whole range of our philosophical and ethical 
 literature, I have not been able to find a single passage to justify 
 sovereigns and governments in persecuting those who dissent 
 from the established religion. If such dissenters may sometimes 
 be in the wrong, they are not wilfully so ; they believe themselves 
 to be in the path of truth, and, if they swerve from it in the recti- 
 tude of their intentions, can that be a good reason for hating and 
 persecuting them. . . . Show me a single instance in our Holy 
 Law where it gives a man correctional power over the thoughts 
 and beliefs of others. Our rabbinical doctors, without excep- 
 tion, ordain that sacrifices are to ' be accepted of the ' trans- 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 187 
 
 gressors of Israel, that a chance of repentance may be given 
 them." * 
 
 Towards the close of the year 1782, a small anonymous work 
 was published, titled, " Search after Light and the Right." t The 
 writer, tacitly taking up the thread which Lavater had let slip, 
 dealt severely with Mendelssohn on account of the views he thus 
 gives forth of the Ecclesiastical Power, and declared that in this 
 Mendelssohn had refined away whatever in Judaism was most 
 special to it as a system, and in fact announced an idea which 
 was far more Christian than Jewish. He urged that Mendels- 
 sohn had wrenched the very corner-stone from the Jewish system 
 by stripping the synagogue of its original power, by denying to it 
 the right of expulsion, and of entailing anathema and cutting-off 
 from the people of Israel. He went on to hint very plainly that 
 Lavater's letters and Bonnet's book had had far more effect on 
 his mind than Mendelssohn had been candid enough to acknow- 
 ledge, and wound up by claiming Mendelssohn as an unprofessed 
 convert to Christianity. 
 
 The result of this charge was that Mendelssohn was drawn to 
 express himself yet more fully on the subject, which he did in his 
 famous work, " Jerusalem ; or on the Religious power and Juda- 
 ism.":}: In the first part of this work he dealt with the whole nature 
 of the hierarchical power, demonstrating its absurdities with a rare 
 logic, and then dealing particularly with the power or authority 
 which elders of alien congregations have over such of their mem- 
 bers as dissent or fall away from them on fundamental points, and 
 this on the principles of the social compact, to excommunicate or 
 to anathematise ; and in the second part, he proceeds to a vindi- 
 cation of the principles of Judaism generally. Mendelssohn's lead- 
 ing idea is, that a great misconception has arisen from failing to 
 distinguish between Judaism as associated with a civil system, and 
 Judaism as wholly detached from it. Yet, under this separation, 
 Judaism de facto exists, fulfils all its functions as a spiritual system ; 
 proving that civil associations were not essential to it, but acciden- 
 tal only. And this fact it is which explains its complete coherency 
 through ages of proscription. When, he urges, the civil bonds 
 of the nation were dissolved, religious infractions no longer con 
 
 * Treatise Hullin, i.e., of Unholy Things. 
 
 t Forschen nach Licht und Recht. 
 
 X Jerusalem, oder uber religiose Macht und Judenthum. 
 
1 88 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 stituted state offences ; and religion as such, knows of no punish- 
 ment, no penitence, save what a repentant sinner voluntarily 
 imposes upon himself. To hold that the penal element which 
 only adhered to Judaism, so long as it embraced a national and 
 state existence, is still alive, were to rob it of its religious aspect 
 altogether. For there is an essential difference between the state 
 and religion which was distinctly recognised throughout the 
 whole of the Jewish polity. The state dictates and coerces ; 
 religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws ; religion 
 gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force, 
 and makes use of it if need be ; the force of rehgion is benevolence. 
 In a word, it was as a state with a religious sanction behind it, 
 that Judaism punished ; and in it too the work of the Church 
 was to temper and draw back, if possible, the erring brother. 
 All the machinery of penal infliction, cutting-off, and anathema 
 fell away from Judaism, the moment that Judaism ceased as a 
 national existence and became purely a religious system ; and 
 even should anathema and cutting off have been had recourse to 
 in any case, they who had recourse to them were illogical and 
 self-refuting, for they then had no power to follow up their decree 
 with civil consequences which alone could have made it truly 
 valid. Judaism recognises that penal inflictions for purely reli- 
 gious causes are not only foolish but mischievous. In this 
 remarkable passage Mendelssohn very powerfully sets forth this 
 point : — 
 
 "The right of proscribing and banishing, which the state, at times, 
 may think fit to exercise, is directly contrary to the spirit of religion. 
 Excommunicate, exclude, turn away a brother, who wants to join me 
 in my devotions, and raise his heart to God along with mine, in 
 salutary participation ! And this whilst religion denies itself the 
 power of inflicting arbitrary punishment, least of all that torment of 
 the soul, which he alone feels who has really religion ! Pass before 
 your mind's eye all the unfortunates who ever were to be amended 
 by anathema or threats of damnation. Reader, to whatever external 
 church, synagogue, or mosque, you may belong, inquire and see 
 whether you shall not discover more true religion amongst the crowd 
 of anathematised than amongst the incomparably greater crowd who 
 anathematised them ? Now, anathema is either attended with civil 
 consequences or it is not. If it draw on civil misery, its hardship 
 falls on the magnanimous individual only, who considers that sacri- 
 fice due to divine truth. He who has no religion, must be out of his 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 189 
 
 senses, if he expose himself to this risk, for the sake of a suppositi- 
 tious truth. But if the consequences of anathema be merely of a 
 spiritual nature (as some would fain persuade themselves they are), 
 they again bear heavy on him only who still is susceptible of that 
 kind of feeling. The irreligious man laughs at anathema and con- 
 tinues as obdurate as ever." 
 
 The author of "The Search after Light and the Right" made 
 it the crux of his charge that Mendelssohn's ideas of political 
 power were opposed to the Mosaic law. Mendelssohn, with 
 fine irony, rejoins that if it were so, and if there were not a 
 genuine element of religion in Judaism separable from the 
 merely legal aspect of Mosaisra, then how could it be, as the 
 author of "The Search'' rather loudly admits, that Christianity 
 had its foundation in Judaism ? In that case there were nothing 
 pure of a religious kind on which Christianity could found ; but, 
 following up as having a valid ground, this idea of Christianity 
 as based on Judaism, Mendelssohn with the most delicate satire, 
 thus feathers his arrow with a happy instance of the argumentum 
 ad hominern : — 
 
 " Now, my anonymous friend," he writes, " let me humbly request 
 your advice in a given emergency, and one which is by no means 
 impossible. Suppose that a fire should break out in my dwelling ; 
 that the flames have already burned out the ground-floor, and that 
 the foundations begin to shake. Would you have me fly for safety to 
 the top story ? Can I reasonably hope to find safety on the roof, if 
 the lower part of the structure, which supports it, is already falling 
 in ? When you find a man of judgment hold opinions subversive of 
 the mosaic dispensation, does the question not occur to you, ' What 
 will become of the Christian one which is founded on it?' Of a 
 truth, thou searcher after Light and the Right, were I not purely for 
 the sake 0/ light and the right, inclined to expatiate somewhat 
 further, I should here have closed my discourse, by showing you that 
 your concluding wishes are in directest contradiction to the principles 
 with which you set out." 
 
 The wide and exact knowledge, the comprehensive grasp, the 
 keen logic of Mendelssohn were never better illustrated. And 
 if it may be said that he over-refines or over-spiritualises Judaism, 
 it is certainly not by becoming harshly unrabbinical. 
 
 Mirabeau declared the "Jerusalem" was a book, which 
 deserved to be translated into all the European tongues, and he 
 placed the exertions of Mendelssohn for freedom on a level 
 
I go MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 with the analogous efforts of the new North-American Free- 
 States. Kant called it— " An irrefutable book;" and thus 
 wrote to Mendelssohn regarding it : "I hold the book to be the 
 announcement of a great, if a slowly-advancing reform, which 
 affects not only your own nation but all others ?" 
 
 XV. 
 
 When shortly before his death, Lessing published the famous 
 " Fragments," Mendelssohn found himself placed in a very per- 
 plexing attitude with respect to them. He found they were 
 actually attributed to him, by those who would willingly have 
 involved him in the mel^e that then arose. On this head he wrote 
 as follows to Herder on the 27th September 1781 : — 
 
 " That I am not the author of the ' Fragments,' I hardly need to 
 assure you. If I could and did write such a work, assuredly I would 
 not publish it without my name. But you will perhaps have some 
 difficulty in believing that these ingenious, celebrated, disparaged, 
 refuted, and yet not-enough-refuted ' Fragments' have not been even 
 read by me up to this hour. And yet this is in the most literal sense 
 true. Lessing's altercations I have never, in truth, willingly read ; 
 only his art and method are such that one must read him, even when 
 the matter otherwise is not interesting."* 
 
 When Lessing died in 1781 it affected Mendelssohn more 
 deeply than anything since the death of his wife. For some 
 time he could do nothing. He made various efforts to put on 
 paper, at the request of others, some record of his life-long 
 relationship with Lessing, and as many times did he fail. The 
 heart, as he said, would not yoke with the head. But he had 
 made a promise to Herder to do something with his help. This 
 is a portion of one of Herder's letters : — 
 
 " Some days have elapsed, dearest Mendelssohn, since I heard of 
 Lessing's death, and I wonder at myself that towards nobody have I 
 disburdened my heart on that sad event. To you I turn, dearest 
 Mendelssohn, to you I write ; for to you, dear friend, he was so 
 much more than to any other. For me in my first years I so often 
 found my thoughts in harmony with his, that I can hardly measure 
 the benefit I derived from -him. It cannot be but that you will by 
 and by make an effort to say, what I know not so well how to say — 
 
 * Aus Herders Nachlass, ii. 228. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 191 
 
 what Germany, what knowledge, what the world has lost in him ; 
 and I shall be gratified if I can in any way further this wise and 
 good purpose." 
 
 To this Mendelssohn, in his reply, said : — 
 
 " And now Lessing's death ! He was the only man to whom for 
 more than thirty years I remained so related that we had no impulse 
 of feeling but was mutually shared. Through all that long period our 
 hearts were undivided ; he was always my friend and good-doer. The 
 death of this dear friend, with whom, as it were, I had come to live, 
 has made a deep wound in my heart ; and it is a true comfort for my 
 soul that you feel a hke void in your breast, and such, through the 
 drawing-together of the family, may result in the more completely 
 thought-out work. Receive my most heartfelt thanks that you have 
 taken the first step. You shall surely help me half-way on the road. 
 I go on somewhat slowly, but uninterruptedly. Every one has his 
 defect, and I have the faith in your knowledge of men to believe that 
 you will not misconstrue my cold-seeming wisdom. It is in truth more 
 temperate than cold, and you will, it is to be hoped, in the course of 
 time, find it ever more true and capable of test, and your love more 
 and more worthily bestowed." 
 
 The bold exercise of individual judgment which had been 
 shown by the young lad of seventeen who exposed himself to the 
 wrath of his co-religionists by his persistent study of German 
 literature had, in several ways, its full outcome. In 1778 he had 
 presented to them the five books of Moses carefully translated 
 into German, beautifully printed in Hebrew character — a work 
 which did much to awaken them to thought and effort. Prior to 
 this, he had done not a little to modify or to remove the prejudices 
 which had been entertained towards Judaism by Frederick the 
 Great and by German statesmen, through his " Ritualgesetze der 
 Juden," a careful and exhaustive abstract of the Jewish Laws, 
 drawn up at Frederick's request. Though now sulfering much 
 from weakness and a tendency to fa,intness, he persevered bravely 
 in the work on which he had set his heart — the complete eman- 
 cipation of his brethren, along with their own liberalisation and 
 advancement to a fuller culture, which his own experience and 
 example had amply proved was compatible with a strict and con- 
 scientious adherence to Judaism. 
 
 Besides carrying on a voluminous correspondence with influen- 
 tial men throughout Europe, he devoted himself to translating 
 
192 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, the most notable of which 
 was his metrical translation of the Psalms. 
 
 It is hardly possible that he could have carried these numer- 
 ous works to the successful issue that he did, had it not been for 
 the aid of two men — Herrs Romberg and Naphtali Hartwig 
 Wessely — the latter more especially. He was a native of Ham- 
 burg, a man of high character. He was four years older than 
 Mendelssohn. After having been for some years in a banking 
 house in Hamburg, he went to Copenhagen, there to establish a 
 business of his own. He was a devoted student of philosophy, and 
 had made himself familiar with modem literature. He had trans- 
 lated the " Phsedon '' into Hebrew. The opposition to the Jews 
 in Copenhagen, which had been particularly directed towards him, 
 operated disadvantageously to his business there ; and suddenly 
 he left it and came to Berlin with his wife and children. For a 
 time he underwent severe sufferings, but was by and by relieved 
 by Mendelssohn and others, and from that time he was engaged 
 along with Mendelssohn in his great enterprise, whose main ob- 
 ject was the elevation and culture of the Jews. His work titled 
 " Worte des Friedens," produced a powerful effect, and prepared 
 the way for further developments. In his translations and in his 
 commentaries on the Books of Moses, no less than in his trans- 
 lations of the Psalms, and the Song of Solomon, which was not 
 published till after his death, Mendelssohn liberally acknowledged 
 the aid of Wessely, of whom he always spoke as of a faithful 
 friend and devoted worker in the cause of Jewish progress. The 
 metrical translation of the Psalms appeared in 1783. Mendels- 
 sohn's genius reveals itself here in that nice choice of word and 
 refined diction for which his prose is so celebrated. His friend, 
 David Friedlander, very justly celebrates these and other quali- 
 ties : — " No other version breathes like Mendelssohn's Psalms," 
 says Friedlander, "the spirit and energy of the original. Particu- 
 larly has he withdrawn from the twilight and darkness in which 
 they had so long lain, the ideas of God and of the godlike attri- 
 butes — the teachers of the purest God-service as well as of the 
 moral relations of men, of which the Psalms contain so rich a 
 treasure, and has set them forward in their purest and clearest 
 light, no more encumbered with expressions of doubtful or double 
 meaning."* Friedlander, in especial, cites as illustrative the ren- 
 
 * Berliner Monatsschrift, 1786, p. 525. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 193 
 
 dering of these expressive lines : — 
 
 " Jerusalem ! vergesse ich dein ; 
 So vergesse meine Rechte ! 
 
 Meine Zunge kleb' am Gaumen, 
 Wenn ich deiner nicht gedenke : 
 Wenn bei jeder Frolichkeit 
 Dir nicht eine Zahre fleusst." 
 
 XVII. 
 
 The " Morgenstunden," which was published in 1786, origin- 
 ated in his desire to give his eldest son Joseph * — a youth of 
 uncommon parts — ^his son Abraham, his son-in-law, and a few 
 friends, " young and hopeful people of his nation," as Nicolai 
 describes them, clear ideas about the foundations of the pre- 
 vaiUng philosophical systems, and particularly about God, His 
 existence and attributes, and of the proper direction of our 
 thoughts of and concerning Him ; the immortality of the soul ; 
 the principles of morahty and virtue, and the essential founda- 
 tions of civil society. The power of lucid and simple exposition 
 seen in these discourses is as remarkable as the graceful style, 
 the well-chosen phrase, the happy illustration. 
 
 The second part, which treated of the influence of the demon- 
 stration of the existence of God on society, and of natural and 
 moral rights, never appeared. This was the point reached at 
 the time of Lessing's death, and Mendelssohn— overwhelmed 
 with grief, and involved in controversy respecting Lessing's 
 beliefs, as we shall see — was never able to finish the manuscript 
 for press. 
 
 We can easily picture in imagination these interesting morning 
 meetings — the slow, grave, and tender tones of the lecturer, 
 whose eye would brighten as he came on the more earnest and 
 elevated passages, or become moist as he touched occasionally 
 on more personal topics ; the hearers, earnest and eager to catch 
 every word that was uttered, and to appreciate fully every varied 
 tone. For they were a young company well fitted to appreciate 
 their privilege. Mendelssohn's own sons were young men 
 of uncommon parts. Though their fame is overshadowed by 
 
 * Nicolai speaks of this son Joseph as " Ein Jungling von ausgezeichneten Fahig 
 keiten, und den er mit der zartlichsten Vaterliebe liebte." — *' Sammlung, von J. Heine- 
 mann," p. 5. 
 
 N 
 
194 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 that of their father, they made worthy contributions to German 
 literature. Joseph Mendelssohn, who died on the 24th November 
 1848, was aUke distinguished as a man, a citizen, and a mer- 
 chant, and attained considerable distinction through his writings, 
 more particularly these two : a " Study on Rossetti's ideas for a 
 new interpretation of Dante " (Berlin 1840), and on " Bill-Bank- 
 ing'' (Berlin 1846).* He also wrote a sketch of the life of his 
 father. He founded in Berlin and Hamburg, along with his 
 brother, Abraham, the firm of J. & A. Mendelssohn, which still 
 exists under the style of Mendelssohn & Company. Abraham, 
 who died in 1835, was a man of large culture and also an author. 
 Though Blackwood's Magazine, in reviewing Mr Sime's " Les- 
 sing," severely reproved him for saying that Felix Mendelssohn- 
 Bartholdy was "a grandson of Moses Mendelssohn," yet in 
 spite of " Blackwood " he was the son of this Abraham. It is 
 not improbable that it was the name " Bartholdy " which led the 
 innocent Blackwood writer astray, and for his (or her) benefit we 
 may add that that name was his mother's. She was a Bartholdy, 
 a woman of great culture and of refined and artistic tastes : it 
 was from her, indeed, that the great musician got his first lessons 
 on the pianoforte. She began when he was a child between two 
 and three with lessons of five minutes a day, increasing a minute 
 daily, till he and his sister Fanny, his kfter-companion and 
 friend, were ready for the highest training. She delighted to 
 surround herself with men of genius, and the greatest poets and 
 painters and musicians of the day were to be met at her recep- 
 tions ; and thus Felix, the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, 
 from the first enjoyed the advantages of the very best society. 
 But he was a grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew philo- 
 sopher, pace " Blackwood." In the commonest of all German 
 biographical dictionaries, the " Blackwood " writer might have read 
 under the heading of " Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy : " "Enkel 
 des Philosophen Mendelssohn, Reformator der neuern Musik 
 durch Wiederbelebung des Sinns fiir classische Tonwerke;" but 
 it may be that the " Blackwood" writer read the Enkel with the 
 " U " sound for the first " E," and failing to check off the dates, 
 founded on this for z. positive assertion which truly does not call 
 for much of a negative ! 
 
 * " Berichte iiber Rossetti's Ideen zu einer neuen Erlauterung des Dante " and " Ueber 
 Zettelbanken." 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 195 
 
 Of the " Morgen-stunden," which had the interesting origin we 
 have described, Count Mirabeau speaks in the following terms : — 
 
 " Ces Matinees et les considerations sur la religion naturelle par 
 Reimarus dgalent k mon avis, si alias ne surpassent, ce que les autres 
 nations ont de livres sur ces matidres dtarnallement dignes de 
 curiositd. . . . Mendelssohn aimoit le dogme de 1' immortality 
 de r ame qu 'il avoit si bien ddfendu, comme tendre, consolant, con- 
 forme k nos dfesirs, et i nos affections, doud d' une certain dldvation 
 propra k 1' homme qui lui fait chdrir la prolongation de son existence 
 et s' occuper de ce qui sera quand il ne sera plus lui-meme." — 
 " Mirabeau," pp. 37, 42-3. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 The last pages of the " Morning Hours " re-connect Mendels- 
 sohn and Lessing. There Mendelssohn inserts one of his most 
 touching tributes to Lessing's memory. Jacobi, through a friend, 
 had asked Mendelssohn to certify of his knowledge whether 
 Lessing had not died a Spinozist, a pantheist ; and, on being 
 answered, Jacobi recalled the circumstance that, when some 
 years before Lessing's death, he had called on Lessing, 
 Lessing's confessions in favour of Spinoza's philosophy amounted 
 to this. The mere name of Spinozist would not seem in 
 itself to bear much obloquy now, but then it was different, 
 and Mendelssohn at once perceived that behind the query 
 lay some intention of further endeavours, whereby Lessing's 
 name and fame might be damaged in the eyes of a large 
 class. When the " Morning HourS " appeared with Mendels- 
 sohn's note, Jacobi at once set himself to forestall any fuller ex- 
 pression of Mendelssohn's, and by-and-by published "Letters to 
 Mr Mendelssohn on the doctrines of Spinoza," in the course of 
 which he even hinted that Mendelssohn was himself tainted by 
 his friend's philosophic heresies. Weak and ill though he was, 
 Mendelssohn set himself earnestly to the work of writing the 
 book now so well known as " Moses Mendelssohn to the Friends 
 of Lessing," * which is one of the clearest pieces of reasoning 
 and exposition, relieved by finest pathos, irony, and choice 
 repartee. It is as valuable for his important expositions of the 
 distinction between speculative opinions and plain common 
 
 * Moses Mendelssohn an die Freunde Lessing's. 
 
196 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 sense, as for its proper defence of Lessing. After saying at one 
 place that in the " Jerusalem " he had given full expression to 
 his religious ideas, that his faith rested on realities that lay beyond 
 the scope of philosophy, he writes with passionate eloquence : — 
 
 " How expressive was that exclamation of the Greenlander who, 
 on seeing the rays of the rising sun scatter the mists, and shed new 
 glories on the snow-peaked mountains, cried out to a German clergy- 
 man, ' See, brother, see, the returning light of day ! If the creation 
 is so excellent, how excellent must the Creator be ! Notwithstand- 
 ing all my study and researches, such a scene as that sufBces to de- 
 monstrate to me the truth of those sublime lessons and of the words 
 of the inspired poet — ' He that hath planted the ear, shall he not 
 hear ? He that formed the eye, shall he not see ? He that teacheth 
 man knowledge, shall he not know ? ' 
 
 " Whatever common sense, which all men share, may have taught 
 me that is before me, like the light at noon-day. So long as the study 
 of any science aids me in penetrating and understanding the laws of 
 nature, I follow it with satisfaction and pleasure ; but when it proves 
 insufficient, I forego the path of enquiry, and trust to the solution of 
 this common sense, which has never deceived me. Let the proficient 
 follow this course before he dashes his head against the dark moun- 
 tains, raised by wiseacres and pretenders in the field of inquiry ; he 
 will find it to be the unobstructed path which the sincere will tread to 
 acquire the knowledge of God, and of the true and eternal doctrine on 
 which all our happiness depends." 
 
 All his studies, he goes on to say, in philosophy and in science 
 were undertaken with a purpose of finding help towards the solu- 
 tion of the great religious problem. " What other motive could 
 I have had," he cogently asks. " In the circumstances I then was 
 placed, not the slightest temporal benefit could I expect from the 
 sciences. I knew well that I had no hope of getting on in the 
 world through them. And as for the gratification they might 
 afford me — alas ! highly honoured philanthropist ! — the position 
 allowed to my co-religionists in civil society is so incompatible 
 with the expansion of the mind, that assuredly we in no way add 
 to our happiness by learning to view the rights of humanity under 
 their truest aspect. On this point also I must decline to say 
 more. He who is acquainted with our condition and has a 
 humane heart, will here feel more than I could express." 
 
 In the part which had to do with Lessing, Mendelssohn wrote 
 
 * Psalm xciv. 9, 10. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 197 
 
 with the truest dignity, though every page betrayed the warmth 
 of his affection, and the faithful heart wounded for the friend's 
 sake. Some thought that Mendelssohn had made too much of 
 Jacobi's poor attempt to injure Leasing by claiming him for the 
 Spinozists ; and Kant wittily said, — " It is Mendelssohn's fault 
 that Jacobi thinks himself a philosopher." Mendelssohn's 
 sincerity was fully attested by the fact that when writing " To 
 the Friends of Lessing," a wholly new arrangement of the 
 "Morning Hours" had suggested itself, by which he would be able 
 to introduce the whole correspondence between Jacobi and him- 
 self on the subject of Lessing and Spinoza. But this he was 
 never able to accomplish, and no second volume ever appeared. 
 On the Ikst day of December 1785, Mendelssohn took to Voss, 
 the publisher, the manuscript of the defence of his friend. He 
 felt sick when he returned home. When his dear friend Hofrath 
 Herz went to see him on the 2d January, he was struck not only 
 by the weak appearance, but by the air of calm, even cheerful, 
 submission with which Mendelssohn spoke of his early going 
 hence. His pulse was slow ; he was very weak ; he could eat 
 nothing. Carefully was he ministered to by the loving hands of 
 his physician and his family, but it availed not; he passed 
 away on the 4th of the month. He was in the 5 7th year of his 
 age. Well might the Berliner Zeitung of the 5 th speak of the 
 announcement of his death as "a piece of news that would bring 
 tears to many eyes." Few are the men of any age or time who 
 have lived more truly the life of a philosopher, and who have had 
 more faithful friends and fewer enemies. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Mendelssohn was of slight stature and very weak in consti- 
 tution, but his countenance was full of expression and cheerful- 
 ness. His black eyes, and his lofty white brow told of great 
 strength of character, purity of purpose, and distinguished intel- 
 lectual gifts. He wore a little beard, after the fashion of the 
 Jews of his day in Germany. A gentle smile played round his 
 mouth, which, as seen in the portraits, more especially the 
 profiles, is always a httle open. Though he was shy and timid, 
 he was very social and attractive among friends, and drew to him 
 at all stages of his life those whose friendship was most worth 
 
198 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 prizing. He greatly loved to surround himself with such friends, 
 and for this purpose he rose early in the morning to write and to 
 study, so that his evenings might be free. Though he was him- 
 self abstemious, and from the weakness of his constitution, pre- 
 cluded from indiscriminate eating and drinking, he delighted to 
 see others enjoying themselves at table. One of his biographers 
 has said : — 
 
 " It was almost inconceivable that the quantity of food to which he 
 restricted himself could have sustained a human being, and it was 
 often very affecting to see him press his guests to partake of viands 
 and liquors which he dared not taste himself He was very fond of 
 company, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to hear a subject 
 discussed on first principles. Providence had blessed his latter days 
 with wealth ; so that he was able to exercise a refined hospitality, 
 and to support his own poor relations and those of his wife with true 
 liberality. To do a good office gave him more pleasure than to pro- 
 duce a successful essay. He was one of the most benevolent of 
 men." 
 
 Of his deep and genuine religious feelings all his friends, 
 whether Jewish or Christian, make admiring record. David 
 Friedlander sums up the judgment on this point in the following 
 passage : — 
 
 " His genuine religious feeling often filled his eyes with tears, which 
 he could not control, more particularly if he read to his friends some 
 of his favourite psalms, and his countenance would lighten and shine 
 clear if he were deeply moved by them : his piety was neither cold 
 calculation, nor (still less) hypocrisy. He was not without intense 
 passions, as he himself admitted ; and their suppression cost him 
 great effort. He had a faculty for satire, and could be very bitter in 
 his expressions, particularly if he had observed any one publicly acting 
 in unworthywise ; but he would strike out or soften down the 
 passage after the first ebullition had subsided, either this of himself, or 
 on the shghtest disapproving look, when his better feelings had way. 
 On the other hand, his trust in the power of the truth was un- 
 limited and immovable. Hypocrisy and the fear of men were 
 alike remote from him ; but so circumspect did he remain, through 
 all the trials of his position, that the way of his destiny naturally fol- 
 lowed. Herein lay the source of his influence with his highly- 
 respected friends, to whom, till his life's end, he stood for a teacher' 
 and exemplar."* 
 
 David Friedlander says (Sammlung, pp. 437-8), that to Moses 
 
 * Dr Heinemann's Sammlung, p. 437. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 199 
 
 Mendelssohn, Lessing's principle, as announced in a famous 
 passage, was, in that respect, an oracle. Here is the original, of 
 which we have given a translation at p. 75. 
 
 " Ich weiss nicht, ob es Pflicht ist, Gluck und Leben der Wahrheit 
 aufzuopfern, wenigstens sind Muth und Entschlossenheit, welche 
 dazu gehoren, keine Gaben, die wir uns selbst geben konnen. Aber 
 das, weiss ich, ist Pflicht, wenn man Wahrheit lehren will, sie klar 
 und rund, ohne Rathsel, ohne Zuriickhaltung, ohne Misstrauen in 
 ihre Kraft zu lehren, und die Gaben, welche dazu gehoren, stehen in 
 unserer Gewalt. Wer die nicht erworben, oder wenn er sie erworben, 
 nicht brauchen will, macht sich um den menschlichen Verstand nur 
 schlecht verdient, wenn er grobe Irrthiimer uns benimmt, die voile 
 Wahrheit aber vorbehalt, und mit einem Mitteldinge von Wahrheit 
 und Luge uns befriedigen will. Denn je grober der Irrthum desto 
 kiirzer und gerader der Weg zur Wahrheit. Dahingegen der verfein- 
 erte Irrthum uns auf ewig von der Wahrheit entfernt halten kann, je 
 schwerer es uns einleuchtet, dass es Irrthum ist. Der Mann, der bei 
 drohenden Gefahren, der Wahrheit untreu wird, kann die Wahrheit 
 doch sehr lieben, und die Wahrheit vergiebt ihm seine Untreue, um 
 seiner Liebe willen. Aber wer nur darauf denkt, die Wahrheit 
 unter allerlei Larven und Masken an den Mann zu bringen, der 
 mochte wohl ihr Kuppler sein, nur ihr Liebhaber ist er nie gewesen. 
 Ich wiisste kaum etwas Schlechteres, als einem solchen Kuppler der 
 Wahrheit." 
 
 As a kind of outflow of the restrained satire of which Fried- 
 lander has spoken, he had a rare power of reproving affectation 
 or pretence without inflicting pain. Here is an instance : On 
 one occasion a young man, meaning to make a display of his 
 erudition, importuned him for an opinion on a passage in Eben 
 Ezra on Special Providence, which had often puzzled the Com- 
 mentators. " I do not grasp the meaning of it myself," said Men- 
 delssohn ; " but as the best way to ascertain the distinction raised, 
 it will be well to contemplate the works of God, his benevolence 
 and his mercy to all his creatures, and then it will be time enough 
 to study Eben Ezra.'' 
 
 In combination with no little subtlety and the power of rising 
 to lofty generalisations, was a subdued and tranquil faith, which 
 he had brought into complete harmony with his own intellect 
 and instincts. To assert, under any kind of justification of the 
 logical faculty, that the urgent claims of the moral and religious 
 instincts had no realities correspondent to them, was to him pre- 
 
20O MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 posterous ; and enables us to realise his shrinking from certain 
 forms of philosophy which tended to analyse these into mere 
 subjective conditions. That his faith could bear the strain of a 
 real grief, we have seen by the way in which he supported him- 
 self under repeated bereavements. His philosophy may thus not 
 inaptly be styled a form of the Scottish common-sense philo- 
 sophy.* This probably it was that drew him to British thought 
 rather than to the metaphysical sensationalism of France. He 
 was, however, an eclectic rather than a dogmatist — ^intent on 
 eliciting divergent views, that so truth might be set forth in all 
 its aspects ; and his style of mind was essentially Socratic. He 
 himself well said, " My philosophy has still too much the savour 
 of every school in which I have formed myself." t 
 
 This constant attitude of appeal to the common understand- 
 ing (der gesunde Menschenverstand) and instincts, allied with the 
 truly Socratic cast of his intelligence, reduced to a minimum the 
 temptation towards the abstract and|general, against which Lessing 
 fought, but under which he sometimes fell. Frequently Men- 
 delssohn had to warn Lessing against this tendency, and never 
 perhaps was his warning based on clearer insight or more 
 subtle perception than when he impressed on Lessing the false 
 assumption which, as he conceived, underlay the " Erziehung 
 des Menschengeschlechts,'' and to his mind greatly vitiated its 
 whole argument — a point which he thus emphasised shortly after 
 Lessing's death : — 
 
 " For my part, I confess that I have no idea of any ' training for 
 the whole human race,' such as my late dear friend Lessing let some 
 historiographer of man put into his head. They imagine to them- 
 selves the thing ' human race ' as a single individual, and then pro- 
 ceed to theorise upon it, as if Providence had put it here on earth in 
 a school, to be trained from an infant to an adult. In the main, the 
 human race (if the metaphor will hold good at all) is in almost 
 
 * In der Annahme des gesunden Menschenverstandes stimmt Mendelssohn einerseits mit 
 den Schottischen Common sense-philosophen Reid, Beattie, u. a., wie andererseits mit 
 Rousseau wesentlich liberein. Im Grunde war der ganze s g. Rationalismus, der von 
 Leibnitz aus der geistigen Zeitbewegungen sich bemSchtigte, ein Eklekticismus, der auf 
 gesunden Menschenverstande basirte. Die ganze ZeitstrSmung hat Goethe richtig charak- 
 tisirt, indem er sagt : "Die Philosophic war ein mehr oder weniger * gesunder Menschen- 
 verstand,' " der es wagte, ins Allgemeine zu gehen und iiber innere und aussere Erfahrun- 
 gen abzusprechen. — Kayserling, p. 406, 
 
 t " Meine Philosophie hat noch allzusehr den Geruch jener Schule, in welcher ich mich 
 gebildet habe." Mendelssohn's relations to Wolflanism, and to Spinozism are de- 
 scribed in a full and masterly manner in Kayserling's Philosophische und religiose 
 Grundsatze. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 201 
 
 every age at once infant, adult, and greybeard, only in different 
 places and regions. There it is (if we may so speak) in the cradle, 
 at the breast, or hving on cream and milk ; then again, in manly 
 armour and eating ox-flesh ; yet again, in another place toothless, 
 and tottering on a staff. Progress is for individual man, who is 
 destined by Providence to pass a portion of his eternity here on 
 earth. Each one goes his own way through hfe. The route of one 
 is through flowers and meadows ; that of another across desert 
 plains, over steep mountains, or along the side of dangerous preci- 
 pices. Yet they all progress on the journey, pursuing the road to 
 which they were destined. But that the bulk or the whole of the 
 human race here on earth should be constantly moving forward in 
 progress of time, attaining perfection, scarcely seems to me the de- 
 sign of Providence. It is, at least, not so decided, nor so very neces- 
 sary for the vindication of Providence, as some would appear to 
 think." 
 
 An intelligent, but non-literary friend, of ours, in looking at 
 one of the portraits of Mendelssohn in our possession, somewhat 
 surprised us by discerning a likeness in expression to Thomas de 
 Quincey ; and on the thing being pointed out, we were com- 
 pelled to discern some truth in it. Very different as the two 
 men appear at first sight, and really are in some things, there 
 are also several points of likeness in character and turn of mind. 
 There is in both the same constitutional weakness and delicacy 
 of taste, combined with the same strong common-sense ; the 
 same capacity to follow out lengthened trains of abstract thought, 
 and suddenly to correct them by reference to some simple out- 
 standing facts of life. The same subtlety of thought, but also 
 the same dislike of over-generalisation (which explains not a little 
 in De Quincey's view of Herder). The same openness to new 
 ideas and general comprehension of the purposes of others, but 
 a full return on certain simple religious ideas closely associated 
 with the deference to common sense or common instinct. There 
 is also in both the same love of solitude strangely qualified by 
 keen social instincts ; both have a rare and unexpected capa- 
 city to find relief in the society of widely-contrasted characters 
 — all the while drawing from them kindlily, the most admir- 
 able aids towards self-development, and this wholly apart 
 from conscious appropriation. In both, too, there is a sub- 
 dued and peculiar humour, which found its best outlet in the 
 freedom of correspondence — the tone of their letters being not 
 seldom peculiarly alike. Mendelssohn's fine appreciation of 
 
202 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 humour did much to determine his freshness both of thought 
 and idea, for in midst of the most urgently-intellectual of his 
 labours and studies, he turned with a true sense of relief to the 
 humourists. He read " Tristram Shandy " alongside of one of 
 the most abstract and trying of treatises, and thus he tells Abbt 
 of the impressions made upon him by it, and the way in which 
 he found the true cue to its author's genius : — 
 
 " ' Tristram Shandy ' is a masterly original. Up till now I have 
 indeed not read more than the two first parts. At first the book 
 made me uncommonly uncomfortable. I rambled from digression to 
 digression, without being able to seize the true humour of the author. 
 I held him for a man, like our own Liscow, for whom, as you know, 
 
 I have no particular liking The parson's saddle-horse first 
 
 excited my curiosity. Then came Tobias, Corporal Trim, and Dr 
 Slop, and the excellent sermon upon the conscience. . . . 
 
 " This letter has lain some eight days ready to send off; but I have 
 still opportunity to add, that I have now read the third and fourth 
 parts of ' Tristram Shandy.' Sterne is not only a greater painter 
 than Voltaire, but his fable has the particular merit over the Candide, 
 that the moral is good. I am still no friend of Burlesque, but I know 
 also a few pieces where the Burlesque may be so instructive, 
 where the caricature is so true, the moral along with all the comical- 
 ity so noble — that you will, I know, be pleased to hear me say this 
 much.'' 
 
 This peculiar openness to the innocent pleasures of life, — to 
 art, humour, and dramatic productions, might, at first view, seem 
 inconsistent with his faithful adherence to Judaism, as involving 
 so much that is dogmatic. But the explanation lies in Mendels- 
 sohn's view of Judaism, as having freed itself from the encum- 
 brances at once of a civil system, and of tradition, thus basing 
 itself on the broad foundation of common moral instincts, which 
 only in the last resort are elevated and fortified by every fresh 
 outlet that the intellect or imagination can find into Ufe and truth. 
 In opening up this point so clearly as he did, and showing, by his 
 own example, how to reconcile a wide interest in all that con- 
 cerned contemporary affairs and reforms with a faithful obser- 
 vance of Jewish customs, he exhibited the true pathway for his 
 brethren, and initiated the only process which can avail to render 
 Judaism still in its degree living and efficient among the many 
 forces now at work in the civilized world. Not by standing coldly 
 aloof from Gentile knowledge, culture, and art, could this by any 
 possibility be accomplished. 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 203 
 
 XX. 
 
 Any faithful attempt to trace Mendelssohn's influence must, 
 therefore, begin with Judaism. In his teachings, he was faithful 
 to the apostolic direction, beginning at Jerusalem. All his study 
 of science and literature only led to a stronger and more ration- 
 ally-grounded faith in the reHgion of his fathers. The great array 
 of tradition and commentary in the Talmud did not shake him 
 from his allegiance in the least. Though he had deeply studied 
 in that vast repertory of wisdom and fable, of legend and poetry, 
 of Divine insight and most futile quibbling and casuistry, yet he 
 keenly felt and openly acknowledged that the evil fate of religions 
 — to outgrow their primal simplicity, and become the victims of 
 human invention and empty ingenuity — had fallen very heavily 
 on Judaism. His great idea was to detach the essential principles 
 from the trivial distinctions and quibblings by which they had 
 been overlaid. But in these very adhesions — often vain and 
 worthless in themselves — he found unexpected and curious con- 
 firmation of the eternal principles that to his mind constituted the 
 essence of Judaism. There is at once truth and error — insight 
 and exaggeration — in the following passage of Heine on this 
 point : — 
 
 " Moses Mendelssohn overthrew the prestige of Talmudism. . . . 
 This man, whom his contemporaries called the German Socrates, and 
 whose nobleness of soul and intellectual powers they so admired, was 
 the son of a poor sexton of the synagogue at Dessau. Besides this 
 curse of birth, Providence had made him a hunchback, in order to 
 teach the rabble, in the most striking manner, that men are to be 
 judged not by outward appearance, but by inner worth. ... As 
 Luther conquered the Papacy, Mendelssohn overthrew the Talmud, 
 and this by a process similar to Luther's. He rejected tradition, and 
 declared the Bible to be the well-spring of rehgion, and to give effect 
 to his position, he translated the more important parts of it. So he 
 destroyed Jewish Catholicism, for the Talmud is in effect the Catho- 
 licism of the Jews. It is a Gothic dome which is surcharged by 
 fanciful and] childish ornamentation, and yet we are astonished by 
 its gigantic hauteur, and the greatness of its heaven-aspiring propor- 
 tions. It is a hierarchy of religious laws, often of a ridiculous subtlety, 
 and yet so skilfully superposed, and subordinated the one to the 
 other, that they mutually support each other, and form a front colossal 
 and formidable.'"* 
 
 * AUemagne, i. p. 129. 
 
204 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 Jost has remarked that Mendelssohn's "aim was to elevate and 
 spiritualize Judaism ;" but this he did by processes which were 
 distinctly rational. When he himself claims to have exhaustively 
 considered the points that arise between Judaism and Christianity, 
 and to have faithfully laid them to the test of reason, he only 
 asserts what is strictly true. But Mendelssohn's spirituality always 
 came readily to the help of his reason. He was rational in his 
 processes, but spiritual in his perceptions ; and it is on this 
 account that he stands so completely apart from the purely 
 rationalising Jews, while yet they cannot really stand apart from 
 him, because he had brought his reason and his spiritual instincts 
 into such a complete unity, that whatever was valid in their posi- 
 tion he had already comprehended and expressed. The tendency 
 amongst thoughtful Jews is either to become complete rationalists, 
 rejecting everything Divine, and regarding all religions as but 
 forms of a necessary human development, or to become mere 
 accommodators, viewing the progress of the world as involving 
 a restoration of the Jewish ideal in some subtle semi-political 
 form, as seen in " Daniel Deronda " and the whole class repre- 
 sented in that book. The latter is the more estimable aspect, 
 inasmuch as it leaves open a sphere for lofty enthusiasms ; but 
 the tendency being to divorce these from a truly individual reli- 
 gious sentiment, the enthusiasm is too much fed by merely national 
 and individual pride, and tends to the most wa)nvard onesided- 
 ness. To both these classes Mendelssohn speaks efficiently, and 
 to the first especially with serious warning. No political compli- 
 cations, no involvement whatever of Judaism with the secular 
 order of the world, and for the highest ends, could avail it now. 
 It has proved its capacity to exist as a spiritual system apart 
 wholly from the civil order — that is one of the grandest proofs of 
 its Divine institution. 
 
 And here lies the central idea of Mendelssohn's conservatism. 
 Judaism antedates such association — rites and ceremonies 
 coalescence with a civil rule, were accretions. Judaism, in its 
 purest ideal existed, and of necessity, as something waiting to be 
 so expressed or to be so allied with civil power — able to enforce 
 its decrees by penalty. In thus following Judaism to its fountain- 
 head, Mendelssohn finds it more and more inclusive of the prin- 
 ciples of the Christianity which claims to have superseded it. He 
 argues, and aptly, that if Christianity is, indeed, founded on 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 205 
 
 Judaism, it is rather odd to urge that Judaism is now non-existent, 
 since a house will certainly not stand if you pull down its founda- 
 tions ! The lower story may be filled with lumber that wants 
 clearing out; but you who abide in the upper story are even more 
 interested than we who dwell in the lower that no violence be 
 done to the beams and pillars in the process. 
 
 In association with this idea were two others, directly accessory 
 to it. These were, first, that the peculiar exclusiveness, and 
 spirit of persecution so much associated with Judaism, were due 
 to later traditions, and were in opposition to the original spirit of 
 Judaism ; and next, that Judaism, on its ceremonial side, was 
 legislated only for Jews, which therefore was not a proselytising 
 system. An element there was in Judaism which could never be 
 done away — the complete and final expression it had given to 
 natural religion and to moral duties ; herein it was a revelation 
 to humanity, and herein it was eternal. In this respect, too, it 
 was viewed by the earlier teachers and by all who had risen to 
 the true idea of Judaism. It was with a peculiar reverence and 
 still enthusiasm that Mendelssohn was wont to refer to the 
 provision for the worship of the stranger in the temple. He 
 writes : — 
 
 '•' When King Solomon had finished the building of the temple, he 
 embraced in his consecration-prayer the foreigner, who was still an 
 idolater, lifting his hands to heaven and saying : — 
 
 " ' Moreover concerning the stranger, that is not of thy people 
 Israel, but cometh out of a far country for thy name's sake : (For 
 they shall hear of thy great name, and of thy strong hand, and of thy 
 stretched out arm :) when he shall come and pray towards this 
 house ; hear thou in heaven thy dwelling-place, and do according to 
 all that the stranger calleth to thee for ; that all the people of the 
 earth may know thy name, to fear thee, as do thy people Israel : and 
 that they may know that this house which I have builded, is called 
 by thy name,' i Kings viii. 41-43. 
 
 " So also our rabbis have set forth that freewill offerings and votive 
 gifts be taken in the temple from one of any nation, even though he 
 has not fully accepted the religion, in order that he may have oppor- 
 tunity and occasion for improvement." 
 
 Here then we have at once the religious and the rational 
 ground of toleration, as drawn by Mendelssohn from the Jewish 
 religion. If it were urged that he spiritualises Judaism and draws 
 it up into the region of Christianity, we would reply that, unlike 
 
2o6 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 his opponent, he is dealing with the real facts of the case, pre- 
 cisely as does a Christian apologist who would not make Chris- 
 tianity in itself responsible for the frightful cruelties and persecu- 
 tions foi: which it was made the justification, after Christianity had 
 allied itself with the Civil Power. 
 
 This idea may be said to colour all Mendelssohn's effort and 
 speculation. Diverse as were the subjects with which he dealt, 
 this influence shines through all, like light through a trans- 
 parency, bringing out more vividly the clearness and sharpness 
 of the characters inscribed. 
 
 His association with the "Aufklarung" did much to modify 
 and to ameliorate its influence ; and it was mainly for this reason 
 — that rationalism with him was reunited with a powerful religious 
 feeling. It was so pervading that in the "Phsedon" he may be 
 said to have christianised Plato and Socrates, and married 
 Judaism to a clarified and spiritual humanism. 
 
 We have more than once seen the name of Mendelssohn 
 coupled with that of Spinoza, as one of the great destroyers of 
 orthodox Judaism. The charge is not well justified. If it 
 is meant to carry any kind of reflection on Mendelssohn's 
 honesty, an epithet stronger than unjustified might well be 
 applied to it. And a distinction must be raised. Ortho- 
 dox Judaism, and Jewish orthodoxy are hardly the same 
 thing. The one may be regarded as Biblical, the other as 
 Rabbinic. Luther, the founder of orthodox Protestantism, is not 
 accountable for the vagaries of the sects, each raising into essen- 
 tial importance some separate doctrine, and forcing it out of 
 proportion to the rest, refusing to recognise what was implied in 
 the teachings of Luther as well as of John Knox, that no formu- 
 lated Confession of belief could be final, and that new references 
 must ever be made to the Bible itself As Heine has said, 
 Talmudism was the Catholicism of the Jews. To lead the minds 
 of the Jewish people back to the Bible itself was, therefore, only 
 a return to purity of doctrine and religious conception, as in the 
 case of the Reformation. The emancipation of the Jews in a 
 social and political sense coincided in a remarkable degree with 
 this outward reform. This fact, in face of all their sufferings and 
 persecutions, is one of the most remarkable in history, and indi- 
 cates something of special providential leading in their destiny 
 still. All these years of proscription, scorn, suffering, and death 
 
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 207 
 
 might seem to be but a new journeying in the wilderness, pre- 
 paratory to a new initiation into a grand possession. For con- 
 sider two things : their pride of race, their intense national 
 memory, and then their sudden conversion, as it were, to modem 
 ideas, and their perception of a great place for them there, not 
 in spite of their race but because of it. 
 
 Aliens, held to hard burdens, made for ages " a scorn and a 
 hissing ; " regarded only as useful to the commonwealth under 
 which they lived, because they could be mulcted of the gold 
 which by the utmost exercise of ingenuity and labour they had 
 amassed, persecuted, spat upon, insulted and assaulted, some- 
 times offered up in holocaust, what wonder that they had been 
 long indifferent to the general welfare, regarded the word 
 Christian as synonymous with cruelty and persecution, and 
 thought of gentile knowledge and culture as a curse to be held 
 at arm's length. It is a miracle that the Jews, considering the 
 treatment received by them from the middle-ages down to the 
 end of the eighteenth century in most of the countries of 
 Europe, and considering the tenacity of their national recollec- 
 tions and traditions, are now so completely conciliated, inclined 
 to view with satisfaction their citizenship without sacrificing the 
 long inherited pride in the phrase " I am a Jew." To the bring- 
 ing about of this result many influences co-operated — one of 
 which was a gradual softening of the feelings entertained toward 
 the Jews by the learned, as their history, their poetry, and their 
 traditions became anew the subject of study — an influence on 
 which, as we shall see, Herder was a great agent. But while 
 this humanism which was destined to include and to do so much 
 to interpret Jewish life and Jewish aspiration to the European 
 world was proceeding, it would have been but half-efficient, if the 
 Jews themselves had not awakened to a new liberality, and per- 
 ceived the advantages, intellectual and social, which a friendly 
 interest in all European learning and progress would afford. In 
 their separation, their isolation, they had found, as it were, an 
 additional tie in the very narrownesses and pedantic refine- 
 ments, that their later teachers had woven round the pure word of 
 Scripture and the more ancient practice. To reconcile Judaism 
 with modem life, and exhibit it as an acceptable and even neces- 
 sary element, it must be purified. The excess of Talmudic re- 
 finement repelled the younger generation. 
 
2o8 MOSES MENDELSSOHN. 
 
 Mendelssohn's great work lay in reclaiming this pure idea of 
 Judaism from the fantasticalities that Talmudism had raised 
 around it, and in showing that the moral and spiritual ideas on 
 which it rested were as consistent with an enlightened exercise 
 of the reason, as were the fundamental ideas of Christianity, 
 which, indeed, were professedly built upon it. Thus he showed 
 — he first efficiently showed — that Judaism is not opposed 
 to later culture — that later culture, truly viewed, only adds 
 to its importance as a leading factor in the world's progress 
 — as the source from which the loftiest ideas of God and 
 man and nature have flown to the race, and as capable of new 
 adaptations in the great stream of influences summed up in the 
 destiny of humanity. 
 
 Mendelssohn was thus a restorer of Mosaism, and was not 
 strictly anti-Christian. The morality of Christianity was to him 
 the full-flower of the Judaic. He was truly liberal and eclectic, 
 but his liberality and wise eclecticism were certainly not due 
 to superficiality of thought. He was not a popular philosopher 
 in the sense of proceeding on loosely-laid premises, or in relying 
 on facile thinking. He, himself, in a letter to Herder, expressed 
 his gentle impatience with the kind of writing that had come to 
 be named popular philosophy, remarking that nowadays, things 
 had reached such a pass, that true thinkers must content them- 
 selves with writing private letters ; and in reference to this matter, 
 Kant said, that he saw in him " a genius to whom it was given 
 to produce a new garment for philosophy, who, with the finest in- 
 sight, controlled by the most admirable discipline, could draw 
 out with master-hand the plan of a really new and consistent 
 popular philosophy." 
 
 " So appears Mendelssohn," writes Kayserling, " as the man who 
 infused into the common consciousness the results of philosophy, 
 and thus had no insignificant part in the building up of the 
 general German culture, as an eminent instrument in the histori- 
 cal development of the Germans, as the educator of his time, the 
 benefactor of his nation, as the Aufklarer in the true form ; and 
 we shall do no injustice if we take him as the representative of 
 the German ' Auf klarung,' and do not forget the one point in 
 which he differed from it." * 
 
 * Fhilosophische und religiQse GrundsaGze, p. 43. 
 
HERDER. 
 
II ne lui suffit pas de contempler et d'admirer ; il a besoin de voir dans 
 toute leur lumiere les lois cachees dont relevent les manifestations libres et 
 spontanees de I'esprit, et c'est moins par des theories ingenieuses, mais trop 
 souvent arbitraires, que par I'histoire et par I'etude comparee des faits, qu'il 
 arrive a cette conclusion si simple et si feconde dans sa simplicity, que 
 I'epoque de la perfection et de la purete de goflt est celle ou les oeuvres litteraires 
 d'un peuple sont la traduction finele et exacte de ses instincts vrais, de ses 
 aspirations naturelles, de son esprit k la fois national et humain. Qui a 
 jamais mieux montre que Herder combien est complexe le probleme de 
 I'etude de sa poesie modeme, et les mille influences sous lesquelles elle se 
 forma? — H. Schmidt "Etude surla Littirature AUemande" p. 83. 
 
 Der achte Schiiler lernt aus dem Bekannten das Unbekannte eutvyickeln 
 und nahert sich dem Meister. — Goethe's Ethisches. 
 
 Herder had the faculty of divining happily where he could not see clearly. 
 — M.M. Henry et Apffel, " Histoire de la Litterature Allemand." 
 
Herder's place in the History of German Literature would be 
 secure were it for nothing but the personal attraction which he 
 exercised sometimes to the detriment of that of Goethe, We find 
 the latter saying to Eckermann in 1827 : — " My personal relation 
 to Wieland was always very pleasant, especially in those earlier 
 days when he belonged to me alone. His little tales were written 
 at my suggestion ; but, when Herder came to Weimar, Wieland 
 was false to me. Herder took him away from me, for this man's 
 power of personal attraction was very great." This is a remark- 
 able confession for Goethe to make. He piqued himself on his 
 power of subordinating others to his influence, and his purposes ; 
 and his victory over Schiller is one of the best testimonies to his 
 claims in this regard. But Herder has more positive rights 
 than even this implies to our respectful consideration here. He 
 occupies a position distinctively his own, as the originator of new 
 ideas, the distributor of germs, the sower of seeds that ripened to 
 harvest in other minds. He suffers under the disadvantage of 
 having occupied himself with too many subjects, to bring to final 
 perfection of form any one work ; but he was one of the most 
 powerful influences that any modern Uterature has known ; and 
 throughout much of the later developments of German literature 
 his character can be traced. It is therefore essential that we 
 should try to understand him, and for this end to read his works 
 in the light of his life — a process by which they gain and only 
 gain — for in spite of some irritability, and what we may call raspi- 
 ness of temper, he was truly a noble man, as well as an original 
 genius. 
 
 There is a certain fitness, an artistic propriety, as we may say, 
 in the circumstance that the man who was fully to awaken Ger- 
 
212 HERDER. 
 
 many to the truly national idea of literature — to the idea of the 
 people, as the first and most potent element in a true art — should 
 himself have been the child of the people, in a literal sense.* 
 Herder's father was originally a weaver, as his ancestors had been 
 before him ; while his mother was the daughter of a black- 
 smith. It may not be out of place to note the fact that, like the 
 father of Winckelmann, Herder's father had come from Silesia at 
 the beginning of the century. By dint of great integrity, industry, 
 and piety Johann Herder had at the time of his famous son's 
 birth become master of a girl's school, and sexton and singer to 
 the Pohsh Church in the town where he dwelt — the duU little 
 town of Mohrungen, some twenty miles distant from Konigsberg. 
 All that district, as most readers are aware, had been in old days 
 wrenched from the Sclavonic people and colonised by sturdy 
 Germans, who, through indomitable perseverance, had transformed ■ 
 stretches of the sandy marshes into cultivated ground, and con- 
 trived to wring from the soil a frugal subsistence as they pre- 
 served a warm but somewhat austere piety which did credit to the 
 Lutheranism they had adopted. Herder's forefathers were true 
 Lutherans ; and we can easily infer that the poet owed much to 
 his mother; for she was not only devout, but had aquick intel- 
 lect, large sympathies, and great force of character. The father 
 was open, earnest, loyal, and well-informed ; the mother was 
 thoughtful, thrifty, and very managing' in the outlay of her small 
 income. Johann Gottfried, who was bom on the 25th of August 
 1744, had bestowed on him a name, which expressed the cha- 
 racter of the parents in a remarkable degree. The son records 
 long after on that point : When' my father was pleased with me 
 his countenance would brighten, and, laying his hand gently 
 upon my head, he would call me God's peace. This was my greatest, 
 my sweetest reward. Strict and just in an extreme degree, he 
 was equally good and kind. I shall never forget his severe, 
 taciturn countenance and his high bald forehead." 
 
 Johann was of a solitary, meditative turn as a boy. When 
 only four or five, he would steal away from his comrades, and be 
 found hours after sitting, as if lost in thought, on a seat in a 
 favourite corner of the garden. At school he soon showed re- 
 markable talents. Even Rector Grimm, the severe and exacting 
 
 * Herder, als ein aus einem schlichten Biirgerhause sich selbst emporhebender Mann, fiir 
 das Volksthiimliche ein ganz unmittelbares Ohr und Auge hatte. — Carl Rosenkranz's Neue 
 Studlen, i. p. 88. 
 
HERDER. 213 
 
 master of the Latin School — ^whom Lindemann rather disparag- 
 ingly speaks of as " a man who, as a school-tyrant, brought 
 honour to his name " — soon began to look on the little Johann- 
 with an eye of pleasure. He needed no drilling : his tasks 
 were always well conned. And it is abundantly evident that 
 Rector Grimm had his good side, which he invariably presented 
 to Herder and such as he. Like many another poor pedagogue, 
 he had a horror of dunces, and disliked laziness in every form. 
 And he was averse to sowing his good seed on sandy or rocky 
 soil, though very liberally did he spread it in the promising 
 furrows. In the depth of his heart there was much of loyalty 
 and uprightness. He often showed the greatest enthusiasm in 
 teaching ; and would even, if allowed, keep his favourite pupils 
 with him on into the night ; and when they had done something 
 right good he would kiss them heartily. The hours of Grimm's 
 teaching were for Herder manifoldly fruitful, and not the less 
 that, as his cleverest scholar, he distinguished Herder with 
 especial love, and often set him forth as an example to the 
 others. Grimm has been called a misogynist and a pedant ; 
 and some of Herder's biographers have shown industry of the 
 perverse kind in collecting ridiculous anecdotes,* when they 
 might better have tried to understand how he came to exercise 
 so great an influence on his distinguished pupil, who never forgot 
 to look back to him with love and profoundest gratitude, while 
 the old " school-tyrant " followed Herder's career with some- 
 thing of a parent's interest and all a parent's love and pride. 
 Doering notes it as a beautiful trait in Herder's character that he 
 gratefully and affectionately remembered his old teacher, who, 
 till his 76th year, remained in his little school at Mohrungen. 
 
 Poor Herder was often put to great disadvantages, through 
 his being frequently kept at home to help his father in odd bits 
 of work, or to run messages for his mother, and this he deeply 
 lamented. He was, in fact, what we would call an unwilling 
 
 * This is a specimen of what strikes us as rather dreary fun which some of these bio- 
 graphers have made out of Grimm :— " Once, on a fair-day, he sent out a boy to buy for 
 him an earthen plate from the potter. The boy thought to make a good purchase, and se- 
 lected a bright coloured plate, on which there appeared a female in gayest clothes, with a 
 wide-hooped petticoat and towering high headdress. When Grimm saw the plate he was so 
 enraged that he chastised the boy, who was till then unaware of Grimm's misogynistical 
 proclivities." Poor Grimm I Yet, in spite of his misogyny, he was not without an affec- 
 tionate heart ; and we can discern, from the following-up of stray hints, that he had some 
 reason to dislike the fair sex. 
 
214 HERDER. 
 
 " half-timer." We are not, therefore, surprised to learn from 
 Schafer that at the date of his confirmation he earnestly begged 
 of his father to be allowed more time in the school. He early 
 developed a great love of music, and, at his own desire, learned 
 the clavier, along with many other children. His father managed 
 to scrape together money to buy a httle instrument for him, and 
 he greatly delighted to play on it during his free hours. 
 
 The religious feeling of his parents worked early upon Herder's 
 susceptible soul. No sooner could he read than he was encour- 
 aged to peruse the Bible and the Lutheran hymn-book. While 
 yet a mere infant, he had committed to memory many simple 
 verses out of the Church hymns and passages of Holy Scripture. 
 With Herder's religious sense awakened also his love of simple 
 song. The poetical parts of the Old Testament made him ac- 
 quainted with the spirit of the Oriental literature. For the 
 framing of his character, no less than for the culture of his ex- 
 pression, this was of essential service. He remained a lover of 
 music, and formed a particular taste for the choral. 
 
 Frau von Herder tells us in her Recollections that Herder's 
 father had some odd rules for the management of the health of 
 his children. At certain times in the year they had to take a pow- 
 der against the worms, and in the spring to drink a strong infu- 
 sion of tea of the blackthorn bloom ; or, if they caught cold, the 
 prescription was warm elderberry, to induce perspiration. Often 
 did Herder laugh, says his wife, when he remembered these 
 primitive medical rules. 
 
 The older Herder grew, the greater waxed Grimm's claims 
 upon his society. We learn that the old man used to take the 
 boy with him on long Sunday walks, when he went into the 
 fields and the woods, to gather certain herbs, which he was wont 
 to infuse like tea ; and that sometimes he would give his young 
 scholar a cup for company's sake. Books were very scarce at 
 Mohrungen, but young Herder's appetite was insatiable here as 
 afterwards, and he found means so far to gratify it in the most 
 unexpected ways. Sometimes he got a volume from the school- 
 master ; at other times he would beg the loan of one from a 
 bookseller in the town on such terms as could not be resisted. 
 Escaping into a solitude apart, he would then climb up into the 
 branches of a tree, and become so absorbed in his prize, as to 
 forget where he was. Once, indeed, he fell down and injured 
 
HERDER. 215 
 
 himself; and afterwards to secure complete quiet and perfect 
 safety at the same time, he secured himself to the branches by 
 straps. The Bible, which was read daily in the humble home, 
 had deeply stirred his imagination, and already he delighted to 
 conjure up pictures of Oriental life and character. Like Goethe, 
 therefore, many youthful days he spent in the Paradise of the 
 Orient.* 
 
 The wonderful power of transporting himself into the very cir- 
 cumstances of others, and of realising their inmost thoughts and 
 feelings — a power which chiefly it was that gained him his great 
 fame afterwards — ^was active in him even as a child. What he 
 read, he not only assimilated in the memory ; it became to him 
 a series of pictures ; nay, more, a vivid and thorough imagina- 
 tive reproduction which exercised his sympathies, precisely as if 
 he had actually witnessed the things of which he read. We are 
 not surprised, therefore, when he tells us that the first introduc- 
 tion to Homer was like a spell. It transported him to the 
 sunny south, suggesting a world of freedom, grace, and beauty, 
 such as he had not till now even dreamed of. He would search 
 out the names of the famous places in his school-maps, and point 
 them out enthusiastically to his little sister, recounting to her the 
 stories which, as he tells us, had at first so deeply affected him. 
 Unlike a boy, however, what affected him most, according to his 
 own account, was not so much the incidents, the fighting, the 
 flight, the pursuit, the clash of conflict, the trailing of warriors at 
 chariot wheels, as the pathetic references to nature. " When ar' 
 mere child," he wrote long after, " I melted into tears on first 
 reading the' great poet's metaphor of spring and the leaves, and 
 the disappearance of the generations of men from the earth, even 
 as they disappear." t 
 
 II. 
 
 At the age of sixteen Herder became man-servant and copier 
 to the Deacon of Mohrungen, who was a somewhat prolific theolo- 
 
 * Noten und Abhandlungen zumWest-ostlichen Divan.— Alt Testamentliches. "Manchen 
 jugendlichen Tag entlang in den Paradiesen des Orients mich ergangen."— p. 400. 
 
 t Die schone Herbstzeit hab' ich genossen ; aber es ist so traurig, dass ich alles gelben 
 und falben sehe. Ein Geschlecht von Blattern, das so wenig aufersteht, als wir Menschen, 
 wenn wir abfallen. Fur mich hat Itcin Bild und Gleichniss von Jugend auf mehr Eindruck 
 gemacht, als dieses, und ich erinnere mich, als ich zum ersten Male, noch sehr jung im 
 Homer das Gleichniss von einem Fruhling von Blattern las, dass so auch ein Geschlecht 
 von der Erde verschwindet, mir— was einem Schulknaben selten zu begegnen pflegt, die 
 Thranen in die Augen traten. 
 
2i6 HERDER. 
 
 gical writer. This Trescho, it appears, had known the. Herders 
 fourteen years before when he was a scholar at a Pensions-Anstalt 
 at Mohrungen. In a letter that he wrote soon after Herder's 
 death to Frau von Herder, he said : 
 
 " I always found him earnest and much inclined to solitude. When 
 the children of the neighbours were at their noisy sports — laughing, 
 leaping, and shrieking loudly, he was alone in some corner with his 
 book. After twelve years, whilst I had studied in Konigsberg, on my 
 return to Mohrungen as Deacon, how extraordinary was the develop- 
 ment seen ' in the sixteen-years-old youth.' " 
 
 It would seem that the boy's oddly-assorted functions were 
 often humorously distressful to him, for the Deacon's housekeeper 
 — an elder sister — was very suspicious and sharp-tempered ; and 
 if he happened to be detained when out on a message to the 
 baker, or to the butcher, she rated him soundly, blaming him for 
 reading books by the way — a fault of which it is not impossible 
 that he may once or twice have been guilty. The result of his un- 
 congenial work and depressing circumstances was that he became 
 completely shut up within himself, and never, of his own accord, 
 spoke a word to any one of the household.* Had he not found 
 more appreciative friends outside there is a possibility that the 
 whole course of his life might have been different. But luckily 
 the good pastor Wilhamov and his spouse discerned the talent 
 in him. They acted towards him as to a son : he was often in 
 their house ; and there he was encouraged to unbosom himself 
 freely. In gratitude for the warm shelter and encouragement 
 Herder received from this worthy Christian couple, he in after 
 years set up a monument to the pastor's memory. Notwith- 
 standing the most impressive tokens of talent and desire for 
 scholarship on Herder's part, Trescho, the Deacon, would seem to 
 have done little or nothing to aid him. Nay, Trescho did what in 
 him lay to discourage the growing impulses of bis famulus, after 
 he had found him at midnight asleep surrounded by Greek and 
 Hebrew books in the library, a corner of which, for lack of space, 
 had been given to Herder for a bedroom ; and even after he had 
 received proof of his gifts by an ode inserted in a Konigsberg 
 newspaper along with an article of his own. " The pictures which 
 
 * " Seine Stimme war hablaut, und er blieb tief in sich versunken. Nie sprach er von 
 selbst, und er war ihm nichts zu entlolcen, woraus ich ihn fiir etwas mehr als ein 
 gewohnliches Geschiipf hatte halten Konnen." — Tresc/u? in Frau von Herder s Erinnerungen. 
 
HERDER. 217 
 
 I recall of my youthful surroundings," says Herder, " are nearly all 
 melancholy ones, and among them is more than one remembrance 
 of slavery that I would willingly cancel with my heart's blood." 
 
 The one pleasant relief of his Hfe was the laying of his hand on 
 a new book. Trescho's library consisted chiefly of theological 
 works, though it contained a selection of Greek and Roman 
 classics, travels, and poetry. Here it was that Herder read for 
 the first time Kleist's poems, and experienced the sense as of 
 some new revelation of possibilities in himself. " How I enjoyed 
 myself over that book in your library," he wrote long afterwards, 
 " which as a youth I so delightedly read, and from which I drew 
 impulses toward the good and beautiful in midst of the loneliness 
 that covered my soul. If I had to choose I would select that 
 volume of Kleist's poems. I feel towards him so peculiar a love, 
 and would rank it as one of the pledges of my early virtue." 
 
 Already the signs of that disease of the eyes, which was after- 
 wards so sorely to try Herder, had made their appearance ; and the 
 circumstance determined his next movement. A medical officer 
 was passing through Mohrungen with his regiment in one of the 
 pauses of the seven years' war, and chanced to receive some slight 
 service from Herder, which caused him to enter into conversation 
 with the young man. We need not say that he soon became 
 deeply interested, and chancing to notice Herder's eyes, he ex- 
 amined them, and at last said he would gladly take him to 
 Konigsberg, and have him operated on, and put him through a 
 course of medical study, provided that he would afterwards go 
 with him to St Petersburg.. Herder's over-sensitive feelings soon 
 showed that he coulrfnot stand the dissecting-room, for he fainted 
 at the first operation he witnessed. His friend, however, faith- 
 fully fulfilled his promise respecting his eyes. He took him to 
 the distinguished surgeon, Schwartzerloh, who consulted another 
 surgeon, Hamann, father of the well-known writer, Hamann. 
 Hamann, on hearing Herder's story, introduced him to the book- 
 seller, Kanter, whose shop was so attractive to Herder that he 
 resolved to become a bookseller, and was taken into Kanter's 
 service. Kanter willingly gave him access to the literary ren- 
 dezvous, which made his place of business peculiarly attractive on 
 the day of the arrival of new books, since a number of Konigs- 
 berg celebrities were then regular visitors.* It was here that 
 
 * Keferstein, Herder : Lichtstrahlen aus seinen Werken, p. ij. 
 
2i8 HERDER. 
 
 Herder was first brought to the notice of Kant, and heard the 
 talk of the Konigsberg professors. 
 
 He had now plenty of books to read, and found a congenial 
 companion and helper in the young Hamann, who, having been 
 in England, was able to introduce him to English literature. 
 Hamann was discursive, erratic, and without sense of proportion; 
 but he was full of original ideas, enthusiastic, suggestive. He 
 it was who first told Herder of a iield that he afterwards worked 
 to purpose — Ossian and the old ballads — and he became " like 
 one inspired " in reading passages from Shakespeare. Herr 
 Rosenkraiitz has thus signalised Hamann's influence: — 
 
 " Here, in Konigsberg, it was that Herder became acquainted with 
 Hamann, and through this intimacy his mind at once was sown with 
 a thousand seeds of culture, which later ripened to an excellent har- 
 vest. Kant remained for Herder the spirit-full teacher who, with 
 eloquent words, opened up to him logic and metaphysic, ethics 
 and physics, mathematics and physical geography. But Hamann 
 drew him into closer personal relations. The difference in their 
 ages was not so great; no official considerations hindered uncon- 
 strained self-expression ; and so it came to pass that Hamann 
 taught Herder English, and first introduced him to Shakespeare. 
 This circumstance we must note as full of the highest significance, 
 for it is indisputable that the great British poet's influence, in large 
 degree, made possible to Herder the sentiment and the phantasy 
 necessary to the production that, in the true sense, made the popular 
 poetry of many nations first accessible." * 
 
 The influence which Hamann had on Herder was thus power- 
 ful and permanent.f He also was chiefly instrumental in reawaken- 
 ing in his friend the thirst for systematic culture; and Herder now 
 resolved to go through a course of academical study. In this 
 purpose he was confirmed by the counsels of Emmerich, who had 
 been a fellow-scholar at Mohrungen, and was now eager to be- 
 friend Herder in all ways that he could. Though great difficul- 
 ties at first presented themselves. Herder was at last matriculated 
 as a theological student, chiefly through the influence of Emmerich 
 and Dr Boch, the Dean of the theological faculty, who was a 
 friend of Hamann's. The register fees exhausted his little stock 
 of money, and he had a hard task before him, though good wishes 
 were not wanting. The " school-tyrant," Rector Grimm, at 
 Mohrungen, that day wrote in his prayer-book, "Anno 1762, 
 
 * Carl Rosenkranz Neue Studien, i. pp. 78-9. t See Appendix. 
 
HERDER. 219 
 
 August the 1 6th, my son became stud, theol." So we see that 
 if Grimm was a misogynist, he was not slow to assume that rela- 
 ship of intellectual fatherhood, of which marriage is but a kind 
 of preparatory symbol. 
 
 And as a very important factor in Herder's development it 
 needs to be noted that, before he left Kbnisberg, he had come 
 under the influence of Rousseau, and was thus moved to many 
 thoughts regarding Nature and man's relations to it. 
 
 III. 
 
 Herder's first winter was very hard. He could scarcely 
 manage to ward off hunger by giving lessons ; but by and by his 
 prospects began to brighten ; he got an appointment at an academy 
 called the Fredericianum ; and as he found friends among his 
 fellow-students, life became more tolerable to him. At the end 
 of his second year a piece of good luck befell him, which opened 
 up his way. Hamann's recommendation procured for him the 
 appointment of assistant to the Rector of the Cathedral 
 School at Riga. Lindemann says he was the more inclined to 
 embrace this opportunity from a fear of being drafted for the Prus- 
 sian military service.* Herder entered the spirited free town in 
 November 1764. Its freedom, its energy, its superiority to the 
 forms of prejudice which infected Konigsberg were grateful to 
 him. He liked the "easy and agreeable" ways of the merchants. 
 For Herder was no pedant or book-worm, who shrank from men 
 and conjured up a "humanity" in the closet. His duties in 
 Riga were twofold. He was teacher in the Domschule and 
 assistant-preacher (Gehelfsprediger). He found the pupils in 
 good order, " gentle in disposition, quick to understand, ready 
 to forget, and ready to obey." His very first sermon produced a 
 strong impression, and the sense of its effect was grateful to 
 him, and encouraged him to hope for the future. His activities 
 flowed out on all sides— and were manifold as were his interests. 
 His passion for improvement found full scope, and was deeply 
 appreciated. He developed a whole system of education, and 
 aimed at founding an institution for the improvement of church- 
 
 • Dazu kam die Furcht vor dem Preussichen Militardienst desshalb nahm er gem die durch 
 Hamann's Empfehlung ilim augebotene Stelle als Collaborater an der Domschule zn Riga 
 an (Herbst 1764).— Lindemann, p. 35- 
 
220 HERDER. 
 
 music* He closely studied free institutions, and extended his 
 studies of Shakespeare and the early English dramatists, trans- 
 lating from them his favourite passages. He was a source of 
 inspiration to all who came in contact with him; his eager 
 enthusiasm and his determination were infectious ; and all about 
 him were set to work to aid him in their several spheres. Here 
 — as could hardly be otherwise — he formed many friendships, that 
 with the cultivated Hartknoch, the bookseller, being the most 
 notable ; though certain passages in which figured a somewhat 
 sentimental and admiring Frau Busch — only a little older than 
 Herder — might be deemed the most romantic. And his study 
 of these free institutions fell in fitly with certain trains of thought 
 that had already occupied his mind. " I fancy,'' writes a friend of 
 those days, " that Herder would hardly have written all he did in 
 the later volume of his ' Ideas ' on the subject of cities, corpora- 
 tions, traditions, and privileges, had he not lived under a munici- 
 pality like that of Riga, at an age when he had still to learn while 
 he taught." He himself said that he found a " second father-land 
 in Riga," and long afterwards he wrote to his wife : — 
 
 " Before long I had won the affection of the whole town — the 
 friendships of the best men I have ever known, and the regard of the 
 most original-minded men I have ever met. I must admit, however, 
 that per contra, I incurred the resentment of several ecclesiastics, who 
 either would not or could not do anything really to hurt me, and the 
 puny envy of a few creeping creatures. But, with all, I lived in such 
 freedom and independence as I shall never probably enjoy again, 
 either in my living, my teaching, or my actions." 
 
 He kept up a regular correspondence with Hamann, so that 
 literary stimulus was not likely to fail in midst of pastoral and 
 other work, and his wife, who loved to recall that time when he 
 was free from care, has told us that " when he received a letter 
 from Hamann, it was a festal day." 
 
 His writings had already brought him friends, and also, as a 
 qualifying concomitant, enemies. He was thought to be by this 
 time a worthy object of attack. There is a point in all reputa- 
 tions, when the vulgar cannot satisfy themselves that it is any 
 longer good policy to persist in ignoring. Notice of any kind 
 
 * Herder fasste in Riga den Gedanken, selbst eine grosse Erziehiingsanstalt zu begrun- 
 den und reiste ursprunglich deshalb nach Frankreich. Auch Spaterhin Kam er mehrfach 
 darauf zuriick. —Carl Rosenkranz's Neue Studien. p. 117. 
 
HERDER. 221 
 
 from them is a tribute to growing greatness, even should it come 
 in the form of a libel. This was Herder's case now. We find 
 Hainann writing to him thus on the i8th March 1769 : — 
 
 " The libel in the ' Klotzischen Bibliothek' you will probably 
 have read. I wish you a more true appreciation of your talents. 
 Still I advise you to let him alone ; for no benefit would accrue 
 to you from making yourself common by crossing swords with 
 so small a spirit and so patent a mountebank, as Klotz is." 
 
 This was the same Klotz as had made himself ignominiously 
 famous through his attacks on Lessing, who resented them to 
 some purpose. We are not surprised to learn that Herder had 
 rejected several promising appointments that were offered to him 
 simply that he might do the work he had purposed for Riga. It 
 is with the more surprise, therefore, that we find him in a year 
 or two confessing himself desirous of change. But this need 
 not imply any more than that he began to think his genius had 
 appropriated all that Riga was likely to yield. It is of the 
 nature of certain temperaments to demand the stimulus that 
 change of scene and circumstances bring ; they are fruitful but reci- 
 pient, needing the aid of outward excitements to bring their ideas 
 to birth. They are always impatient, and always striving, yet 
 never satisfied, and while they despise circumstances, are apt to 
 blame them for their failures. Such was Herder. In spite of 
 the peace and the prospect of promotion that depended on his 
 remaining longer at Riga, he could not do it ; and to the sur- 
 prise of those who knew him best, he departed from Riga, scarce 
 knowing whither he went. Herder was one of those who are 
 impelled by a principle of self-development, a hunger for varied 
 experiences, which makes them often act against what the prudent 
 mind would regard as their clear self-interest. " Deaf to all 
 remonstrances and to every offer, closing my eyes even to the 
 tears that accompanied these, I left behind me the pinnacle of 
 popularity which I had gained, because my genius whispered to 
 me with irresistible accents, ' Devote thy best years to seeing the 
 world;' nor have I ever for an instant repented having done so." 
 
 So, on the 3d of June 1769, we find him on the way to France, 
 to observe and to study what might enable him hereafter the 
 better to serve the world. Hartknoch had generously set some 
 money at his disposal, that he might, with the easier mind, 
 gratify his wish, and reap benefit from observation of foreign 
 
222 HERDER. 
 
 ways. One thing only, as it would seem, had weighed with him 
 before he started on this somewhat Quixotic expedition — his 
 mother's lonely and miserable condition. His father had died 
 in 1763, and she was now old and feeble in health. But the 
 brave and pious old woman soon set his mind at rest on this 
 point, writing — " Take no thought on my account. If the Lord 
 through his grace will but take me into his house, then will I 
 have all I wish for.* I would recommend to you for thought on 
 your journey the words of Isaiah, ' Have no fear, for I have re- 
 deemed thee ; if thou walkest upon the waters, I shall be with 
 thee.'" 
 
 On the voyage, which lasted for forty days. Herder did more 
 than observe the " outward shows of sea and sky," though it is 
 clear from his diary that these stirred and suggested great 
 thoughts. He found that the ocean life gave a new colour to 
 Homer and Ossian.* The sea, he said, was not the place for 
 Idylls and Georgics, but for the lUad or the Odyssey, or for the 
 old ballads and Ossian ; and he owned that after this voyage he 
 could better understand the poetry of the Edda. This voyage 
 was a kind of determining influence in bringing him directly face 
 to face with nature in her most striking forms. He had come 
 from the strife and pressure and artificiality of town life ; and the 
 solitude of ocean — for, as he said, a ship's company are a com- 
 munity set adrift on a plank between sea and sky — was like a 
 sudden return into some form of primitive existence. 
 
 Herder at length found himself in Nantes, where he wished 
 to remain incognito for a time, that he might improve himself in 
 the language and study at leisure the manners and customs of 
 the people. There was a delightful sense of secresy and supe- 
 riority, no doubt, in passing himself off for a time as M. Erddr ; 
 but he did not find the French people quite so accessible as he 
 had expected; and he had more pleasure in the society of one of 
 his young countrymen and a Swede, in whom he found pleasant 
 companions, and so far receptive pupils; while female society 
 was in some degree opened to him, and Madam Bubut, to whom 
 he had been first presented, was ready to do him service. 
 
 In visiting France he was but applying the principles of his 
 
 * " Wenn mir der Herr nur die Gnade schenkt, dass ich in sein Haus gehen kann, so 
 hab' ich alles." 
 
 t Wie hat er das meer geliebt ? wie ist Ossians Verstandniss ihm dadurch aufgeschlosser 
 — C. RosENKRANZ, Neue Studien. 
 
HERDER. 223 
 
 own philosophy. He had said, " One cannot know an author 
 without knowing his nation and his language and the conditions 
 among which he has grown," and now he first made explicit ap- 
 plication of his principle — a principle which, expressed as he 
 expressed it, might form a motto to all M. Taine's works. He 
 had hitherto been enamoured of much in French literature, and 
 it is certainly significant that his abode in France did not a little 
 to desillusioner him. He never ceased to admire the polish, the 
 elegance of form, the choiceness of phrase which the French 
 attained, but he soon perceived, and more and more became per- 
 secuted by, the sense of superficiahty, insincerity, lack of depth 
 and of living interest perceptible in their literature. He wrote — 
 
 " A certain distinction in their mode of thought, a marked freedom 
 in their manner of expressing themselves, felicity in the choice of 
 words, and polish in the turn of phrase, are the characteristics of 
 French language and manners. The first thing with them is not 
 what others are taught by them, but how much they themselves are 
 masters of, and are able to teach. . . . Their generosity is polite 
 ness ; their brightness is levity ; they have no inward repose and 
 cheerfulness of heart." 
 
 J 
 
 It was perhaps fortunate for Herder, that just as he began to 
 discover somewhat of the seamy side of French hfe and cha- 
 racter, he found a subject on which to concentrate his thoughts. 
 The Berlin Academy had offered a prize for the best essay on 
 the " Origin of Language," and Herder resolved to compete. In 
 spite of the recurrence of his eye-disease, he worked on with 
 considerable satisfaction, till, in fact, another operation was de- 
 manded. This having been successfully accomplished, he left 
 Nantes for Paris ; having received some further aid from Hart- 
 knoch, who never seems to have felt it other than a pleasure to 
 aid his friend in this way — assured that in the best form he would 
 in good time receive his gifts back with full interest. In the 
 capital Herder found all circles readily opened to him through 
 the letters of introduction he carried. He met many famous 
 men — Diderot, D'Alembert, Arnaud, Thomas, Duclos, Barthe- 
 Idmy, Ue Guigner, D'Aubenton, and others ; and it is certainly 
 surprising to find him at this time declaring that he felt lonely — 
 his sense of dissatisfaction in his study of the French having 
 increased rather than diminished. We find him writing from 
 Paris on the 8th November 1769 : — 
 
224 HERDER. 
 
 \ " I have spent my time in making acquaintance with scholars, in 
 /visits to libraries, galleries of art, antiquities and collections of copper- 
 plate engravings, have attended plays, and examined buildings that 
 are worth looking at ; and this is my opinion: In all that pertains to 
 I taste and prettiness, both in art and institutions, Paris is the great 
 ' centre. But as the taste embraces only the lightest idea of beauty — 
 no more than prettiness, indeed — and often an attempt to supply the 
 want is itself a greater defect, — so France can never fully satisfy one's 
 cravings ; and I confess I am heartily tired of it. I feel in this 
 matter that, amongst many other things, I would not have lost very 
 much even if I had not seen it, either in experience or idea. And yet 
 I must needs acknowledge that upon the origin and the condition of 
 the French language, morals, taste, history, art and science, I have 
 collected a great deal that may prove useful. I have sought after 
 books and men, orators and plays, dances and pictures, music and 
 the opportunity to study the public. But the seed-corns must be 
 buried till a future time." * 
 
 IV. 
 
 Herder's journey, as planned originally, had embraced a tour 
 through England and Scotland ; but this, through pecuniary and 
 other considerations, he was forced to forego. As he felt that in 
 these two months he had fully accomplished the object of his 
 visit to Paris, he was glad to accept an offer to travel for three 
 years with the son of the Prince-Bishop of Holstein-Eutin. 
 Herder was to have a handsome salary, a great deal of his 
 own way, and a professorship at the University of Kiel on 
 his return, if he cared for it. This was exactly what he wanted. 
 He left Paris, and took a ship from Calais to Holland, which 
 was wrecked on the Belgian coast; Herder having, as he 
 graphically describes, been fished off the vessel with others just 
 before she went down in the early dawn by some fishing-boats. 
 Herder. then proceeded by land to Hamburg, and on to Kiel, 
 where the young Prince was completing his studies. He was 
 received with the utmost distinction at the Ducal Court at 
 Eutin, where he remained for some months making preparations. 
 
 * Aus Herder's Nachlass, 1-211. It is indeed very remarkable that Nathaniel Haw- 
 thorne used almost the same words in giving his impressions of Paris in 1858, winding up 
 with: "Nothing really thrives here; man and vegetables have but an artificial life, like 
 flowers stuck in a little mould ; but never taking root. I am quite tired of Paris, and long 
 for a home more than ever." — Good Words, 1871, p. 130, 
 
HERDER. 225 
 
 In spite of a disposition tending towards moroseness and reserve, 
 his pupil soon became very fond of him. They set out in the end 
 of July 1770, intending to winter at Strasburg. They passed 
 through Hanover, Gottingen, and Darmstadt, and spent some time 
 at the last named place. There Herder made two acquaintances 
 that had a powerful and permanent influence over his future. 
 The one was Johann Heinrich Merck, and the other was Caro- 
 line Flachsland, who, several years later, became his wife. 
 
 Merck, who was only an apothecary's son, had by sheer dint of 
 genius raised himself to be the companion of princes. He was a 
 lover of English literature, having translated Addison's Cato 
 (hence the title given him by Herder of " Socrates- Addison"), and 
 many other works, and was an enthusiast for Shakespeare, and a 
 supporter of the new " Sturm und Drang." Merck's brilliancy, 
 his scepticism, his wit, his flashing irony, his great resource, are 
 admitted to have suggested to Goethe some traits in Mephisto- 
 pheles ; and the thought of these qualities stirs a more pathetic 
 chord than would else be stirred, when we read of his miserable 
 end ; for he died by his own hand, his memory involved in some 
 dim haze of disaster and a tragic criminal connection. 
 
 At present, however, Merck was in his ascendant, his most 
 brilliant period. A " Councillor of war," he was the friend and 
 counsellor of the Landgravine Caroline — one of the most remark- 
 able women of her day, whose powers Frederick the Great cor- 
 dially acknowledged, whom Wieland wished to see " Queen of 
 Europe, and Herder and Goethe were wont to call the great 
 Landgravine." Already Merck had attained to such a position 
 that persons of note would turn out of their way to pay him a 
 visit ; and any one whom he presented to the Princess was cer- 
 tain to be favourably received. His house was the centre of a 
 briUiant and cultivated society that did much to impart life and 
 soul to the dull litrie capital. It was at the house of Merck that 
 Herder first met Caroline Flachsland - a girl from Alsace, who 
 was then living a repressed and unhappy life at the house of a 
 brother-in-law, with impulses towards higher development. In 
 Merck she found a true friend, who was not a little pleased at the 
 affection which arose between her and Herder, and afterwards did 
 not a little to make the course of true love run smooth, when mis- 
 understandings, due for most part to the unadvised words of inter- 
 meddlers, would have sown discord. Their love-letters are as 
 
 P 
 
226 HERDER. 
 
 remarkable for elevation and range of interests, as for the touches 
 they sometimes show of the feverish sentimentalism of that epoch. 
 Caroline Flachsland was a woman of great sensibility as well as 
 of fine and quick understanding ; but the circumstances in which 
 she had lived had imparted a somewhat querulous and suspicious 
 hastiness to her temper, which occasionally proved an element 
 of "delicious torment" to Herder before their marriage, and 
 formed at once a bond of union and an intensifier of the marital 
 discontent afterwards. But one thing Herder found in Caroline, 
 a true sympathiser and helpmeet. Her interests were entirely his. 
 As he goes on his travels, while she still remains under the roof 
 of her brother-in-law, she is ever in his mind. In all his projects 
 she has a share. He is like Swift in his letters to Stella, before 
 the one is sent off he has begun another. His precious billets — 
 though sometimes they are sentimental enough, are for most part 
 freighted with more permanent ware — now with this discovery, 
 now with that — this time a delicious old ballad, which he has trans- 
 lated from Scottish or Spanish, a passage from Shakespere, or a 
 song from Ossian. Her enthusiasm over these things is delight- 
 ful. She writes to him on the i6th September 17 71 : — 
 
 " A thousand thanks, my dearest friend, for your Scottish and Eng- 
 lish Songs — a true gift for my heart. The old, honest, good, simple 
 tone moves me deeply ; one perceives so truly the natural source 
 of it. The song of ' The Unhappy Mother,' ah ! and ' William's 
 Ghost,' are wholly excellent, and the ' Song of the Prison ' has 
 greatly pleased my sister also . I am desired to say this, and to thank 
 you for having sent it. ' The Way of Love ' is altogether a lovely 
 thing. Do you see how it runs through between the lines ; methinks 
 I see the love running." 
 
 At Darmstadt, also. Herder had come into contact with the 
 distinguished Count Schaumburg-Lippe, whose conduct, in rela- 
 tion to Herder, would seem to illustrate the competition into 
 which the little Princes of Germany ran in these days, for cele- 
 brities to adorn their courts. Count Lippe was the ruler of the 
 small principality of Schaumburg-Lippe, of which Biickeburg was 
 the capital, and he had extracted a promise from Herder that as 
 soon as he could relieve himself from the Prince of Eutin, Biicke- 
 burg should rejoice in his presence and preaching. A sermon 
 which Herder had published on the occasion of the death of 
 Abbt, who, as we have seen, had some years before taken up his 
 
HERDER. 227 
 
 residence at Lippe's court, was the means of exciting in the 
 Count's mind a wish that Herder should become court preacher 
 and consistorial-rath at Biickeburg: we have seen with what 
 result.* 
 
 Herder, however, could not loosen his ties to the Prince of 
 Eutin at once. He went forward to Carlsruhe. In spite of his 
 great need for sympathy and appreciation, we find him here 
 offended and repelled by the " highflown and gratuitous compli- 
 ments" of the Margravine. " I am thoroughly sick of the court," 
 he writes, in despair at having to remain for another fortnight. 
 At the end of that time, the party set forward to Strasburg where, 
 unfortunately. Herder's enjoyment was hardly any greater. His 
 eyes were once more in such a condition as to necessitate 
 another operation. Here he was compelled to part from the 
 young Prince, who had become greatly attached to him — a thing 
 which caused him keen pain ; besides leaving him in a far from 
 enviable pecuniary condition. He felt lonely and miserable, 
 and reproached himself for having linked the fate of Caroline 
 with his own, with no prospect of being able, for an indefinite 
 period, to offer her a settled home. It was in the midst of such 
 depressing thoughts and circumstances that Goethe burst in 
 upon him with youthful freshness, and such devotion and rever- 
 ence as could not but prove a support. They passed the long 
 winter evenings in reading together, and in conversation on the 
 merits of great authors — French, German, and EngHsh. Herder 
 did much to detach Goethe from the French influence, which 
 hitherto had exercised some power over him ; and to awaken 
 him to a sense of the greatness of EngUsh literature, and the 
 wealth of poetic association and suggestion in German legend 
 and story. " The Vicar of Wakefield" and "Percy's Relics" 
 were read and re-read, and Shakespere and Ossian were pored 
 over and enthusiastically discussed. Goethe and Jung Stilhng 
 were assiduous in their endeavours to lighten Herder's weary 
 hours, and spared no trouble to accomplish the end. The opera- 
 tion proved unsuccessful ; and he had to leave Strasburg money- 
 less, preoccupied and restless. 
 
 After a short stay at Darmstadt, which was not so happy as it 
 
 • We have seen it stated that Herder sTicceedsd PtSM, but this could not be so in a strict 
 sense ; since Abbt was a layman and occupied the position of privy councillor and private 
 legal adviser, for which he had quaUfied himself b studying law and jurisprudence. 
 
228 HERDER. 
 
 might have been, Herder reached Biickeburg to take up his post 
 as superintendent in April 177 1. 
 
 CaroUne Flachsland, who had been suffering much from de- 
 pression of spirits, caused in part by some lack of health and 
 in part by brooding over misfortunes (due in some measure we 
 suspect to the vices of a brother), had gone to visit some friends 
 in Alsace. Herder, whose impressions of persons and new scenes 
 were always deeply coloured by the feelings of the moment, 
 entered Biickeburg with some sense of care and pre-occupation 
 on Caroline's account. But at such times the truly brave spirit 
 of the man most decisively proclaims itself, as will be seen from 
 the following naifve and cheering epistle, which is a good speci- 
 men of the letters he wrote to her about this time : — 
 
 " I know not with what eyes I have seen all that concerns Biicke- 
 burg, but this I know, that in my hours of closer approach to it, I 
 have seen nothing which the soul, that subtle conjuror, has not, so to 
 speak, involved with your picture ; so that if you are always travelling, 
 or have distracting sounds in your ear, not the less are you too in 
 Biickeburg — seen and heard of nie — enough ! A remembrance of my 
 kind must be a better thought-sign than any other — at least I will still 
 wish that your little innocent heart may beat stronger and quicker 
 when I thus think upon you. But you must be very strong and get 
 better ; for otherwise I will not consent to be the cause of quicker 
 pulse-beats, by which you might be made fainter and weaker ! Judge 
 you yourself whether I write romantically when I place you before any 
 thing in Biickeburg ! " * 
 
 At first Herder did not like the place. He was repelled by the 
 stiff and commanding mihtary airs which the Count assumed, and 
 did not realise what he had expected. The Count, on the other 
 hand, was a little disappointed in Herder. He had looked for 
 great breadth and freedom from prejudice in his new preacher, 
 ■ — he, in fact, expected a man of philosophic turn, who would not 
 be too concerned about spiritual conditions and so on, and, 
 behold. Herder was on fire with zeal for improvements, and had 
 projected never so many great reforms. Count Lippe gently 
 tried to throw cold water on some of his more ambitious schemes 
 and plans of work, and this only repelled Herder the more : — 
 
 " We live apart from each other," he writes. " He is very attentive 
 to me, and esteems me ; but I know as little of his character as he 
 does of mine. ... I content myself with the distant esteem. I never 
 
 * Aus Herder's Nachlass, iii. p. 179. 
 
HERDER. 
 
 229 
 
 dine at court without special invitation ; then I find myself seated " 
 beside our master, and have him wholly to myself in conversation ; 
 but he is only too apt to listen too much to his own discourse, and to ' 
 repeat the same idea too persistently." 
 
 He mourned the lack of true society. His one pleasure for a 
 time was to gallop through the Teutoburger Wald, and enjoy the 
 excitement of quick movement in the delightful air, and this 
 pastime he varied by inditing now and then an article for the new 
 journal, the Frankfurter Zeitung, in which Merck and Goethe 
 were deeply interested, or in the labour of translating and revising 
 his Volk's Lieder, which had now grown to considerable bulk. 
 By and by a more intimate and congenial association arose for him. 
 The Countess who had, owing to various circumstances, been 
 much secluded during the first eight or ten months, at last ven- 
 tured to write to him stating some of her difficulties, and asking 
 for advice. This was the beginning of a friendship which throws 
 a kindly light across this section of Herder's life. The Countess 
 not only came to an understanding with Herder herself, but she 
 brought the Count into warmer and more confidential relations 
 with him. She made them understand each other. Herder had 
 to combat a tendency to quietism in her, and judiciously used the 
 influence he had gained to direct her mind to healthy practical 
 interests. He warned her against the literality of religious wor- 
 ship, the tendency to elevate the letter into a symbol, a fetish, 
 and pointed out the way of freedom, and cheerfulness, and 
 self-denial. The Countess was full of gratitude for the light and 
 the help that had been, as it were, the instrument for the renewal 
 of her spiritual life. And certainly she was privileged to exercise 
 as choice and elevating and cheering an influence in return. 
 After her countenance was turned on him, he enjoyed a period 
 of delightful activity. Difficulties vanished before him; his 
 interests multiplied; his powers of production seemed to be 
 increased tenfold. His correspondence with the Countess was 
 regularly maintained. Daily they wrote to each other, if either 
 were absent from Biickeburg, and we can easily imagine the 
 inspirating efifect on Herder's sensitive and apprehensive mind of 
 such letters as this, which is but a fair specimen of a voluminous 
 collection. 
 
 "Cod, of his grace, by this separation hath well prepared me to 
 
230 HERDER. 
 
 regard every little passing trouble as but a new trial of my soul. Your 
 letters, beloved teacher, your sermons in the Passion-week and at 
 Easter have been most suitable and blessed to that end — to set my 
 heart in the act of seizing the spiritual benefits which may spring out 
 of that great blow ; and I can with truth assure you that, amid all 
 troubles, I will ever think on your words, and derive the strongest help 
 and sweetest solace from them. Your Sunday's sermon is to me only, 
 so to say, the seal of fuller tranquillity (voUiger Beruhigung), so that 
 in the future no thought of grief shall obtain hold upon me, and that 
 I, above all, shall not forget the Good God, in whom we live, and 
 move, and are. I will more and more praise and adore the Highest, 
 who has taken my darling away from all peril, all fear, all suffering, 
 all pain ; and I thank him that he has permitted me to see that this 
 separation has proved indeed only a new incitement which will be for 
 the furthering of my spiritual life." * 
 
 Herder's wife says, " She was a good angel for him, to gladden 
 his days at Buckeburg."t Social intercourse was no longer con 
 strained ; and it was Herder's delight to hear the music dis- 
 coursed by that excellent orchestra, of which the Count was now 
 prouder than before since Herder confessed great benefit from its 
 performances. The second year of his life at Biickeburg was a 
 pleasant time, and it only needed CaroHne to make its joy com- 
 plete ; though with that faculty of self-torment, which often plays so 
 large a part' in the life of studious and irresolute minds, he often 
 persecutes himself with apprehensions of difficulties in the future. 
 But meanwhile he has a dozen irons in the fire. He writes 
 articles for Merck's editorial scrutiny, telling him — somewhat 
 surprising fact, that testifies fully to the complete faith he had in 
 Merck's critical sagacity — that he might modify or omit as he 
 deemed desirable. 
 
 It is a point worthy of notice that Herder, whose style was in 
 some respects hardly suited for periodical writing, was neverthe- 
 less very successful in hitting the tastes of editors. We find 
 Wieland — a man whose notions of style were very exacting — 
 writing to him on one occasion : " Your reviews give life or 
 death to the Mercury (Teutsche Merkur). Really and truly, dear 
 friend) you ought to write more, all you have hitherto thrown on 
 paper is pure gold." 
 
 We find Herder also about this time communicating specimens 
 
 * The Countess Maria to Herder, sth May 1772. 
 
 t Suchte sie ihm mit den starksten zartlichsten Ermunterungen, welche Religion und 
 Freundschaft eingeben konnen, Vol. I., 325. 
 
HERDER. 231 
 
 of his "Volks Lieder," with such personal commentary as 
 this :— 
 
 " These old songs have such an effect on me that I am seized with 
 a passion to see with the bodily eye the local associations, and I am 
 firmly resolved that should I ever set foot on British soil, I shall 
 merely skim London in passing — take a peep at the theatre and 
 Garrick, pay my respects to Hume, and then fly off to Wales, Scotland, 
 and the Western Isles, on one of which, hke the youngest son 
 of Ossian, Macpherson sits enthroned. There shall I hear the Celtic 
 national songs wildly chanted in the language and tone of the country 
 — yes ; hear those very songs which in their present metamorphosis . i 
 into hexameters and Greek metres, I can but compare to a painted and | 
 scented paper-flower, instead of that living and fair-blooming daughter 1 
 of the earth, who sheds her sweet fragrance on the mountain side. ; 
 But here I must return to Shakespeare, and ask you to aid me in 
 bewailing a dire loss, at which, no doubt, every other honest man 
 would only laugh. During my fanatical passion for Shakespeare, I 
 had more particularly studied those scenes in which he opens up to 
 us his world of ghosts and fairies — those parts which the English 
 prize as most precious, and in which I took the more delight for having 
 dreamt away my childhood among such fables. I had, for instance, 
 translated the fairy divertissement in the ' Midsummer Night's 
 Dream ' (which, if I remember rightly, Wieland entirely omitted), and 
 the witch-scene in ' Macbeth,' where the witches are boiling, uttering , 
 spells, muttering and bubbling through a whole gamut of ghostly 
 tones ; but my translations have disappeared, and I can find nothing, 
 nothing save a few soliloquies from ' King Lear,' 'Hamlet,' 'Macbeth,' 
 &c. This is enough to make me tear my eyes out. In short, I find 
 everything but my conjurations, and these must have been swept 
 away or burnt, when the witches last swept out my rooms in Riga. To 
 my own private feelings such a loss is irreparable ; but when I begin 
 prating about Shakespeare, I can never leave him." * 
 
 Herder never enjoyed the delight of setting foot on British-^ 
 soil — much as he did to interpret its literature to his countrymen 
 — he never heard the old Gaelic songs chaunted on the mountain 
 top or within sound of the sea-wave in the genuine native fashion ; 
 but none the less did he write (as we shall see) precisely as 
 though he had. 
 
 At this time, it is clear, his enthusiasm was infectious. All his 
 critical friends were plied with specimens of Volks Lieder, and 
 their comments solicited. Along with their hints, they were 
 
 * Briefe an Johann Heinrich Merck, von Goethe, Herder, Wieland, &c., Herausgegeben 
 von Dr Karl Wagner, p. loi. 
 
232 HERDER. 
 
 asked to aid him with translations of suitable songs. Goethe, 
 now in Frankfort, was inclined to bestow more time on such 
 things as these, and to the composition of articles for the Frank- 
 furter Zeitung, than the old councillor quite liked. He was 
 ready with his aid, sending many letters and something like a 
 dozen specimens of his own translations. Speaking of "Ossian's 
 Poems " and " Percy's Relics," which he had read about the 
 same time, Goethe says — " You will see whether you can agree 
 with me when I say that Ossian's Poems and Percy's Relics 
 make very different impressions on ear and soul." * 
 
 And, if it is true, as Goethe has said, that Herder did not en- 
 courage him when the " Mitschuldigen " was read two years 
 before at Strasburg, he was not reluctant with his praises now that 
 "Goetz" was before him. Between March and June of 1772, we 
 find Herder, in letters to his bride, repeatedly referring to 
 Goethe's "Goetz,'' which he had read in manuscript, in such terms 
 as these : — 
 
 — " His excellent ' Berlichingen,' I will soon return to him. Since 
 he will most probably then send it on to Merck, you will also have 
 some hours of unique and heavenly delight, as I had in reading it. 
 It is uncommonly full of German strength, depth, and truth through- 
 out, although now and then it is only, as one would say, thought 
 out:'\ 
 
 At last, on the 2d of May 1773, he was married and brought 
 Caroline to Biickeburg. To her the Countess extended all the 
 friendly care and consideration she had shown to Herder, 
 while the Count received an access of pride in his preacher 
 through the prize which was about this time awarded to him by 
 the Berhn Academy for his " Origin of Language." 
 
 It is characteristic of Herder, as we shall see more particularly 
 afterwards; that he should reject the idea of the divine origin of 
 language, holding that more honour is done to God by allowing 
 to the soul that He created the power to create language. 
 Therefore he says : Because the human soul is God's work, 
 
 * Sie werden sehen, ob Sie mit mir einig sein kBnnen, wann ich sage, die " Relics " and 
 Ossian's Schottisches machen ganz verschiedene Wurkung auf ohr und Seele, p. 31. Frank- ' 
 furt, Septr. 1771. 
 
 t We append the original, because it has been, without proper ground, asserted that 
 Herder did not generally appreciate " Goetz." " Seinen braven Beriichingen *ill ich ihm 
 nachstens Schicken. Da wird er ihn wohl Merchen Schicken, und dann werden auch Sie • 
 einige himmlische Freudenstunden haben, wenn Sie ihn lesen. Es ist ungemein viel Deutsche 
 Starke, Tiefe und Wahrheit drin, obgleich hin und wieder cs auch nur gedacht ist." 
 
HERDER. 233 
 
 gifted with the faculty of freewill, it is able to produce language, 
 this ingenious organ of reason, as a mediating symbol of its 
 existence. The origin of language can then only, in a dignified 
 sense, be termed divine, in as far as it is human. 
 
 He was now engaged on his work " The Most Ancient Doc u- 
 ment of the Human Ra ce." His wife tells us that it was written 
 as if under one inspiration, in an uninterrupted state of feeling, 
 and that the first volume was completed in six weeks. His 
 energy and productiveness at this time were wonderful. Frau von 
 Herder has said that this was the blooming time of their married 
 life. It was certainly the blooming time of his genius. A second 
 prize from the Academy of Berlin rewarded his essay on the 
 " Causes of the D ecline of Taste," and then appeared in quick 
 succession his "_Life ofJesus,""his "JPhilospphy pUHiatory," and 
 his " Commentaries upon the'New Testament." 
 
 In 1775 he was named Superintendent of the Clergy of Biicke- 
 burg — the nearest thing in the Lutheran Church to the dignity 
 of a Bishop. He was still only thirty-one years of age. He 
 did not then need to speak of himself, as he did afterwards at 
 Weimer, as a pastor without a church, a patron of schools without 
 a school, a consistorial-rath without a consistory ! 
 
 In the summer of 1774, as we have seen. Herder accompanied 
 the Count and Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe to Pyrmont, 
 where he first met Mendelssohn. We find him thus writing to 
 Haftknoch on the 23d of July : — " Mendelssohn I have found in~ 
 Pyrmont, but I have not as yet discovered any special point of 
 contact with him ; he is an extraordinarily clear, passionless philo- 
 sopher ; for the rest a splendid author and popular thinker, who 
 is not always thinking of his position. Few acquaintances would 
 I cherish more highly than his. My wife thinks exactly of him 
 as I do." 
 
 Very soon the bonds of intimacy between the two men were 
 drawn closer, and they kept up to the end a very steady and 
 interesting correspondence. 
 
 V. 
 
 Herder's position at Biickeburg now was one which was only 
 too likely to lead to differences. He was earnest and autocratic. 
 
234 HERDER. 
 
 and held high views of his profession. He must either be a 
 genuine superintendent or none ; and he very soon let the Count 
 feel this. The Count had insisted on the nomination of an 
 ecclesiastic whom Herder held to be unworthy, and had refused 
 to ordain ; and although the Count when he became aware of 
 Herder's firm and serious resolution in the matter, gave way, 
 there was once more a sense of constraint in their relations. 
 Herder at this time smarting under a sense of wrong, wrote : 
 '" If I cannot be an instrument of elevation and improvement to 
 the Church, I shall certainly not be a means of scandal or abuse, 
 so help me God and his holy Word ! " This bespeaks the man's 
 noble character and fearlessness. In spite of all these disagree- 
 ables he declined several invitations to other appointments, one 
 of them to Eutin and another to the University of Giessen. But 
 when, shortly after this, the Countess Marie died, Herder looked 
 on the chief link that had bound him to Biickeburg as broken ; 
 and readily acquiesced in Goethe's proposal that he should use 
 his influence to have him transferred to Weimar. In that, as the 
 world knows, Goethe was successful; and in the autumn of 1776, 
 Herder became general superintendent and head of the Con- 
 sistory at Weimar. Much might tempt us to dwell on the life 
 of the Weimar Court here ; but we dismiss it briefly, because we 
 shall have opportunity afterwards to do it more fully. Suffice it 
 to say that in much it failed to realise what Herder had expected 
 of it. The Duke, who with Goethe and others, indulged in a 
 thousand mad freaks, which sometimes even put the tolerance of 
 the prudent Duchess Anna Amelia to the test, was anything but 
 a pure liver, however much he may have aimed at intellectual 
 cultivation ; and the whole Court was infected with that highly- 
 aristocratic tone and laissez-aller, that dislike of anything like moral 
 earnestness, which was, above most things, distasteful to Herder. 
 To others besides Herder, indeed — men who were strangers to 
 the moral earnestness that marked him — the tone that soon 
 manifested itself in Goethe was simply repellant. Even Wieland 
 — who was not likely to look frigidly on any temperate enjoy- 
 ment, or to be in any way morally severe — was compelled to 
 enter his protest against the predominant recklessness and 
 indifference. He said once of Goethe : " His imagination seems 
 quenched, instead of the all-enlivening warmth which used to 
 emanate from him, he seems to be enveloped in an atmosphere 
 
HERDER. 235 
 
 of political frost. He is always gentle and harmless ; but he is 
 friends with no one, and nothing can be done with him.'' 
 
 The Duke's example, as set forth in his cruel neglect of the 
 Duchess Louisa, and his liaisons with such women as the actress 
 Jagemann, — was only too readily followed by those around him, 
 till, as Schiller said, every person about the Court had at least 
 one liaison. All this was gall and wormwood to Herder, whose 
 pure domestic feelings were daily outraged by things to which he 
 could not close his eyes or his ears; and sometimes he was 
 brought into perilous contact with them through attempts made, 
 under the influence of those doubtful women, to press into the 
 Church relatives or friends who were wholly unworthy and unfit 
 for the sacred office. He was thus put into opposition with those 
 who had placed him where he was ; whilst the clergy themselves 
 failed to appreciate his earnestness or his determination to reform 
 the abuses of the Church, or to attain to a higher standard of 
 discipline and purity. They tried to thwart him, and embittered 
 his life, laying on him a burden of correspondence and continual 
 effort and supervision which he was ill-fitted to bear. "Alas ! " 
 he exclaims on one occasion, " what am I but an intellectual 
 serving-man, a slave to business ? I am obliged to beg, to 
 bargain for, or to steal every moment I devote to reading or 
 study ; but I shall some day figure in the martyrology, and the 
 folks who feel at their ease in the world will not." His old re- 
 spect and love for Goethe was in painful conflict with the feelings 
 to which he was now frequently moved. He wished to judge 
 generously, and to work his work without involving himself in 
 the ungrateful task of advising or reproving where reproof or 
 advice were not wanted, and might only involve still further 
 separation; and hence the apparently capricious and varying 
 attitude which throughout these years Herder seemed to occupy 
 towards Goethe and others. He was often ill in health, and 
 always ill at ease ; but he could neither improve matters by de- 
 serting his post nor by wholly surrendering himself to his narrower 
 feelings. The result was inward division which did him no 
 good. 
 
 In spite of the ceaseless calls upon him, he snatched the 
 leisure to produce or to finish the works which have mainly 
 gained him his world-wide reputation. First came the " Volks 
 Lieder "_ in 1778 — a work on which he had been engaged for 
 
236 HERDER. 
 
 several years. It was an epoch-making book. Largeness of 
 sympathy, fine taste, keen and subtle discernments of the cha- 
 racteristics of the various peoples ; and a power not only to 
 catch, as if by instinct, the spirit of the individual songs, but a 
 wonderful felicity in their translation into his own language. The 
 collector of these songs, he said, has neither the leisure nor the 
 ability, neither the taste nor the intention, to become a German 
 Percy ; but the field was so tempting, and as yet so completely 
 untrodden, that he was impelled to enter on it rather than 
 allow his countrymen to wait indefinitely for one better qualified 
 for the task. By such an one this work will be regarded as a mere 
 prehminary to a greater and a more inclusive undertaking. For 
 the scope of the " Volks Lieder " is wide as the realm of the 
 highest poetry. The greatest poets, in their greatest moments, 
 most nearly touched the quick of the common sentiment of those 
 for whom they sung. Homer was the first poet of the Greeks, 
 because he was the first Folk's Singer ; so Hesiod in his degree, 
 so Orpheus, and the choruses of ^lEschylus and Sophocles, which, 
 as the holy flame of a burnt-offering, consumed the lower in the 
 ascending fire. And he exclaims : 
 
 " Oh that to me it were given, to convey into our tongue some of 
 these golden gifts, some faithful report of these earher times ; that 
 in something of their native simplicity these noble people's songs 
 might still remain. Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, I see your shadows 
 still moving before me on the islands, blessing the multitudes ; 
 and hear the echo and re-echo of your songs, as I feel your presence 
 and your power in my land and my language. The waves of the sea 
 deaden the far-spreading notes of the harp, but the winds blow your 
 songs back again to the shores where in Amaranthine bowers amid 
 eternal festival and dance they never more die away." * 
 
 Wide was the field that Herder traversed for his Lieder. 
 French, German, Spanish, Italian, English, Scottish, Dutch, 
 Scandinavian, Finnish, Lapp, Russian, Greek, Greenlandish, 
 Lettish, Danish, Bohemian, Peruvian, Norwegian, Latin, Chinese, 
 Indian — all were represented by typical specimens. Here is a 
 
 * Homer, Hesiodus, Orpheus, ich sehe eure Schatten dort vor mir auf den Inseln, der 
 gliickseligen unter der Menge, iind hOre den Nachhall eurer Lieder, aber mir fehlt das 
 SchifF von euch in meine Land und meine Sprache. Die Wellen auf dem Meer der 
 Wiederfahrt verdumpfen Die Harfe und der Wind weht eure Lieder zurilck, wo sie in 
 amaranthen Lauben unter ewigen Tanzen und Festen nie verhallen werden. — Preface to 
 Volks L iedery p. 25. 
 
HERDER. 237 
 
 sample of a ballad which should be familiar to most of our 
 readers — in Herder's German, very exact, spirited, idiomatic : — 
 
 Der Schiffer. 
 {Schottisch.') 
 
 Der Konig sizt in Dumferlingschloss, 
 
 Er trinkt blutrothen Wain, 
 " O wo treff ich ein'n Segler an, 
 
 Dies SchifF zu segeln mein ? " 
 
 Auf und Sprach ein alter Ritter, 
 
 (Sass rechts an Konig's Knie) 
 " Sir Patrik Spence ist der beste Segler, 
 
 Im ganzen Land allhie." 
 
 Der Konig schrieb ein'n breiten Brief 
 
 Wersiegelt ihn mit seiner Hand, 
 Und sandt ihn zu Sir Patrik Spence, 
 
 Der wohnt an Meeres Strand. 
 
 Die erste Zeil Sir Patrik las, 
 
 Laut lachen schlug er auf ; 
 Die zweite Zeil Sir Patrik las, 
 
 Eine Thran' ihm folgte drauf. 
 
 O wer, wer hat mir das gethan ? 
 
 Hat wehgethan mir sehr ! 
 Mich auszusenden in dieser Zeit ! 
 
 Zu segeln auf dem Meer. 
 
 Macht fort, macht fort, mein' wackre Leut, 
 Unser gut schiff segelt Morgen, 
 
 " O sprecht nicht so, mein Heber Herr, 
 Da sind wir sehr in Sorgen. 
 
 Gestem Abend sah ich den neuen Mond, 
 
 Eric Hof war um ihn her, 
 Ich furcht,' ich furcht, mein lieber Herr, 
 
 Ein Sturm uns wartet schwer." 
 
 O edle Schotten, sie wussten lang, 
 
 Zu wahr'n ihre Korkholzschu; 
 Doch lang iiberall das Spiel gespielt 
 
 Schwammen ihre Hiite dazu. 
 
I 
 
 238 HERDER. 
 
 O lang, lang mogen ihre Frauen sitzen, 
 
 Den Facher in ihrer Hand ; 
 Eh je sie sehn Sir Patrik Spence, 
 
 An segeln an das Land. 
 
 O lang, lang mogen ihre Frauen stehn 
 
 Den Goldkamm in dem Haar, 
 Und warten ihrer Heben Herr'n. 
 
 Sie sehn sie nimmer mehr. 
 
 Dort iiber, hiniiber nach Aberdour 
 
 Tief Funfzig P'ad'n im Meer 
 Da liegt der guteSir Patrik Spence, 
 
 Sein Edlen um ihn her. 
 
 Hettner says of the " Volks Lieder " that it is the most com- 
 prehensible, and therefore also the most fully acknowledged of 
 all the services Herder rendered.* 
 
 The burden of Herder's life in every aspect of it was well shared 
 by his wife. So completely did they S}rmpathise with each other, 
 that occasionally it might seem as though they thus intensified 
 each other's troubles, as well as multiplied each other's joys. It 
 is delightful to see how she takes often on herself the disagree- 
 ables of correspondence — ^writing letters that show no little tact 
 and art, and often contriving to finish off" what her husband, 
 through stress of engagements, had left unfinished. Herder's 
 later correspondence bears throughout the marks of her character, 
 as she concerns herself in supporting, cheering, and stimulating 
 him. Some of his most interesting letters of this time are written 
 to Jacobi, with whom he was very hearty and familiar, and the 
 following — a good specimen — ^which bears date September 6th, 
 1783 — has a special value in view of what we have just said of 
 Caroline : — 
 
 ' " I have a wife," he writes, "who is the support, the trust, and the 
 happiness of my life, even in quick, flying thoughts one with me, at 
 which we both often wonder. She suffers in her spirit only in so far 
 as she suffers with me ; otherwise she is at once the rest and the energy 
 of the house, ever full of cheerful courage and careless expectation. 
 Six healthy and well-organised children have I — five boys and one 
 girl ; the youngest boy I found on my return home, just born." 
 
 Perhaps the most notable incident in the later period of his 
 life was a journey to Italy with the Dowager Duchess and Herr 
 
 * Hettner's Literaturgeschichte, v. p. 40. 
 
HERDER. 239 
 
 Von Einsedel. They set out in the end of 1788. It hardly 
 needs to be said that, in spite of the suffering inevitable in his 
 case during a lengthened separation from his family, he found 
 much to enjoy, and his letters home to wife and children are 
 simply delightful — communicative, quaint, fuU of the warm affec- 
 tionateness, which was part of himself. Alike for sharp observa- 
 tion, fine thought and quick felicities of expression, they are very 
 remarkable. His tenderness towards his children was unfailing. 
 Often weak, and irritable through disappointment and repressed 
 energy, he was always patient and considerate with them ; and 
 in the latter period of his life, nothing was more grateful to him, 
 than to steal time from other duties to indite long letters to them. 
 This single specimen to his son, August, in 1795, ™^y stand as 
 sample of them all, with the mere preUminary that August had 
 been sent to Switzerland to school : — 
 
 " I waited very anxiously for thy letter, dearest August, and it has 
 given me uncommon pleasure. It is very beautiful and good that 
 thou so carefully readest Plutarch ; since thou wilt derive a very last- \ 
 ing impression of the Greeks, through one who was a genuine Greek ; ' 
 it is a handbook that all great and good men value. Thou not only 
 repeatest thy reading of Cornelius, but mayst learn to apply to prac- 
 tical life all the particular critical fancies that arise in it. I am a 
 loser because I read Plutarch too late in life, and this I have never 
 ceased to regret. 
 
 " All thy friends here remember thee in love and with good wishes. 
 The Dowager-Duchess has spoken of thee in high terms, and thus 
 greatly gratified me. Forget what is in Thiiringia, and enjoy Switzer- 
 land. Buy good books on natural history in so far as it concerns 
 Switzerland. Consult Herr Droze, and listen to him with will and 
 spirit. 
 
 " It rejoices me that you go to your lessons with delight. You 
 know how often I have wished such for you. Switzerland is a pleasant 
 museum — for you to learn, to read, to see and hear. 
 
 " The newspapers say that in Neufchatel the war is now closed. 
 God grant that it may be true, that peace may follow ! Farewell, 
 dearest August, behave to Herr Droze reasonably, and with all courtesy 
 (and please present to him my most cordial salutations), surpass his 
 expectations, and add to the enjoyment of thy beautiful exile by the 
 greatest usefulness and contentment. 
 
 " Thy comrades are at the Academy. The acting was mediocre. 
 The speech on William's day was given by Burchhard ; the Ex- 
 amination is not passed yet, nor is the exact day fixed. Goodbye, 
 dearest August, I kiss thee heartily. H." 
 
240 HERDER. 
 
 During the latter years of Herder's life he suffered much. 
 Yet, though writing was often a severe trial to him then, he was 
 literally unresting. Ideas seemed to come to him with fresh 
 force at these times, and he was always reluctant to obey the 
 direction of his physicians and to seek change. But in 1802, his 
 symptoms became more serious than they had ever been. An in- 
 creased debility of the nervous system, accompanied by a greater 
 weakness of the eyes, drove him once again to the baths at Aix- 
 la-Chapelle. He found but little relief Nevertheless, he returned 
 to Weimar, in the autumn of 1803, refreshed in spirit, and with 
 bright hopes and wide-stretching designs. But soon, alas ! the 
 quickly-increasing sickness condemned him to complete inactivity.* 
 In a few weeks he was confined to bed. His brain seemed to 
 have been paralysed, though he himself was the last to believe 
 it ; expressing the fullest conviction of unweakened intellectual 
 powers. " Ah," he said, " if there would but come to me some 
 great, some new spiritual idea, that would wholly penetrate my 
 mind, I would rejoice, and be strengthened. I cannot com- 
 prehend this sickness ; my spirit is sound, and only my body is 
 weak ; if I could but get out of bed, I feel I could do great 
 work." t 
 
 It was a vain hope, and the ideas that visited the prostrate 
 thinker died with him. He passed on the i8th December 1803, 
 leaving behind him the impress of a unique, and noble and 
 highly-endowed nature. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Two men contended in Herder. The keen intuitionalist, 
 piercing directly into the recesses of history and the secret 
 domain of causes — thrusting aside all the impeding formalities 
 which scientific refinement or scholasticism may have built up ; 
 and the exact thinker who would reduce all his experience to 
 satisfactory formate. Out of this contest mainly arose his singu- 
 lar defects of form, no less than his impatience. He would not 
 rest content with the suggestive, axiomatic writing which would 
 
 * Lindemann, p. 167. 
 
 t Erinnerungen aus dem Joh. Gottfried's Von Herder, Von Maria Von Herder, geb. 
 Flachsland. Herausgegeben durch Johann Georg MuUer, li. p. 330. 
 
HERDER. . 241 
 
 best have corresponded with his genius ; he was constantly urg- 
 ing himself systematically to find the nexus between what were 
 really remote orders of thought and feeling, that he might at once 
 be exhaustive and logical ; and the attempt injured alike his 
 more ambitious poetic efforts and his more strictly logical work. 
 His " Metakritik '' against Kant is the most salient illustration of 
 his error as to his true powers.* He was essentially a seer — a 
 man of penetrating, divining insight, whose mission it was to 
 unfold and to awaken — to reveal new possibilities of perception 
 and sentiment, and to reduce the complexities of the feelings, 
 even while exciting new conflicts in the understanding. Hence 
 it comes that Herder will not seldom excite in his readers some- 
 thing of the unrest that lay as an inherent necessity in his own 
 idiosjmcrasy. But unless that unrest is associated with an insati- 
 able desire to penetrate the various forms and aspects of nature 
 and of man, in order to restore a rule of simplicity, truth to 
 nature, and healthy sympathy with all the various manifestations 
 of the same element. Herder's teaching has wholly failed of its 
 legitimate result. The great aim he had in view may be pro- 
 perly regarded under two forms, which in their ultimate aspects 
 merge into one. First, he desired to free the human spirit 
 entirely from the restrictions of conventional and artificial rule ; 
 and, secondly, to recover a true solidarity in the necessary embodi- 
 ments which the healthy imagination and uncorrupted genius of 
 man will, in the most contrasted circumstances, find for them- 
 selves. One can imagine the intense thrill of delight that Herder 
 would have felt had he hved to read of the later results of com- 
 parative mythology, which tend to indicate in the human mind, 
 however variously circumstanced, a necessity towards a certain 
 resemblance in the earlier developments of thought and exercises 
 of fancy. Whether we regard him as poet, critic, theologian, 
 historian, or mythologist, these aims mark and colour all his 
 activity, presenting us with the unity that sprang from his nature 
 and genius. In a certain sense it may be said that Herder 
 carried into German life and literature the spirit of the revolu- 
 tion, in asserting fully the rights of the individual intellect; quali- 
 fying and correcting the excesses that had proceeded from it, 
 
 * He does not fail, however, in detailed portions of his dialectic ; nay, is very conclusive. 
 Schmidt has' some very good remarks on these points, in which he regards Herder as effi- 
 cient against Ka.at.— Etudes, pp. 29-32. 
 
242 . HERDER. 
 
 however, through the fine historic perception and the healthy- 
 imagination that were so remarkably united in his nature. 
 Schmidt has well said,* " Germany had its own part in the Re- 
 volution of the Spirit ; the critical philosophy, and the influences 
 that sprang from it, did precisely what the Revolutionary idea 
 had done in France." Herder was one of the most powerful 
 agents of this revolution in Germany ; but while he sought to 
 render individual genius free and fruitful, he found a healthy 
 check to excesses in that direction in the very principle of that 
 varied development on which a true unity, and an intelligent 
 mutual interest, alone could be based. It is his distinguishing 
 characteristic (as opposed to the barren abstract ideas which for 
 so long governed the intelligence of France, ministering only to 
 division, and even in Rousseau, tending to the most anti-social 
 sentiments), that, while he desired to free the intellect from every 
 unnatural impediment, he^ught to relate all the varied and 
 diverse manifestations of the untrammelled human genius through 
 the exercise of the healthy imagination. Thus, though he so far 
 carried forward that great work of destruction, which Lessing had 
 so efficiently begun — that work which, in its final results, really 
 made an end of the culture of the eighteenth century — he was 
 essentially constructive, laying down at once on the ground that 
 he had cleared, the true plan and prospectus of the later culture, 
 which is as much distinguished by its disregard for authority in 
 itself, as it is by the subtle and open-eyed comprehensiveness, 
 which has imparted a higher purpose to history, breathed into 
 poetry a new spirit of nature and of truth, and raised the science 
 of language and mythology to the first rank of studies. A disin- 
 terested and literally insatiable curiosity animated Herder. He 
 first of Germans suggested the ideal of the modem spirit. No 
 country was too remote from him, no language too rude. If he 
 could catch but the true accent of faithful utterance, it sufficed. 
 Under his hand the language and the song retranslated them- 
 selves, as it were, into their true ideal. It has been well pointed 
 out that, though he knew no Sanscrit, he succeeded so perfectly 
 in reproducing the true form, the rhythm, and the spirit of the 
 Sakuntala from a bad version, that it might well pass for the 
 work of a man who had lived half a Ufe time in India, and had 
 studied Sanscrit alone. 
 
 * Geschichte der Romandk, ii. p, ii6. 
 
HERDER. 243 
 
 His translation of Balde's Terpsichore is marked by the same 
 merits, and his version of The Cid is beyond perhaps all others 
 informed by the very spirit of Spanish chivalry. With an odd 
 inconsistency he has been called the " Prince of Pedagogues," an 
 " essentially Encyclopaedic nature," the " German Rousseau." 
 He was " Encyclopaedic " in the range of his interests ; but no 
 man was ever less Encyclopaedic in his method and character ; 
 he was no pedagogue ; for his lesson was only to be fully appro- 
 priated through the heart and imagination ; and certainly he was 
 no Rousseau, inasmuch as he shrunk from all manifestations of 
 unhealthy individualism. His early friend Hamann was constantly 
 urging in his ear the necessity for a complete and harmonious 
 expression of all the varied faculties of man ; urging that what- 
 ever was isolated, or the product of an isolated faculty, was to 
 be condemned. There can be no doubt that this thought found 
 a ready echo in the mind and heart of Herder, who never ceased 
 to call men back to its importance, both as respects life and 
 literature. Through Hamann, who had not only studied EngUsh 
 authors, but had visited England, Herder was first led to a 
 thorough study of English literature ; and in the dramas of 
 Shakespeare and the greater playwrights of that age, he found 
 the highest utterance of the expression of healthy imagination 
 availing itself freely of the elements of a rich and varied social 
 life and history, and translating these into art after fresh forms. 
 For Herder, unlike Rousseau, not only clearly perceived, but 
 illustrated in many ways and with the greatest force, the im- 
 portant fact that man can only develop himself through society — 
 that the people and the common sentiment are the foundations 
 of a true poetry ; and that any utterance can only become vital 
 and permanent in the measure it gathers up and concentrates the 
 conditions amidst which the author lived and moved. The rank 
 of value between two pieces of literature, is not with him to be 
 decided merely on the ground of anything that can be said to be 
 directly derived from the artist. Trick of finish, elaboration, 
 mere pen-craft, are of but secondary account. The first question 
 with him is how far does it reveal the milieu in which it was written, 
 the customs, the manners, in a word, the spirit of the time and 
 the people amongst whom and for whom it was produced. Con- 
 scious and elaborated self-expression is inadequate to this— only 
 the full and unfettered, the spontaneous and unreflective expres- 
 
244 HERDER. 
 
 sion of the whole individuality, undivided as yet by reflection and 
 artificial rule, is equal to it. Herein lay the prerogative of 
 primitive art ; it held in union what reflection and criticism had 
 divided and set in opposition to each other. Homer was igno- 
 rant of the rules which Aristotle deduced from his works — the 
 genius who will speak to the very heart of his time even by re- 
 vealing it, must rise above the sense of any cold ancf frigid rules, 
 so arrived at, through complete sympathy with the life that flows 
 rich and warm around him. Pieces of literature thus differ in 
 value, first, as they clearly or dimly reflect this ; and, next, as 
 that spirit is in itself memorable and great or trivial and secondary. 
 From this point of view we can fully understand, even should we 
 not be able to sympathise with, Herder's very decided dis- 
 regard of Latin literature. He looked upon it as a mere imita- 
 tion of the Greek, with no true and independent root in the life 
 of the people ; therefore greatly dependent for its interest on 
 pedantic knowledge, to which but few could attain. His judg- 
 ment on this point alrnost banished Latin from the German 
 schools and universities. Here it may be truly said that Herder 
 anticipates the tendency of historical or positive criticism in 
 literature, which has its present most influential representative in 
 M. Taine ; while yet, by recognising the element of individual 
 freedom, he escapes from the weakness of that school and admits 
 the higher teachings of romanticism. But, though in this indi- 
 vidual instance his view sounds extreme, his principle was not 
 exclusive. He was prepared to welcome all manifestations of 
 the human spirit — to test, to compare, and to assign them their 
 true place in relation to a broader scheme which, as we shall see, 
 was almost identical with what is now widely regarded as the one 
 law of human progress as of nature. Unsystematic as he was, 
 this idea is to be detected running through all his very varied 
 writings — clear and efficient : it is the law of development held in 
 harmony with the completest sense of spiritual freedom. If 
 works of art, as expressive of the conditions out of which they had 
 come were to him alike valuable, historically, they recovered 
 particular interest as reflecting individual genius. A song, fresh 
 with the dew of true passion, and glowing with direct simplicity 
 of image and expression, was of equal rank with the most power- 
 ful epic ; but this because, Hke the common wind through an 
 .^oUan harp, the spirit of the singer had exalted in preserving it. 
 
HERDER. 2^S 
 
 In the horizon of social circumstances, of belief, of phantasy and 
 common myth that was revealed, lay the general and philosophic 
 interest; in the charm, the naive and unconquerable grace of 
 embodiment lay the subtle distinction of the individual bard. 
 That the two moved in a harmony alike indescribable and yet 
 completely natural, constituted the highest value of a literature 
 that was at once truly national and cosmopoUtan. 
 
 Herder rnay thus be said to have proclaimed efficiently the 
 principle that harmony with a common ideal constitutes the 
 truest freedom of the poet, precisely as it may be said generally 
 of life that he has most of liberty who in all his impulses is in 
 harmony with law. " If nature," as Goethe has said, " does 
 nothing for blunderers and doubters," certainly imagination will 
 not be fulfilled of its purpose in the man who piques himself on 
 a select and exclusive experience, on which he hugs himself in 
 secret and declines to regard the common herd as the proper 
 sharers with him in the beautiful record which he may have given 
 to it. There is and can be no experience truly sincere and suit- 
 able for purposes of art, which is not in the widest sense mine 
 and his, as well as yours. The test of sincerity in the long run is 
 universality and the possibility of translation into all the dialects 
 of men. 
 
 Herder's first impulse, which would in itself have become 
 merely revolutionary in erecting the authority of the individual 
 above that of .all common ideals, was derived from Rousseau, or 
 rather, as we may say, from the general sentiment of which 
 Rousseau was the most powerful exponent, was thus at every point 
 controlled by his second impulse, which was derived in great part 
 from England ; so that, although he has hitherto not been very 
 well krlown amongst us, he has, on the ground of that relationship, 
 a good right to claim our attention and suffrages. And this all 
 the more that there is not a German writer who has more of those 
 scattered glimpses that would emphatically enlighten many of our 
 difficulties respecting revelation, the position of science in refer- 
 ence to it, and all these related topics, which are daily becoming 
 more and more imperative in their demands on our attention. 
 
 If now we attempt to exhibit Herder in the various depart- 
 ments of his unceasing activity, we may fairly hope that our state- 
 ments may be the more readily understood and followed. 
 
246 HERDER. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 As the first great interest to which Herder devoted himself 
 was the collection of the Volks Lieder, we shall first regard him 
 in relation to poetry. We have seen how, while still a student, 
 he had become possessed with the idea of the great value of the 
 popular song in relation to a true Kterature. What Nicolai had 
 in vain tried to get Lessing to sneer at and openly to ridicule, 
 came to Herder with the force of a revelation of a new world of 
 life and beauty. His quick ear at once detected the true note ; 
 and he wisely followed a fine instinct in devoting himself to an 
 extended search. The world is wide, and from the furthest cor- 
 ners of it came rare gifts in response to his earnest call. He left 
 no stone unturned ; he spared no labour of research or of corre- 
 spondence, and the result was an epoch-making book. The 
 superfine critics found themselves outgeneralled by this audacious 
 youth, who ransacked barbarous as well as civilised languages, 
 produced his volumes, and revolutionised literature. This, how- 
 ever, he would not have done, had he not been as able to inter- 
 pret as to produce ; and as efficient to apply the lessons derived 
 from the past to urgent present-day needs as to draw philosophic 
 generalisations. His prevailing principle here may be summed 
 up in his own axiom : " It is at the epoch of decadence only that 
 poetry becomes a play, a mere affair of form." His one object 
 in presenting the Volks Lieder to the world was' to show the 
 means by which literature might regain simplicity and truth. This, 
 he held, it could do only in one way — by becoming once more 
 immersed in popular thought and sentiment. Poetry had become 
 classicalised, artificialised, bound hand and foot in a napkin of 
 dead rules and forms. All individuality had passed out of it — 
 all simple fervour, whole-heartedness, genuine passion as well as 
 genuine humour. By constant contact with these refined and 
 empty copies men had actually become unable to detect the note 
 of genuine song when they heard it. Such were the statements 
 that this iconoclast bravely threw forth on his contemporaries who 
 were still in the toils of the i8th century artifice. He wrote in 
 one of his earliest volumes : — 
 
 "^ " The rhythm of the popular verse is so delicate, rapid, and precise, 
 that we bookworms find it no easy matter to detect it with our eyes ; 
 but do not therefore imagine it to have been so difficult for those living 
 
HERDER. 247 
 
 peoples who, instead of reading it, listened to it, were accustomed to 
 the sound of it from their very infancy, and whose ear, through this 
 constant singing of it, had been formed by its cadence. And as we 
 know nothing is more insistent, more durable, quicker, or more deli- 
 cate than the sense of bearing. How long it retains what once it has 
 thoroughly seized." 
 
 Homer was, in his eyes, the greatest of all epic poets, because, 
 first of all, he was the greatest of all Folk's Singers. He was, in 
 reality, an improvisator e, who threw back on the people in 
 improved musical form, that with which they were all already 
 intimately familiar. And he urges still more forcibly : — 
 
 " We have become accustomed to reflect and to analyse so much 
 that we scarcely see and feel; we do not now poetize in or on the living 
 world : our poetry is in no sense the result of the contact of objects 
 with our soul ; we manufacture themes artificially, and treat them in 
 similar manner. And we have now practised this so long and so con- 
 stantly, and begin to do so at so early an age, that a free education 
 would not have much chance with us : we are, in fact, deformed ; and 
 how should the lame walk upright ? Our modern poems are all alike 
 in the lack of firmness, freedom, bold, well-defined and yet rounded 
 outlines, such as the first sketch alone can show, and which no 
 amount of after-work, with aid of the compasses, will ever secure. 
 Our poetic labours would clearly produce the same effect upon 
 Homer and Ossian that the unsteady lines drawn by the trembling 
 hand of an apprentice would upon a Raphael or an Apelles, who 
 always revealed their genius in the roughest sketch." 
 
 Herder's principle of referring back to primitive times, when 
 as yet poetry was the most direct expression of the general voice, 
 has been potent to preserve Germany from the worst phases of 
 the artistic temper, or the art-pour-art idea, which has been so 
 powerful in France, as a residue of the extreme classicism which 
 has so long prevailed there. The separation of classes which 
 must inevitably be instituted by this style of art, and the critical 
 doctrines on which it is based, would have been simply repug- 
 nant to his mind. The affectation of indifferency to the " dim, 
 common populations," and the assumption of some secret process 
 of appropriation possible only to the initiated, the habit of setting 
 aside the general or uneducated verdict in view of a set of eso- 
 teric impressions derived from the work in hand, would have 
 found no quarter from him. All this he would have regarded as 
 the morbid outgrowth of vain and corrupted minds — minds, 
 
248 HERDER. 
 
 which, in spite of culture, fancy, grace, and dreamy eloquence, 
 must yet necessarily be deficient in imagination, and in those 
 broad and robust interests out of which a great, simple, and 
 natural art alone could flow. He has some words on this point 
 which seem to have as direct an application to us at present as 
 they had at the time when he wrote them. After speaking of the 
 artificial elaborations, the affectations, the wire-drawn refine- 
 ments, the lack of health and truth and broad free outlines, which 
 rriarked the art of his day, he goes on to say : — 
 
 [ "It will remain an eternal truth that we can have neither public, 
 ' nation, nor language, nor a poetry of our own, living and acting with 
 us, without the people. We now do no more than write for sages 
 and scholars. The odes, heroic poems, songs for the church — it may 
 be for the kitchen — that we do compose, are of a kind that nobody 
 understands, appreciates or really feels. Our whole classical literature 
 is really like some bird of paradise, showy in plumage, pert in aspect, 
 all elevation and flight, but without any true footing on our German 
 soil." 
 
 A man with such views as these could not have been gratified 
 with the evident feeling of nationality, of true sympathy for 
 German life, which Goethe's " Goetz " and the First Part of 
 " Faust " displayed ; and we are as little surprised at the enthu- 
 siastic praise which he bestowed on these works, as we are at the 
 disgust and repulsion with which he turned later from some 
 of the productions of Goethe's sensuous-classical period, at a 
 time when Goethe's disgust at everything homely and German 
 was as remarkable as his activity in these his " classical " works. 
 We say this with the recollection quite clear in our mind of 
 Goethe's report of Herder's cold criticisms of the " Goetz," and 
 shall have a good deal to say of this when treating immediately 
 of Goethe. Meanwhile, we must note that Herder's claim to a 
 juster judgment than marked his contemporaries, is founded on 
 a principle which Goethe at least would have been ready to 
 acknowledge. Herder was philosophically more consistent in his 
 eclecticism than Goethe was in some of his preferences and 
 in many of his dislikes ; and if Herder failed in attaining to that 
 elevation and clearness at which he aimed, or was ever over- 
 borne by the influence of the subjects with which he was more 
 immediately concerned, the privilege he asserts may therefore be 
 the more willingly accorded to him. He says, " I have striven 
 
HERDER. 249 
 
 to form my taste to embrace more than one nation, epoch, or 
 language, and surely I may therefore claim the privilege of writ- 
 ing as I prefer for my own people, age, and tongue." 
 
 As a necessity of this position he was as much concerned as 
 Mr Matthew Arnold now is, to reprove and to lessen that self- 
 hugging conceit which is so apt to assail a nation the more that 
 it develops an artificial art and an esoteric poetry; and is 
 inclined to pique itself on attainments at once material and 
 trivial — whose art, totally and boastfully divorced from the tenor 
 of its everyday life, becomes a luxury, an indulgence, a source of 
 escape from the rude life around, — a medium merely of a kind 
 of dreamy intoxication. He perceived the evil of all this, as 
 clearly as our modern Heraclitus, but he was more faithful in 
 probing the wound and in pointing practically to the only true 
 cure, though some of his severely playful passages might well 
 have suggested points to that more modern teacher : — 
 
 " Don't we laugh at the poor Chinese,'' he writes, " for thinking \ 
 that their country is the centre of the world, and for placing us, poor 
 monsters, at the four corners of the globe ? And why ? Because they 
 knew nothing of us, and fancied that they themselves possessed the 
 monopoly of taste and wisdom. How often is one tempted to think 
 one's self in China, on hearing certain China-like judgments in every- 
 day life — judgments by which, through our ignorance and pride, we 
 condemn all that is at variance with our own understanding, and ways 
 of thinking." 
 
 Herder's pervading principle, therefore — under which he would 
 make the primitive poetry bear a fruitful lesson for the poets of 
 a more cultivated period, who still should be true to the 
 essential life — and the entire life — of the people around them is 
 based on an idea which, we think, has nowhere been better or 
 more simply expressed than by Schmidt, when, with fine penetra- 
 tion, he writes : " The distinction between cultivated and uncul- 
 tivated people is not specific." * 
 
 Herr Rosenkranz, whose admirable address on the anniversary 
 of Herder, forms perhaps the most interesting portion of his 
 " Neue Studien," has found in Herder's sensitive perception of the 
 music of speech the source of one of his weaknesses — one of the 
 necessary elements in a nature fitted for a great people's pedagogue, 
 which marked him as being in strictness rhetorically organised, 
 
 • Geschichted er Romantick, ii., p. 114. 
 
2 so HERDER. 
 
 whilst really no poet.* Any judgment of such a writer as Rosen- 
 kranz is well worthy of consideration ; and certainly there is 
 much in Herder that seems to give favour to this view. But on 
 a closer scrutiny we discover one or two reasons for presenting a 
 qualification to that judgment as absolute. Herr Rosenkranz 
 himself finds that this sensitiveness to the music of speech was in 
 some inscrutable way bound up with " that unrest, that irre- 
 pressible impulse forward which so distinguished Herder ; " t and 
 assuredly if that calm self-possession and repose which may be 
 held essential to the production of great dramatic composition or 
 to epical poetry, is to be held a sine gud, non, then Herder can 
 hardly claim to rank as a poet. He himself was fully alive to this, 
 and was ever ready to acknowledge how infinitely such a genius 
 as that of Goethe here outstripped him. On this point he himself 
 wrote to Goethe : " My muse is lacking in that delicious round- 
 ness with which you charm the world ; " and he would have been 
 quite ready to admit the force of what Goethe himself once said 
 in writing to Falk : — " I was always more inclined to a patient 
 observation of nature through the senses than was Herder, who 
 continually wanted to hurry forward to some result ; and before 
 I had got through my examination, had grasped at an idea. But 
 it was precisely this kind of mutual stimulus that made us useful 
 to each other." \ 
 
 And this stimulating and widely-helpful energy, that was 
 always pushing forward and pointing out new paths, was precisely 
 what was then needed. Germany had been suffering from over- 
 systematisation ; the supremacy of cold intellectual methods that 
 permitted no glimpse of anything beyond had induced a paralysis 
 of imagination and spiritual life ; and what wonder that the man 
 who was destined to lead the new generation out of the wilder- 
 ness should in his own practice too decisively set aside the old 
 traditions in the new circumstances. Unsystematic as Herder 
 
 * Diese Unruhe, diesen Dran^ nach Vorwarts. 
 
 t Dieser Sinne fur die Musik der Sprache erklart uns auch eine seiner Schwachen. Als 
 eine auf die grosse Volks padagogik angelegte Natur war Herder wesentlich rhetorick 
 organizirt, er war kein Dichter. .... Herder war wesentlich eine padagogische Natur. 
 Sich mit Padagogik beschaftigen, Einsichten in dieselbe haben, Biiclier dariiber schreiben, 
 Vortrage dariiber halten, ist vollkommen mSglich, ohne eine padagogisch Natur zu sein. 
 
 Unter einer padagogischen Natur verstehe icli einen Menschen, der ganz un- 
 
 mittelbar das Bedilrfniss hat, Personen, Zustande, Einrichtungen zu verandern und dem 
 aus diesem Bedurfniss hieraus auch ein Tact fiir die Behandlung solcher Verhaltniss in 
 wohnt. — i., p. 82. 
 
 X Falk, pp. 36-37. 
 
HERDER. 251 
 
 was in respect of form, he was always clear and graceful in style, 
 — ^which may in some degree be attributed to those French studies 
 his early passion for Rousseau had led him to ; but more still per- 
 haps to the play of that imagination which imparted to all he 
 wrote an elevation and a glow that speak more directly to the 
 heart than to the head. If, then, we may say that the place 
 imagination held in Herder's nature enabled him to act with such 
 effect on so many points at once, to stimulate and to awaken, this 
 must be taken in conjunction with the statement, that it was 
 especially supreme in these lines, from which imagination had 
 been most completely excluded, and into which it now seemed 
 most hopeless to introduce it. We have here then this notable 
 phenomenon. Herder's imagination was more active and concen- 
 trated when dealing with matters that properly lay outside the 
 range of poetry, than with subjects strictly poetic in themselves. 
 Let it be admitted that he made science and philosophy poetical 
 by informing them with imagination rather than created great 
 poetic works. Yet we would urge that to deny thus absolutely the 
 name of poet to a man who had so completely placed himself 
 in the position of the early ballad-singers of almost all peoples, 
 as to reproduce with a poetic faithfulness that has never been ap- 
 proached, not to say surpassed, the very spirit and rhythm of their 
 songs, is surely too much. Dramatic imagination, as well as a 
 sense of the music of speech must have been active there — transla- 
 tion of this kind is not a mere exercise of intellect and fancy, but 
 of instinct, heart, and simple passion, and is possible only to a 
 man, who combines many of the rarest attributes of the poetic cha- 
 racter. Besides, are there not many gems of concentrated thought, 
 and fancy — of chastened beautiful expression and lofty thought 
 in the " Flowers gathered from the Greek anthology?"* Several 
 of these remain in our memory, as with an indefinable sense of 
 brightness and finality — 
 
 " Does Fate cruelly draw thee, then draw thou more kindly to Fate : 
 Follow him willing and cheerful ; for this if thou wilt not, thou must."+ 
 
 Elsewhere he has given us a variation on this thought, from 
 which we could almost imagine that Goethe and Carlyle had 
 
 * Blumen aus der Griechischen Anthologie gesammelt. 
 t Das Schicksal. 
 Tragst das Schicksal dich, so trage du wieder das Schicksal. 
 Folg ihm wiUig und froh : willt du nicht folgen, du musst. — Zerstreute Blatter, i. p. 21. 
 
252 HERDER. 
 
 half-consciously borrowed in some of their most accepted 
 utterances : — 
 
 Thy Fate, oh, call not cruel only, 
 
 Name not Envy as its end, 
 
 Eternal Truth its law had stood, 
 
 The purity of God its good, 
 
 Necessity its might to blend.* 
 
 And are there not here and there amongst Herder's poems 
 true droplets of song, clear and graceful in expression, instinct 
 with deep experience, steeped in metaphor, and pervaded by the 
 " lyrical cry." Such poems as " Die Lerche," " Der Regenbogen," 
 " Der Mensch und seine Schatte," strike us as fully justifying this 
 statement. That our readers may judge for themselves. We 
 attempt a version of an exquisite lyric, giving the original in a 
 footnote : — 
 
 THE BUTTERFLY.t 
 
 Lovely, light, as cloud in sky. 
 
 Butterfly, 
 Over flowers thou flittest free. 
 Dew and blossom food for thee ; 
 Thyself a blossom, flying leaf ; 
 Who purpled thee by rosy-finger's 
 
 Touch so brief? 
 
 Was it a Sylph, that thy sweet dress 
 
 Did so impress ? 
 Of morning odours moulded fine 
 Thy beauty for one day to shine .'' 
 O little soul, and thy small heart 
 Beats quickly 'neath my finger there, 
 
 And feels death's smart. 
 
 * Nenne nicht das Schicksal grausam, 
 / ' Neilne seinen Schluss nicht Neid 
 
 Seine Gesetz ist ew'ge Wahrheit, , 
 
 ' Seine Gute GGtterklarheit, 
 
 \ Seine Macht Nothwendigkeit. 
 
 t DcLs Liedvom Schtneiterling. 
 Liebes, leiclltes, luft'ges Ding, 
 
 Schmetterling. 
 Das da iiber Blumen schwebet 
 Nur von Thau und Bliiten lebet, 
 Bldte selbst, ein fliegend Blatt 
 Das mit welchen Rosenfinger 
 
 Wer bepurpurt hat ? 
 
HERDER. 253 
 
 Fly hence, O little soul, and be 
 
 Bright and free ; 
 An image of that later birth 
 When man, the chrysalis of earth, 
 Like thee, a Zephyr, shall become. 
 And kiss, in odour, dew and honey 
 
 Every bloom. 
 
 Exquisite, too, is the little song titled Friede (Peace), of which 
 the first verse may be freely rendered : 
 
 " Here in the shade 
 Of the cloistered wall 
 Shall I my life 
 Yield to sorrow's call ? 
 And have sweet release 
 For the fevered head ? 
 O godlike peace 
 Dwellest thou here." 
 
 Herr J. G. von Miiller, as the editor of Herder's poems, may 
 be pardoned for some natural partiality, yet we cannot read the 
 Preface he has appended to these " Gedichte," without feeling 
 the truth of much that he says : There is at all events a profound 
 and true expression of critical and biographical truth in these 
 sentences : — 
 
 "As Rousseau called his musical compositions les consolations de 
 ma vie, so were Herder's poems the consolations of his life, the free 
 overflowings of his heart, true expressions of feeling, which to utter 
 was with him a necessity. Poetry, he called the energetic language 
 of the spirit and of the heart ; and his own songs in large measure 
 fulfil that condition." 
 
 War's ein Sylphe, der dein kleid 
 
 So bestreut 
 Dich aus Morgenduft gewebet 
 Mir auf Tage dich belebet ; 
 Seelclien, und dein kleines Herz 
 Pocht da unter meinen Finger, 
 
 Fiihlet Todeschmerz. 
 
 Fleuch dahin, O Seelchen, sei 
 
 Froh und frei, 
 Mir ein Bild, was ich sein werde 
 Wenn die Raufe dieser Erde 
 Auch wie du ein Zephyr ist 
 Une in Duft und Tliau und Honig 
 
 Jede Blute kiisst. 
 
254 HERDER. 
 
 Herder, then, we venture to name a poet, though it may be 
 only of the second rank ; but expressing with sincerity and music 
 a considerable range of lyrical feeling. 
 
 IX. 
 
 " Do not suppose," says Herder, " that I despise the benefits 
 of civilisation and morality, do not smile at me for my enthusi- 
 asm for savages, as Voltaire did at Rousseau for admiring men 
 who went on all fours ! I believe as firmly as you do that man- 
 kind achieve their progressive evolutions in a series of consecu- 
 tive scenes like those of a drama." This gives us, in little, the 
 keynote to Herder's position as a critic, philosopher, and theolo- 
 gian. He would never consent to view any phenomenon apart 
 and isolated. He constantly sought to see every fact and mani- 
 festation in its relation to the general idea. Spirit, he held, could 
 not reveal itself apart from conditions of race, climate, circum- 
 stances of inheritance and physical pecuHarity. Hence with him 
 the unity of life is seen only in the principles of development 
 attested at once by science and history, which must fully admit 
 as a special factor the influence of external and physical elements 
 in all their variety and scope. He it was who first suggested, if 
 he did not exhaustively formulate, that idea to which Hegel has 
 given such prominence, that the fullest development of humanity 
 is only possible in the more temperate zones, and hence the 
 direction in which, as we may say, the flow of the racial waves 
 has been determined. Hence the attention which Herder gives 
 in his " Ideen," in his " Adrastea," and in the Hebrew Poetry, 
 and elsewhere, to such questions as the physical organisation of 
 the various races of the earth, to temperature, to climate — inves- 
 tigating at great length, for instance, what climate is, and what 
 eff'ect it has on the culture of mankind, both in body and soul. 
 Such questions he illustrates by the widest array of references to 
 Asiatic traditions — those of China, Tibet, India, Babylon, 
 Assyria, Chaldea, Jewish, Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and 
 Roman — as well as Finnish, Lettish, Slavish, German, Dutch. 
 He thus anticipates much in the attitude of the positivistic 
 school, while he also has given impulse to historians of the 
 school of Niebuhr and Ewald, and Arnold and Stanley, and like- 
 
HERDER. 255 
 
 wise to modern broad-school theologians, who find the reconcil- 
 ing medium for religious doctrines in the principle of develop- 
 ment. 
 
 Mr Baring-Gould, in his " Origin and Development of Reli- 
 gious Beliefs," has many passages which might have been sug- 
 gested by Herder ; and an association of him with Herder would 
 not have been so surprising as that he, a high churchman, should 
 vaunt so close a relation to Hegel. 
 
 Religion with Herder, too, is ever the primary concern. " As 
 men live, and think, and believe, so will they build and dwell ; 
 but the first structure in significance, if not in time, is the temple, 
 the shrine given to the God." Mr Ruskin could not be more 
 resolute than Herder is, in seeking in the sacred edifice for the 
 clearest indication of the character of the people. From this 
 their language, their poetry, even their amusements take shape 
 and colour ; the truths seriously" believed will penetrate to the 
 most unimportant details of life, and make them expressive to us. 
 Popular poetry is indirectly informed, from first to last, by this 
 influence ; and is of the greater worth as it bears significant 
 witness to the supernatural side of life, and the hopes and fears 
 to which it gives rise. Of Herder's surveys in this spirit, espe- 
 cially in the works we have just named, it is hardly possible here 
 to present an epitome that would do him justice. From first to 
 last he proceeds on the distinct idea that all records and tradi- 
 tions are to be openly submitted to criticism — that no claim of 
 revelation can be held to bar the way to a careful, deliberate 
 examination and comparative estimate of sacred books or cus- 
 toms. In consonance with his idea of development, he finds 
 even in the most remote and apparently perverted beliefs, dim 
 prophecies and approaches to the fuller truth, in a style that must 
 have gratified Mr Maurice. 
 
 Herder's conception of the Origin of Language very happily 
 illustrates this position. He is averse to the idea of admitting 
 any element of the miraculous — as if God had by some special 
 and direct communication imparted to man the secret of speech. 
 This would be to lay the axe at the root of the tree of his per- 
 vading doctrine of development. On the contrary, he regards 
 it as at once more philosophical and honouring to God to 
 believe that man, from the inherent capabilities of his own spirit 
 and reason, with which he had been endowed at first, should, by 
 
2s6 HERDER. 
 
 gradual stages, and by a series of instinctively-directed efforts, 
 have himself framed that wonderful series of figures and symbols 
 which we name speech. " The Origin of Language," for far- 
 grasping thought, and felicitous treatment of details, is certainly 
 one of the most attractive and stimulating of Herder's works, 
 and, it should be added also, is in a peculiar measure popular and 
 easily comprehended. 
 
 The origin of language is with Herder, and of necessity, closely 
 bound up with the Genesis of religious ideas. Looked at from 
 this historical point of view, these are, according to Herder, seen 
 to become purified and simplified very gradually. First there is 
 fear and superstition ; but curiosity comes ere long, and, carry- 
 ing man's view from within outward, and then again from out- 
 ward within, creates a cosmogony, and by help of the imagination, 
 a mythology, in which inevitably the first wonder of human life 
 in generation is projected over the physical universe, and gods 
 are begotten after man's own likeness. It is the inward which 
 determines the outward here as in the latest development ; these 
 are the germs that need time and space to grow into the fairest 
 flower of belief which without these antecedent stages were want- 
 ing in that rootage in the past which stands for the faithful 
 witness to the unity of man in all times and places. The 
 religious sentiment itself, though the most radical and essential 
 of all, is thus brought within the sphere of development ; and 
 the study of it cannot be rightly considered apart from the 
 general scope of history, which, regarded philosophically, will not 
 at the convenience of chroniclers, separate itself into secular and 
 sacred, but is really one and indivisible. 
 
 Dogma, with Herder, can thus be no more than an accom- 
 modation, as it is destined, sooner or later, to be superseded. A 
 Creed or Confession is a symbol of an agreement^ that is possible 
 only through the conscious surrender of something on the part 
 of each of the individuals recognising it. In the measure that it is 
 found practically to foster religious feeling lies its essential value ; 
 in the measure that it has done this in past times lies its his- 
 torical value. But the appeal to it from religious feeling is fatal ; 
 hence all religious controversy is to be condemned as destructive 
 of that which it would preserve. It is impossible, he says, to 
 dispute about what religion is, but only about the forms in which 
 it has clothed itself; and these also are removed from the field 
 
HERDER. 257 
 
 of discussion in the very measure that they still represent, and 
 are held in relation to, the realities of the religious sentiment. 
 Religious controversy is thus a misnomer ; and cannot be en- 
 gaged in by religious men. 
 
 As we found Herder in the field of poetry, history, and 
 criticism, uniting the positivist and the romanticist, and showing 
 how both ought to tread much of the way together for mutual 
 help ; so here he unites the mystic and the rationalist, and is the 
 first efficient advocate of what we may call a Protestant via 
 media. He has firm faith in the inward personal light, is full of 
 reverence for the mystical glow and rapture, and would subscribe 
 heartily even to the claims of Quietists and Quakers. But, un- 
 like them, he is immediately recalled to the inherent necessity for 
 efficient forms of Union ; and his historical sense at once compels 
 him to recognise all religious symbols as originally springing 
 directly from a recognition of this same personal but only partially 
 expressible vision ; and here he of necessity assumes once more 
 his critical and comparative attitude, from which he would plead 
 the right to preach two great doctrines ; tolerance of others in 
 their choice of forms suited to them, and the supremacy of these 
 forms as they are in themselves comprehensively humane. 
 And it should not be overlooked that Herder not only per- 
 ceives a progress in the spiritualization of the symbol, but regards 
 religion as assuming higher stages as the Infinite is reverenced 
 and adored apart from the media of definite conventional forms. 
 
 At this point we reach the reason of Herder's exceeding re- 
 verence for the Bible, which he regards as the basis of the highest 
 religion possible. Judaism was the consecration of monotheism, 
 and Christianity is the spiritualization of Judaism. In its essen- 
 tial inwardness embodied in the text — " the kingdom of heaven 
 is within you" — and yet its complete recognition of a law of 
 order and providence in the outward realm of nature, supreme 
 over all apparent confusion and evil, it unites the two loftiest 
 elements that are seen dimly to struggle through the process of 
 religious development, and here find spiritual unity. " No one 
 can build up any other foundation than that which is laid in 
 Christ. His gospel needs no external sign, carrying its own proof 
 with it to the religious consciousness j and it cannot be affected 
 or overturned by such doubts as theology or science may 
 
 suggest." 
 
 R 
 
2S8 
 
 HERDER. 
 
 Let us look at this matter a little more closely for a moment. 
 We find Herder saying of the Jews — in a tone which is most 
 characteristic : — 
 
 " Israel was and is the most remarkable people on the earth. In 
 csAM-'^ its fortunes and misfortunes, its failures and successes, in its glory and 
 in its shame, it is alike so unique and wonderful, that I hold the his- 
 tory, the art, the existence of this people, to be a most indubitable 
 proof of the Providence of God in the world. Something in the people 
 is averse from fabrication. Such a people would not permit itself to 
 invent such a history with all that pertains to it, and is involved in it. 
 The still unfinished course of this history is the greatest poem of time ; 
 and most probably it is still proceeding to a final development by 
 which the perplexities of other nations shall be lightened. This 
 / remarkable people has the most remarkable book : a people indeed 
 / whose religion and history are wholly of God."* 
 
 ~ And then Herder proceeds to speak here to the same effect as 
 in the " Hebrew Poetry " on the remarkable circumstance that the 
 inventing or hero-creating impulse should in the Jews of all 
 peoples have been so restrained. When the late Mr Isaac Taylor, 
 in his " Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry," worked out this thought so 
 carefully he was but unconsciously developing the leading ideas 
 of Herder. Indeed but few striking thoughts have since then been 
 added to this branch of critical literature, which may not be justly 
 said to have been more or less clearly suggested in the dialogues 
 of Alciphron and his friend. And Herder, who, in consistency 
 with his own axiom, was never inclined to isolate, was as faithful 
 here as elsewhere in his endeavour to see all the portions of the 
 Hebrew literature in relation to each other. In the story of the 
 creation he was disposed to find a poem of matchless beauty and 
 insight — a fitting overture to the marvellous history, so Providence 
 attesting, that was to follow. The two elements which he most 
 specially signalised in the prophets are their pure moraUty and 
 lofty national sentiment, struggling against a perpetual tendency 
 to self-indulgence and sensualism. And yet, — a fact unparalleled ' 
 in the history of any other nation — the spirit of these prophets, 
 who were proscribed, often driven out by their infuriated brethren, 
 in the last resource always prevailed. The nation came to itself 
 and did honour to the prophet it had proscribed preserving and 
 honouring the literature in which its own sins had been reproved. 
 Herder says : — 
 
 * Ideen. ii. p. 249. 
 
HERDER. 
 
 259 
 
 " What other people of antiquity had a voice so pure and powerful 
 as the prophets of Israel ? What Greek or Roman poets could we 
 place by the side of Isaiah, from the standpoint of a pure and elevated 
 morality, or from that of a wide and elevated national mind ?" 
 
 His criticism is thus quite consistent with the general principles 
 he has laid down ; and we are not- surprised to find Herder's ser- 
 vices in this regard highly celebrated by Jewish critics. Herr 
 Kohut says ; — 
 
 " Not only was the poetic and eternal beauty of the Bible appre- 
 hended by Herder, the foundation-thought, the Monotheism also found 
 in him a straightforward commentator and an eloquent advocate. 
 .... His whole individuality was penetrated by the strong nature- 
 truth of the Bible which stood high above Homer, Hesiod, Ossian, 
 the bards and the Scalds. The glowing rays from the Book of God 
 that lighten humanity's path, caused the strings of Herder's genius to 
 sound Vfith wonderful sweetness ; and, like Memnon's head, if it were 
 kissed by Aurora's breath — he sang and rejoiced in the conviction born 
 of his contemplations, that the Bible also first fully awakened to 
 warmth and to music the deepest spirit of man."* 
 
 It has been the habit with a certain class of writers to rank 
 Herder among the cosmopolitan indififerentists in matters political 
 and patriotic — to think of him as assuming very much the airs of 
 Goethe, concerned only with his own theories, and inclined to find 
 in art and literature the solvent for political misfortune or oppres- 
 sion. A reference to what we have set down as the leading pur- 
 pose of Herder's life will suffice to correct and qualify this assump- 
 tion. Herder desired to deliver raan,kind from the burden of 
 artificial restrictions, from everything arbitrary that tended to 
 impede the full and harmonious development of their free 
 natural powers. How could it then consist with his principles in 
 any form to encourage or to support a condition of things which 
 must necessarily cripple and contract the energies of national life ? 
 If he was a cosmopoUtan in the sense of welcoming warmly and 
 valuing highly any natural, original, and independent contribution 
 to the world's history from any quarter, was it not the element of 
 individuality and fresh untutored self-expression that constituted 
 its value in his eyes, and in relation to all the rest ? How could 
 he have illustrated his idea by his Volk's Litder, if he had not 
 
 • Johann G. Von Herder und die Humanitats-bestrebungcn der neu Zeit. Von Adolph 
 Kohut, p- 37. 
 
26o HERDER. 
 
 found that each nation had by its genuine folk-songs first of all 
 faithfully expressed itself in its highest and noblest moods ; and 
 next, by this very faithfulness, had reached that universality which 
 made it of value for every other nation that had risen to such 
 point of comprehensiveness. But Herder's indifference to the 
 jealousies and animosities that prevailed among the small States 
 of Germany, in the earlier part of his career especially, is easily 
 understood. Changes based on such points of policy as were 
 powerful in these matters were not likely to be regarded by him 
 as of vast moment. His cosmopolitanism, however, was essen- 
 tially dependent on the maintenance of national peculiarity, alike 
 as respects belief, custom, thought, and capability ; and his most 
 earnest conviction was that the whole world was deeply interested 
 in the survival of such elements ; and that no poHtical change or 
 usurpation could, without greater loss than it was easy to reckon, 
 be directed to the effacing of these national characteristics and 
 tendencies. All imperialism was therefore for literary reasons 
 condemned. The very taproot of a true poetry traced itself to 
 the people and to its free and unfettered development in its widest 
 and truest acceptation ; and amid a people in whom there still 
 survived the excellent qualities of simphcity, independence, and 
 self-sufficing faith, patriotism must necessarily rank among the 
 strongest virtues. Without it one of the most powerful interests 
 in a people's literature was gone. To regard Herder as the up- 
 holder of a cosmopolitanism that could in any way weaken or 
 efface the expression of distinctive points of national character, is 
 simply to force him into the ■ rnost contradictory and exclusive 
 positions. In fact the lack of that distinctiveness and indivi- 
 duality over which he so deeply mourned could not but be found 
 associated with the empty cosmopolitanism which is intolerant of 
 rough peculiarity, idiom, and national usage. He was, in a word, 
 cosmopolitan in the desire to receive readily from all nations alike 
 a fair and faithful impression of these distinguishing traits which 
 had particularly coloured their history and their religion, their 
 poetry.and art ; but he was necessarilyinterestedin the maintenance 
 of these sentiments and affections which are strictly to be classed 
 as national and patriotic, because everything that promoted or 
 intensified these quickened the thought and aspiration of the people 
 who are the only source of the genuine Zled or ballad, or indeed 
 of a true literature. 
 
HERDER. 261 
 
 Herder himself has thus definitely expressed the principle 
 which lay at the root at once of his cosmopolitanism and his 
 patriotism — the attempt to acknowledge frankly in the lives of 
 others the elements that gave value and elevation to our own : — 
 
 " Each one loves his own country, customs, language, wife, children, ~) 
 not because they are the best in the world, but because they are his \ 
 exclusive property, and in them he loves himself and the pains that he ' 
 has devoted to them. Thus every one will reconcile himself to the 
 worst food, to the hardest mode of hving, to the roughest customs of 
 the harshest climate, and will find at last comfort and peace in it."* 
 
 Schmidt, approaching this matter from a slightly different point,- 
 has well said : — 
 
 " An idea political and patriotic displays itself with immense acti- 
 vity in Herder; the publicist and the philanthropist in him are united 
 with the litterateur and the critic. The interest of the great German 
 Fatherland was always one of his most cherished ideas. He would see 
 a free, a great, a strong nation ; and contemplated with pride the time 
 when Germany should send colonies and kings to all parts of the world. 
 To constitute this Germany one and indivisible was his great aim ; 
 he would fain see it the source of world-wide influences ; yet a true 
 head with many groups held in connection with it as living members 
 of one body." + 
 
 The special impulse which Herder contributed to the romantic 
 movement is thus, as we shall hereafter see, very plainly indicated. 
 In turning the eyes of the cultured to antiquity for the suggestion 
 of the true relation in -which the artist should stand to the people 
 amongst whom, and for whom, he labours, he asserted for art a 
 social, moral, and religious significance. Richter has said : — 
 " Greece was to him the supreme object of reverence, the point 
 towards which all his aspirations were directed, and well as he was 
 disposed by the cosmopolitanism of his taste to discover and to 
 honour merit, from wherever it might come, yet, in midst of the 
 rich lands through which he strayed, he ever longed, like a far- 
 travelled Ulysses, for his return to a Grecian home ; and this 
 more especially in his later years. He was, as it were, designed 
 from some breathing Grecian model. Hence came his Greek-like 
 reverence for life in all its manifestations : like a Brahmin, with 
 a divine Spinozism of the heart, he loved the humblest creatures, 
 the reptile, the insect, even the blossoms in the woods." And 
 almost to the same effect speaks Rosenkranz : — " Herder, indeed, 
 loved the Greek ; but he loved also the phantasy of the Orient 
 
 * Philosophy of History. t Etudes sur la Litt&ature AUemande, p. 9. 
 
262 HERDER. 
 
 and of the north ; he had an inspiration for the Scandinavian 
 mythology and everything like it" * 
 
 It was the width and generosity of his imagination, combining 
 childlike openness and aptitude, with sagelike sagacity and recti- 
 tude, which, as Schmidt has well said, gave pertinancy and 
 value to all his researches ; and if this universality, this ceaseless 
 seeking for and opening out of new prospects and possibilities, 
 imparted often an air of incompleteness to his work, it certainly 
 has communicated to them in large measure the interest of per- 
 manent application. In the effort to transport himself, by ima- 
 gination to former times, he only finds a new means for the 
 interpretation of his own. In spite of the wide variation in 
 symbol and image, he discovers an identity of common purpose 
 and aspiration in ages the most distant ; and he would employ 
 the imagination to reveal this link worthily, for therein the 
 highest ends of poetry would be fulfilled. It is very characteristic 
 of Jean Paul, in his sketch of Herder, to set down so prominently 
 as he does these two anecdotes : — "While riding out with Herder 
 on one occasion, he told me the following, which to others may 
 seem trifling, but which have dwelt in my memory because they 
 so deeply impressed me. One was, that once when listening to 
 choral music sounding from a neighbouring church as from the 
 heart of some distant century, and thinking of the cold frosty 
 spirit of these times, he wished that he had been bom in the 
 middle-ages. The other, which embodied a sentiment very 
 different, was this. He said that he would gladly communicate 
 with a messenger from the spiritual world, and that he neither 
 felt nor foreboded any of the awe or fear usually associated vnth 
 the thought of such a communication." These two anecdotes 
 point directly to the elements in Herder, which, as we shall see 
 later, made him a vital spring of romanticism, and all the more 
 that his spiritual longing and imaginative depth were combined 
 with a keen historical sense and a vivid concern in the actual 
 events of his own time. 
 
 X. 
 
 The wealth of Herder's intellectual resources is in nothing 
 more seen than in his correspondence. His mind was perma- 
 
 * Neue Studien, p. 92. 
 
HERDER. 263 
 
 nently in the condition of giving off light. True, it was a wide 
 and diffusive flame rather than an intense and concentrated one ; 
 but It was essentially serviceable both to those beside him and to 
 those at a distance. If, like the electric light, it was sometimes 
 flickering and unequal, through the great drain made upon the 
 source at many points, it sent forth intermittently a clear colour- 
 preserving glow like to the sunlight. And it never fell far below its 
 own normal standard. The letters to Hamann, to Lavater, to Kant, 
 to Hartknoch, to Scheffner, and to his wife, contain in themselves 
 enough to constitute one man's fame. He needs but a friendly 
 hint, a suggestion, an intimation of interest in any topic, and he 
 will steal an hour from the most pressing business to stimulate 
 still further the intellectual hunger in his friends. He loves to 
 realise the link of influence. It is a necessity of his nature that 
 he should communicate himself — ^ discover tokens of his own 
 growth and progress. His correspondence is thus the most 
 admirable commentary on his works, which, indeed, cannot be 
 fully understood unless read alongside of these ; and certainly 
 Dr Emile Gottfried von Herder did a great service to students, 
 when he conceived that idea of a Chronological Selection from 
 Herder's letters, and works, and fragments.* 
 
 Scheffner, one of the friends he had made at Konigsberg, was 
 among his most favoured and also among the most industrious 
 of his correspondents, sending all the literary news of that centre 
 together with various gossip, and he was always inclined to con- 
 sult Herder's opinion on any prominent matter, whether relating 
 to German or English hterature. For Scheffner, too, was a student 
 of Hume and Shaftesbury, and other English authors. Herder's 
 letters to Scheffner abound in original thought and in the most 
 exquisite morsels of criticism. Here, for example, is his estimate 
 of Winckelmann and Lessing : — 
 
 " Lessing and Winckelmann to compare : the one is more produc- | 
 tive and useful ; the other is more laborious and fluent ; the one thinks 
 more, and knows how to show us not only what he has thought, but 
 how he thought it ; he conducts us into the workshop of his spirit, and 
 teaches us to think ; the other draws most of his thought from anti- 
 quity, and where he does think, shows us only the product of his 
 spirit-work, not his process of thinking ; the one is a learned reasoner 
 of genius and taste, the other is a tasteful antiquarian, of limited but 
 
 * J. G. von Herder's Lebensbild. Heraus^egeben von Dr Emile Gottfried von Herder 
 Berlin, 1846. 
 
264 HERDER. 
 
 strong judgment. Lessing sits upon Winckelmann's shoulder, and 
 through.this elevation sees further and wider: among the ^stheticians 
 by profession stands Winckelmann, while Lessing stands among the 
 
 professional Litterateurs Winckelmann's fine constructive 
 
 genius enables him to find completeness among ruins, and amongst 
 Irujns, as in Athens, he most loves to wander."* 
 
 Elsewhere he says of Lessing — in a tribute published on his 
 death : — 
 
 " He was convinced that every artist and poet could only attain to 
 excellence through clear ideas of his art, and this way to the attain- 
 ment of clear ideas upon the art of the stage-play he has himself 
 admirably illustrated in his ' Dramaturgie.' .... Where thou 
 did'st err," so he winds up in eloquent apostrophe, " Where thy sharp 
 sense, and thy ever active, most aspiring spirit failed to find what it 
 sought, there thou showedst thyself more and more the man — thou 
 strivedst ever to attain a completer manhood, to be a progressive and 
 expanding spirit in very truth."f 
 
 " No power of nature," says Herder, " is without organ, but 
 the organ is not the power itself; it is only the medium by which 
 it works." While he was as careful as " Professor Huxley is to 
 allow all that can possibly be claimed to the action of physical and 
 merely material influences, he never forgets to refer back to the 
 original principles of human nature, and there he feels he can 
 fortify himself against every possible assault of materialism." 
 Within your own sphere he says, " you speak with conviction 
 and you convince ; beyond that your word is without authority, 
 because you ignore the instinct, the- experience. There is here a 
 gulf fixed between you and me, and there it must remain." 
 Here he recognises fully all that the materialists would 
 ^aim : — 
 
 "Great Mother Nature, to what trifles hast thou knit the fate of our 
 race. With the altered form of a human head and brain, with a little 
 change in the build of the organisation and nerves, which the climate, 
 the inheritance, and the habits produce, the fate of the world also 
 changes the sum of that which everywhere on earth humanity does 
 and suffers.' .... ' The body of man is a fragile, ever-renewed 
 shell, which at last can no longer be renewed ; but his spirit works on 
 earth only with and through the body. We think ourselves self- 
 existing ; and yet are dependent on everything in nature, involved in 
 a chain of wonderful things, we must also follow the laws of their 
 succession, which are no other than beginning, being, and vanishing. 
 A loose thread binds the race of men, which breaks every moment, 
 
 * Herder's Lebensbild, ii. p. igi t Zerstreute Blatter, ii. p. 437. 
 
HERDER. 26s 
 
 to be again renewed. The grey old man with his wisdom is laid in \ 
 the earth that his successor may begin even as a child the work of his 1 
 predecessors, or like a fool may destroy it ; leaving again to one who \ 
 comes after him the same seeming-useless labour, with which, too, 
 his hfe is consumed. Thus days are bound to each other, and thus 
 also races and kingdoms. The sun sets that night may come, and 
 that men may rejoice over a new dawn.' " 
 
 But he must find the solution by an appeal to the spiritual :— ^^~ 
 " The power that thinks and works within me is, after its own'^n 
 nature, a power as eternal as that which holds together suns and 
 stars ; its organ may work itself out, the sphere of its operations may 
 change, as the earth wears away, and stars change their positions ; 
 but the laws through which it is there and assumes other phases, 
 change not. Its nature is eternal as the mind of God, and the sup- 
 ports of my being (not of my corporeal manifestation) are as fast as 
 the pillars of the universe." - — ' 
 
 His idea of development, which is held to mark all spheres, 
 even the spiritual, serves him here also : — 
 
 " The foundations of religion have ebb and flow ; from idolatry to 1 
 Deism, from Deism to idolatry — ignorant, narrow, and merely sen- I 
 sible ; and hence we appeal continually from the externals to the un- 
 known sources : in this dark glimmer lies fear and hope. The ima- 
 gination makes the abstract representation special, individual ; cloth- 
 ing it in forms, it becomes sensible, intelligible : man's higher being 
 is set in motion by love and hate, and through gifts and intercessions, 
 offerings and prayers, it rises to rule over the lower. The heartfelt 
 devotion of men swells this idea higher and higher, till it rises from 
 finite to infinite. But when this idea passes down among the com- 
 mon mass, it does not remain long pure ; it becomes once more 
 vulgar and mean. Half-gods, something between one thing and 
 another, idols, prayers and praises, all become more and more vulgar- 
 ised ; hence it is that the Jews and Mahommedans condemned the 
 painter's art ; weak mankind will have sensible images, and at a cer- 
 tain stage fear is a powerful medium for absorbing the lower in the 
 higher." * 
 
 Herder's peculiar method of thus uniting the claims of head 
 and heart, finds apt expression in one of his axiomatic utterances : 
 " A man," he writes, " who would be all head is as great a mon- 
 ster as he would be all heart : the wholly sound man is both." 
 
 Herder himself seems to have fully realised the disadvantage 
 in point of popular force which his detached and, in one respect, 
 too inclusive and ambitious style of writing laid him under. It 
 
 * Lebensbild, v. pp. 371-z. 
 
266 HERDER. 
 
 is very characteristic of him that he should, in the dialogue 
 between Theano and Demodor, introducing " The Scattered 
 Leaves," make the former speak of him as like the Sibyl, and 
 lead the latter to say that in these leaves, too, no more may be 
 found than in the Sibylline Leaves. There was earnest under 
 the playful manner of the statement. He is, it must be admitted, 
 more a writer for thinkers than for the mass ; for those who 
 seek for and can receive stimulus, and will be willing to under- 
 take a search for themselves when the way has been pointed out. 
 The " Adrastea,'' the last work to which he set his hand — a 
 periodical intended to excite thought, and to suggest and stimu- 
 late inquiry, had reached its tenth part when he died. It is a 
 mine of maxims — a set of pearls loosely strung together — indeed 
 hardly strung at all ; but, nevertheless, each showing that it only 
 needs to be lifted into its proper position to be an enduring 
 monument of genius. In the "Adrastea" he touches nearly 
 every imaginable topic, and draws from it something to enlighten 
 his leading ideas as we have tried to exhibit them. He studies 
 in detail the century of Louis XIV. and of Queen Anne, the 
 religious, the political, and literary condition of France and of 
 England at this memorable epoch : he is arrested by the writings 
 of Fdndlon, of Bayle, of Locke, Shaftesbury, of Addison, of Swift, 
 and of Pope. Charles the XII. and Peter the Great are not 
 forgotten ; the works of science, the discoveries of Newton, of 
 Kepler, of Lambert, of Herschell have their place. So full are 
 these volumes, both of thoughts and facts, ranging from the reve- 
 ries of Swedenborg to the history of the Freemasons, that Herder, 
 had he been spared, would undoubtedly have made the work 
 encyclopaedic. We may not unhtly end our sketch by citing the 
 significant last words he wrote for it — and certainly, as his wife 
 has said, they were full of presentiment : — 
 
 " In new regions now advancing 
 
 My eyes inspired there see — bright glancing — 
 
 Reflections of high Godhead, in this world 
 
 And in that heaven, like tent unfurled ; 
 
 My spirit weak in dust bends down 
 
 The wonder grasps not — silence is its crown." * 
 
 * In neue Gegenden entriickt, 
 
 Schaut mein begeistert Aug' umher — erblickt 
 Den Abglanz hShrer Gottheit, ihre Welt, 
 Und deise Himmel, ihr Gezelt 1 
 Mein schwacher Geist, in Staub gebeugt, 
 f asst ihre Wunder nicht--und Schweigt. 
 
GOETHE. 
 
Goethe's Leben und Geistesentwickelung ist eine harmonisch fortschreitende 
 Universalbildung. — Goedeke. 
 
 Ledebrinna fuhr fort. . . . 
 
 " Nun schrieb Goethe den abscheulichen Werter, in welchem er den Sebst- 
 mord, die verruchte Stelle, in welcher er die Polygamic vertheidigte. Wie 
 liistern sein Meister ist, wie unmoralisch seine Walverwandschaften, braucht 
 nur erwahest zu werden. Eine Musterkarte von Unsinn ist sein Faust, sein 
 Tasso die Anempfehlung der Weichlichkeit, das elende Schicksal eines Ver- 
 zartelten, seine Iphigenia schwatzt und schwatzt, und seine Kleinen Opera 
 und noch Kleineren Gedichte sind weniger als nichts. In den letzeren beson- 
 ders hat er unsrer deutsche Sprache den Hals umgedrecht Geistreich, Genial, 
 Genie, lauter Ausdriicke des Unsinns." — Tieck — Die Vogelscheuche, 
 
 Sein "Goetz von Berlichingen " und sein "Werther" vparen mit Begeister- 
 ung aufgenommen werden, aber die Werke der gewbhnlicher StUmper waren 
 es nicht minder, und man gab Goethen nur eine kleine Nische in dem Tem- 
 pel der Literatur. — Heine^s Romantische Schule^ p. 42. 
 
 There must be in Goethe's language great beauty of style, for in other 
 respects the ' ' Elective Aifinities " is, in the first place, more than singular 
 with respect to morality, and then even the ideas that have nothing to do 
 with morality are clumsy, or false, or puerile. I mean it when I say that 
 probably I understand nothing of it. A man who did not shed a tear on 
 hearing a sermon at which all the rest of the congregation were weeping 
 bitterly, said coldly : "I don't belong to this parish ;" and perhaps he was 
 right. . . . I am then very insensible to the "Elective Affinities," but I 
 am not so stupid as not to beUeve in Goethe's talent. — X. Doudan. 
 
Goethe's life is properly the record of a struggle between healthy 
 original impulse or tendency and the ideal of an artificial or artis- 
 tic perfection. In many things from his precocious childhood to 
 his ripe old age we can see it. It is evident, for example, in the 
 facile and half-helpless way in which he fell in love, and his studied 
 and careful retreats from the many objects of his passion, after he 
 had fuUy appropriated, as he believed, certain experiences. We 
 see it in his honest but significant confession of utter lack of in- 
 terest in the great Italian pictures on that famous early visit to 
 Dresden, and his preference for the naively-frank naturalness of 
 the works of the Dutch masters, and yet his devotion soon after 
 to classical form under Oeser's influence. We see it in the 
 contest of the Gothic or romantic spirit with the classical or 
 pagan effort after clear and defined outlines ; and instead of the 
 two ever being brought into complete harmony, the opposition be- 
 came only more visible toward the close of his long life. We see 
 it in the constant unrest — the involuntary and confessed submis- 
 sion to mysterious or what may be termed occult influences which 
 mainly it was that rendered constant change of circumstance, 
 and even of personal relationships, necessary to him in view of 
 his genius, alongside of very strong convictions of the possibility 
 of pure self-development. He needs, in a word, consciously to 
 experiment with himself even in his attempts to see himself, as it 
 were, through the lives of others ; and to surround himself with 
 an artificial atmosphere derived from this tendency. His great 
 fascination personally was largely due to this, and in some degree 
 also the fascination, rather than healthy attraction of many of his 
 writings, may be traced to it, Goethe was greater in artistic 
 faculty or power of appropriation and manipulation than in cha- 
 racter. His will, on the moral side, remained incompletely de- 
 veloped, and would have had a fatal effect on the balance of his 
 
270 GOETHE. 
 
 character had not his moral sensibilities been, also on one side, 
 defective. The care with which, like his mother, he fenced him- 
 self from what he called disagreeable impressions, or rather from 
 the call to any exercise of healthy vicarious sympathy, indicates 
 some lack of normal emotion ; and the possibility of so- with- 
 drawing himself can scarcely be cited as illustrating happily the 
 axiom of his contemporary, " The man wins what the poet loses."* 
 Weak veins, it must be confessed, pervade the marble in this 
 statuesque personality, — veins and stains which the most dexterous 
 manipulation will not remove. His careful self-study and his 
 guarded self-confession only the more prominently reveal them to 
 the skilled eye. 
 
 He had great command over certain elements of his personality, 
 but his will was subject to perpetual flux — he ■ was unequal 
 thoroughly to discharge some of those vagrant impressions to 
 which men of far inferior genius would not for a moment have 
 yielded. It is true he draws some tribute from them by effort of 
 will, but the trace of his submission and his efforts are too visible 
 in his work ; and that is our excuse for speaking of them here. 
 AVe presume it was this phenomenon which M. Ximenes Doudan 
 was intent to impress on the mind of a friend, when he wrote this 
 in recommending Goethe's " Italian Journey " : — 
 
 " Do you not find Goethe's imagination singular .? It is bright and 
 cold at the same time ; it is like the sun in winter. In his character 
 there is very little individuality, and a good deal of personality ."t 
 
 Probably Haym did not mean anything very different when he 
 said " the world of Goethe is all aestheticised." J 
 
 Acknowledging at once all the benefits that Goethe conferred 
 by quickening the as yet imperfectly developed feeling for literary 
 form in the German people, and awakening in them the profound 
 sense of certain elements of life as necessary factors in a great 
 art, it yet remains to be urged that his influence on personal and 
 social life was not always elevating ; for, as he himself has said, 
 " character alone is efficient there as a final force." The state- 
 ment he over and over again made that his writings could only 
 be judged by the select (although qualified by the admission that 
 he did not look for a wide popularity), is prejudicial to his claim 
 
 * "Der Mensch gewinnt was der Poet verliert.' 
 t Lettres et Melanges. Tome iii. 
 J Romantische Schule, p. 84. 
 
GOETHE. 271 
 
 to have seized and exhibited that which is permanent and essen- 
 tial to German life, justifying so far the remark of M. Scherer 
 that Goethe in " Werther " merely caught up a phase of a passing 
 phenomenon, and artfully presented it. With some deductions, 
 the same thing has to be said of works on which he himself would 
 have more seriously based his claims as an artist. Goethe once 
 said to Eckermann : — "You must do some degree of violence to 
 yourself to get out of the idea ;'' but he never really did that 
 amount of violence to himself, and the idea at last overcame him, 
 and always blurred the outlines as he worked on any great 
 scheme. He was so intimately concerned with himself that he 
 could not once for all hazard the sharp and painful 
 
 " Turning outward, with a sudden wrench 
 Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing 
 He felt the inmost," — 
 
 of which Mrs Barrett Browning sang in " Aurora Leigh.'' " The 
 sorrowful great gift of a twofold life " was not by him realised at 
 its fullest. Even though we may allow that his calm was in some 
 degree affected ; yet assuredly his desire to escape wholly from 
 the presence of all that was painful and suggestive of those deeper 
 emotions and mysteries by which men are most radically related 
 to each other in supreme moments, was not effected ; and inas- 
 much as it was not so, we see how broadly the natural tendency 
 was opposed to the artistic desire ; and how a certain coldness 
 and reserve characteristic of his life and conduct is inevitably 
 communicated to his Art, as it could not fail to be. And yet 
 the concentration that the purely aesthetic mind might be pre- 
 sumed to attain was not reached by him. In a word, he sought 
 unnaturally to widen the field of experience on one side, and as 
 unnaturally to narrow it on another ; but Life is after all greater 
 than Art, and avenges itself sevenfold on the artist who for Art's 
 sake would subdue it to his own ends only. 
 
 Our fuller reasons for these somewhat bold assertions will be 
 found in the sequel, and we would fain hope may not be regarded 
 as being wholly without ground. We shall first glance at the 
 leading facts in Goethe's long and laborious life — because in few 
 cases have the works been more a reflection of th^ life — and then 
 throw what light we can upon them by a reference to the spirit 
 that actuated him, and the results that he attained. 
 
272 GOETHE. 
 
 II. 
 
 Goethe's horoscope was happily cast The stars, as he himself 
 most characteristically takes time to tell, not without a pleased 
 and half serious smile, were propitious.* He was born at Frank- 
 fort-on-the-Main on the 28th August 1749. His more en- 
 thusiastic biographers have spent a deal of time in demonstrating 
 the fitness of the place for a great poet's birth. In its mingled 
 strain of interests, they say, his destiny was fitly prefigured. For 
 it is a busy town, holding forth, as it were, a ready hand to 
 humanity at all points, through its commerce, whilst as the 
 head of the old German empire, it proudly preserves its records 
 of a storied past, its works of art, its buildings and ancient 
 monuments. And, as if to draw the symbolism of the circum- 
 stances to a clear and fitting centre-point, over the door of the 
 very house in which he was born was a lyre and a star — " an- 
 nouncing, as every interpreter will certify, that a poet was to 
 make the house illustrious."! 
 
 Goethe was favoured, too, in his parents. His mother — still 
 little more than a girl — was a bright, sprightly person, highly 
 gifted with mother-wit, refined by considerable reading, always 
 apt at turning off a disagreeable matter — shrinking from all pain- 
 ful experience — bolting the devil, as she said once, " without 
 looking at him." She had, it is clear, something of a tendency 
 to self-indulgence, and to regard other people as framed by God 
 for her service and help. She found perhaps the needed comple- 
 ment in her husband the Hofrath or councillor — several years her 
 senior — who was apparently a methodic, orderly, intelligent, 
 somewhat vain and pragmatic man, going through the world with 
 a full sense of his honour and responsibilities, and taking care 
 that those about him should know and feel it. Not a little in the 
 character of Goethe took its colour from those apparently con- 
 flicting traits in his parents. 
 
 His boyhood was unique. Along with the most careful atten- 
 tion to certain matters, he was allowed to develop himself in his 
 own way in some very important respects. He was kept at home 
 and taught unfter the eyes of his parents. It has been suggested 
 
 * See opening passage of the " Dichtung und Wahrheit." 
 * t Lewes, p. 24. 
 
GOETHE. 273 
 
 that the brushing against other boys which is found at a pubHc 
 school, might have fostered in him somewhat more of respect for 
 the people and for the ideas of equality which assumed such im- 
 portance in his time. Mr Lewes is careful to rebut this supposi- 
 tion ; and we shall not follow him, but simply remark that the 
 youthful style of life was certainly not unfavourable to natural 
 self-development. The boy was very precocious. He found little 
 difficulty in doing the tasks given him by his father ; and already 
 was keen to improve himself in ways unconfessed, and even to 
 practise a litde innocent mystery. He learned Italian by listen- 
 ing to his sister Cornelia when his father was giving her lessons. 
 "■^ He pretended to be occupied with his own lesson, and caught up 
 all that was said."* And his fearless curiosities, which would 
 secretly seek gratification in the most unchildlike ways soon be- 
 came a characteristic feature. Any child might, like him, have 
 been guilty of pulling off the leaves of flowers one by one vaguely 
 to gratify its general destructive and inquiring tendency ; but he 
 did it with scientific system and definite purpose, to see how the 
 leaves were joined to the calyx, and how different flowers dif- 
 fered in this respect; and very, very few children would have 
 repeatedly plucked the feathers out of birds to ascertain exactly 
 how they were inserted into the wings. And somehow when 
 one has thoroughly realised this element in the childish character, 
 it is not so difficult to see how the suspicion might arise that 
 Goethe when a young man poisoned the pet dog of a youthful 
 neighbour, solely because its bark annoyed him. 
 
 While the father, after a system of his own, gave the boy his 
 verbs and particles, the mother encouraged him to develop his 
 gifts in other ways, and would seem to have done little to restrain 
 a vein of precocious vanity which indicated somewhat of an un- 
 healthy egotism in a child. And it was already complicated with 
 the most persistent religious questionings about matters to which, 
 in most cases, the adolescent is only gradually awakened by ex- 
 perience. And no sooner has he conquered a certain clear space 
 for the mind to move in, than he immediately proceeds to sur- 
 round it with an array of symbols which he contemplates without 
 awe, but with the composed sense of an artist; the most sacred 
 ideas being thus draped and recommended to his exigent intel- 
 lectual perception. Mr Lewes records this anecdote from the 
 
 * Lewes's Life, p. 16. 
 
 s 
 
274 GOETHE. 
 
 famous Bettina Brentano, or von Arnim, the " Child " to whom 
 Goethe, in his old age, wrote these now famous letters. 
 
 One day his mother seeing him from her window cross the 
 street with his comrades, was amused with the gravity of his car- 
 riage, and asked, laughingly, if he meant thereby to distinguish 
 himself from his companions. The little fellow replied, " I begin 
 with this. Later on in life I shall distinguish myself differently." 
 On another occasion we read that he plagued his mother with 
 questions as to whether the stars would perform all they had pro- 
 mised at his birth. " Why,'' said she, " must you have the assis- 
 tance of the stars, when other people get on very well without." 
 " I am not to be satisfied with what does for other people," he 
 answered.* 
 
 The theological discussions he constantly heard — for these 
 were days of disruption within the Lutheran Church, giving rise to 
 Congregationers, Pietists, Herrnhuters, Separatists, and Quietists 
 — quickened in him the intellectual sense of the religious 
 sentiment which was stirred into something of preternatural acti- 
 vity by the news of the great Lisbon earthquake, whilst he was 
 yet in his sixth year. He questioned the justice of God in the 
 event, and brooded over it, till at length he found a reconcilia- 
 tion satisfactory to himself, and, in some sense, flattering to his 
 own destiny. " It may be, after all, a much simpler matter than 
 the clergyman thinks," he replied to his father when asked his 
 opinion about a sermon on the subject he had heard ; " God 
 knows very well that an immortal soul can receive no injury from 
 a mortal accident." Having once attained to ideas of the Crea- 
 tor as a personality that can be approached and propitiated, he 
 proceeds in his own way to make his offering. 
 
 " Unable to ascribe a form to the Deity, he resolved to seek 
 Him in His works, and in the good old Bible fashion, to build 
 an altar to him. For this purpose he selected some types, such 
 as ores and other natural productions, and arranged them in sym- 
 bolical order on the elevations of a music-stand; on the apex was 
 to be a flame typical of the soul's aspiration, and for this a pas- 
 tile did duty. Sunrise was awaited with impatience. The glitter- 
 ing of the house tops gave the signal; he applied a burning 
 glass to the pastile, and thus was the worship consummated by a 
 priest of seven years' old, alone in his bedroom." 
 
 * Life of Goethe, p. 23. Edition of 1864. 
 
GOETHE. 275 
 
 A certain English critic of repute, outstripping Gervinus, very 
 irreverently suggests that a vi^hipping might have done Goethe 
 good at this time ; but we do not say that we can altogether 
 bring ourselves to agree with him. The seven years' war which 
 now broke out brought stir and company to Frankfort, with the 
 advantage to Goethe (if with great disadvantage to the country at 
 large), that, as Mr Lewes says,* " it relaxed the severity of pater- 
 nal book education, and began another kind of tuition — that of 
 life and manners," and an introduction to the French theatre. 
 
 His grandfather, Textor, presented the boy with a free pass to 
 the theatre, where he went almost daily, somewhat to his father's 
 chagrin. There he made some new acquaintances, and had 
 suggested to him a course of study, which, through his great 
 quickness, speedily enabled him to understand the plays. With 
 that irrepressible curiosity which marked him from first to last, he 
 soon obtained a peep behind the scenes. At home the atmos- 
 phere, too, had been somewhat changed through the addition of 
 a French element. The king's lieutenant. Count Thorane, had 
 been quartered in the Goethe House. He was a refined and 
 well-read gentleman, who aimed at causing as little trouble as 
 possible, and thus conciliated the whole family. To the bright 
 boy, Wolfgang, he was peculiarly attracted, and studiously en- 
 couraged him in his painting and writing, so that Goethe was 
 drawn to the French literature by the kindliest interests. He 
 read plays, he even wrote one, and in consequence of the criti- 
 cisms he met with from his French friends to whom he submitted 
 the piece, he set about a thorough study of the French theory of 
 dramatic composition, specially studying Corneille on the unities. 
 Though he could not fully comprehend it all, he strove to embody 
 the theory, so far as he understood it, in practice. This was an 
 important period in Goethe's life. 
 
 When, after an interval of excitement, and much observation 
 and awakening to the ways of life, Goethe returned to his more 
 formal studies, we are told that he made giant strides. He 
 studied half-a-dozen languages, Hebrew among them, and com- 
 posed stories whose characters, scattered over the world, talked 
 in different tongues, to give him an opportunity for practice in 
 the colloquial style; and he essayed Biblical poems. Ooster- 
 zee writes of this time : — " He obtained clear ideas of the Holy 
 
 * Life of Goethe, p. 25. 
 
276 GOETHE. 
 
 Land, and gained sympathy with the patriarchal time. The 
 history of Joseph enticed him even to a poetical attempt ; and 
 when scarcely fourteen years old, he prepared with an almost 
 unpractised hand, a weighty collection of spiritual odes and 
 songs.* 
 
 In his fifteenth year, he felt the attractions of women. Gretchen, 
 the sister of one of a somewhat disreputable set, amongst whom he 
 had fallen, rather afHicted him by her declaration in a court of 
 law, where they found themselves, that she had treated Goethe as 
 a child, and had entertained for him merely a sisterly affection ; 
 and his heart had" already been affected in a very different way 
 by contact with a contrasted type — the Fraulein von Klettenberg, 
 who furnished the suggestion for " The Beautiful Soul," whose 
 confessions relieve the " economic worldliness and artistic athe- 
 ism," as NovaHs called it, of " Wilhelm Meister." 
 
 III. 
 
 Goethe entered on a new period with his advent in Leipzig to 
 study jurisprudence. He avowed to Hofrath Bohme his deci- 
 sion to set the parental wish aside, and to study Belles Lettres 
 instead. But Herr Bohme prudently dissuaded him from this 
 course, and the youth enthusiastically set himself to master phil- 
 osophy and law. In the course of a month we find him writing 
 to Frau von Klettenberg : — " The jurisprudence begins to please 
 me very much. It is indeed with all such things very much as 
 it is with the Merseburg beer — the first time it makes one shudder, 
 but when one has drunk it for a week one can no more let it 
 
 alone The chemistry, however, is still always my homely 
 
 love." t 
 
 But it illustrates what Herder afterwards called the " sparrow- 
 like" element in his character, that he could not long settle to 
 any study or object. Before long, as we learn from his own 
 records, his experience was almost identical with that he has 
 pourtrayed in Faust, in the opening of his great drama. And 
 soon, in spite of his home-made suit, he finds himself in attrac- 
 tive society, and learns what the Becoming is, by " enquiring of 
 noble-minded woman." Frau Bohme, it seems, was very kind to 
 him in this respect, and, on the authority of a friend, Horn, 
 
 * Goethe's Stellun? zum Christenthum, p. lo. \ Leyser, p. 12, 
 
GOETHE. 11-j 
 
 he soon came forth as a dandy. " All his thought and effort 
 is only to please himself and his lady-love. In every circle he 
 makes himself more ridiculous than agreeable. Merely because 
 the lady admires it, he has put on tricks and gestures that 
 one cannot possibly refrain from laughing at. He has adopted 
 a walk which is quite insufferable. If you only saw it ! 
 
 " ' II marche k pas compt^s, 
 Comma un Recteur suivi des quartre Facult^s.' 
 
 His society is every day more intolerable to me, and he, too, tries 
 to avoid me whenever he can. I am too plain a man for him to 
 walk across the street with me." And though the writer by-and-by 
 retracts in a certain way something of what he has here said, there 
 can be no doubt that this — only in an extreme form — expresses 
 what many others felt towards Goethe at this time, and a little of 
 which a few felt, more or less vaguely, long, long afterwards. 
 
 Frau Bohme, it is clear, did not exercise over him much 
 restraint in certain directions, for this Kathchen Schonkopf, to 
 please whom he made himself ridiculous in the eyes of some of 
 his friends, was of very inferior position, — her father, in fact, was 
 the keeper of a table d'hote, — and towards her Goethe acted in 
 such a way that one of his most enthusiastic biographers is fain 
 to admit that as he did by Kathchen, so another coquette, in later 
 years, did by him. 
 
 When, by-and-by, Frau Bohme died, he fell into rather rough, 
 wild ways of life, of which the worst was certainly not a succes- 
 sion of love affairs, about which he waxed surprisingly communi- 
 cative to his young friendly correspondents. We find him, for 
 instance, writing thus to his friend Trapp, in French of no im- 
 maculate excellency : — 
 
 " O vous savez trop que Worms me tient au coeur. Vous con- 
 noissez ma passion pour la belle Charitas, que vous I'avez crue le plus 
 fort motif da m'amener k Vous acrira an ma donnant par Stern le 
 doux espoir, da ma faire entendre des nouvellas, qui touchent da plus 
 pres votra charmante niece." * 
 
 * Charitas, or, as she was properly called, Charlotte, Meiner, was the daughter of a 
 rich merchant, George Fredk. Meiner. She was very heautiful, and of a cheerful spirit. 
 She herself wrote lyrical pieces in graceful French. As a young girl she had come to 
 Frankfort, to the house of some friends of the Goethes, the family of the Rath IMoritz, on 
 a long visit. Here she formed a friendship with Cornelia Goethe, and Goethe of course 
 also came to know her. He saw her in Leipzig, and visited her later in Worms, where she 
 married one Schuler, a merchant, in 1773, and died in 1799 in child-bed.— See Otto Jahn's 
 " Goethe's Jugend in Leipzig." 
 
278 GOETHE. 
 
 A very important thing in its bearing on Goethe's whole after- 
 development was his contact with Oeser, the friend of Winckel- 
 mann, who was then teacher of drawing at the gymnasium. 
 Through Oeser, he was led to discern where his real powers lay. 
 He had till this time been divided in his interests — divided 
 between the claims of poetry and the pictorial arts. Oeser told 
 him plainly but kindly that in the last he could never be anything 
 else than a dilettante ; but that in the other, he had the capacity 
 to raise to a high rank. In this, Oeser's keen discernment is 
 clearly betokened, and to the end Goethe felt this, and cherished 
 towards him not only gratitude but admiration. 
 
 " Oeser's invention has given me a new occasion to be thankful 
 that I have had him for a teacher. He presses in on our souls, and 
 one cannot but strive every way to be useful to him. His instruction 
 will have results in my whole after-life. He taught me that the ideal 
 of beauty is simplicity and repose, and hence no youth can be a 
 master.'' 
 
 Otto Jahn in his essay, " Goethe's Jugend in Leipzig,"* gives a 
 full and somewhat amusing account of the elder Goethe's conduct 
 towards his son at this time, urging him over and over again to 
 remain true to the jurisprudence study, while yet he could not 
 conceal his pride in the drawings and poetical productions which 
 the son sent home, and which indeed he was fain to have had pub- 
 lished, somewhat to the son's surprise and reluctance to print. 
 Herr Jahn also gives so full an account of the circles in which he 
 moved (including a racy picture of Oeser's household, and a 
 touching sketch of his daughter Frederica Elizabeth), that even 
 after Mr Lewes, it is full of interest and piquancy. 
 
 Mr Lewes himself admits that Goethe's rough wild ways had 
 something to do with the violent hoemorrhage, the beginning of 
 that illness which compelled him to leave Leipzig for home. 
 
 On the back of one illness followed another, and during all 
 his time of weakness and pain, his mother and sister assiduously 
 attended him, and he was often visited by the Fraulein von Ketten- 
 berg, who did not fail to take full advantage of his relaxed con- 
 
 * " Oeser's Erfindungen haben mir eine neue Gelegenheit gegeben, mich zu seegnen, dass 
 ich ihn zum Lehrer gehabt habe. Er drang in unsere Seelen und man musste Keine haben 
 non ihn nicht zu nutzen. Sein Unterricht wird auf mein ganzes Leben Folge haben. Er 
 lehrte mich, das Ideal der Schonheit sei Einfalt und Stille." 
 
 t Biographische Aufsatze. Herr Jahn says: — Ruhmt er ihre Einsicht, ihren Witz, ihre 
 Munterkeit, und vor all ihre schone Stimme, und denkt mit Sehnsucht an die " aufgeweckten 
 und klugen " Gesprache zuriick, die sie mit ihm in dem Garten und in der Loge gefiihrt. 
 
GOETHE. 279 
 
 dition of body and mind to turn his thoughts to spiritual matters. 
 The mother and sister, it is clear, were then so far in sympathy 
 with her. It somewhat surprises us to find Goethe writing about 
 this time in the following very orthodox vein to his friend Lamp- 
 recht, but it only proves how far he had yielded himself to the 
 Fraulein's influence : — 
 
 " As I was I am still, only that I stand somewhat better with God 
 and his dear Son, Jesus Christ ; whence it follows that I am some- 
 what wiser, and have found out what mean the words, ' the fear of 
 the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' Grant that the Hosannah will 
 be sung only to him that overcometh, yet still this is a blessing ; the 
 king must enter before he can ascend his throne." 
 
 It was here, however, as in other things. Religious impressions 
 were no more lasting than were love affairs ; and soon after, when 
 he goes to Strasburg, he has to tell the Fraulein that he cannot 
 any longer tolerate her co-religionists. 
 
 " They are so heartily tedious when they begin that my vivacity can- 
 not hold out. People of merely moderate intelligence, who thought, 
 with their first religious feehng, their first rational thought, and are 
 now of opinion that this is everything, because they know nothing 
 besides, are the very last I can find it advisable to spend my time 
 With." 
 
 And this, though only a little time before, we find him writing 
 to his " much honoured pious friend," " I have to-day gone with 
 the Christian Congregation to celebrate our Lord's passion and 
 death," and at the same time thinking of the approach of his next 
 birthday, he takes opportunity to solicit their intercession with 
 the words : " Pray with me, and for me, that all may be with me 
 as it should be.'' 
 
 Before he went to Strasburg, however, he had to "live down 
 the grief of a disappointment." Just when he was recovering 
 from his illness came the news that Kathchen was engaged to 
 another ; and his record of his feelings on the receipt of the 
 news is very characteristic. " A thousand things remind me of 
 you," he writes to her, " I see your image a thousand times, but 
 as faintly and often with as little emotion as if I thought of some 
 one quite strange to me." But then he dreams of her, and tells 
 her so, and before long winds up, somewhat doubtfully, an epistle 
 thus : — " For Kathchen Schonkopf, now I know well that a letter 
 from you is as dear to me as from any hand in the world. You 
 
28o GOETHE. 
 
 were always a sweet girl, and will be a sweet woman. And I, I 
 shall remain Goethe ; you know what that means. If I name my 
 name, I name my whole self, and you know that so long as I 
 have known you, I have lived only as part of you.'' And he 
 craves that he shall be admitted to the friendship of her husband 
 that they may still have friends in common ! 
 
 " So fall away," writes Mr Lewes eloquently, " the young blossoms of 
 love which have not the force to ripen into fruit. ' The most loveable 
 heart,' writes Goethe to Kathchen, with a certain bit of humour, ' is 
 that which loves the most readily ; but that which easily loves, also 
 easily forgets.' It was his case; he could not be happy without some 
 one to love, but his mobile nature (?) soon dried the tears wrung from 
 him by her loss." 
 
 It was in April 1770 that he arrived in Strasburg. To Goethe 
 it was truly, as the old song says, — 
 
 " O Strasburg, O Strasburg, 
 Du wunderschone Stadt." 
 
 There, at first, he devoted himself to jurisprudence with some 
 zest, but speedily tired of it, in spite of the excellent repetent (or 
 ^^ coach") found for him by the dapper Dr Salzmann, who, as 
 president of a club that had Goethe and Jung Stilling for mem- 
 bers, and Herder as a visitor, and as renewing the good instruc- 
 tions of Frau Bohme, as Goethe himself put it, may well have 
 some title to remembrance in German Literary history.* Goethe 
 then turned to Bayle and Bruno, read and annotated them, and 
 made excursions from these central themes on many sides, pre- 
 paring himself as decisively as if he had foreseen the destina- 
 tion, for Herder and his teachings, which were soon to detach 
 •1iim wholly from the French influence, either as regards poetry 
 or philosophy, and send him on quite another beat. But " he 
 could not be happy without some one to love" ; and though there 
 were certain very " romantic " passages between him and two 
 sisters, the daughters of a French dancing master,! from whom 
 he got lessons, the most decisive influence upon him at Stras- 
 
 * Herr Leyser, in his sketch (pp. 22-3), has given many details about Dr Salzmann ; 
 and he has published Goethe's letters to Dr Salzmann, as well as those to Herder and 
 others at this time, as an Appendix to his *' Goethe zu Strasburg." 
 
 t Goethe's heart inclined towards Emilia, who loved another ; while that of Lucinda, 
 the elder sister, was bestowed on him. EmUia was afraid to trust herself too much ivith 
 hhn, but Lucinda was always at hand, ready to waltz with him, to protract his lesson, 
 or to show him little attentions. " So," says Mr Lewes, " it is clear that here was a 
 situation, and dangerous moments." 
 
GOETHE. 281 
 
 burg was exercised by the simple Sesenheim maiden — the daugh- 
 ter of a Lutheran pastor — who has become immortal as the 
 " Frederika" of Goethe's Autobiography. He is careful to tell 
 us that on the recommendation of another, to whom we shall at 
 once refer, he had just read the " Vicar of Wakefield" before going 
 with his fellow-boarder, Weyland, to Sesenheim ; and there he 
 saw the very scenes and characters of it realised before his eyes. 
 Goethe's nature was genuinely touched by Frederika, moving 
 there so like the necessary heroine of a true idyll. The very 
 first night, as Mr Lewes, quoting from the Autobiography, is 
 careful to tell us, he seriously plied Weyland with questions as 
 to the state of her heart — whether she had ever been in love, or 
 was engaged, and so forth. Biographers are divided about the 
 exact length of his stay, but the essential fact is, that he was 
 there long enough to fall in love, and to draw forth Frederika's 
 love, and " to captivate the whole family by his gaiety, obliging- 
 ness, and poetic gifts." He returned to Strasburg, if not a for- 
 mally betrothed, yet an accepted lover. He wrote many delicious 
 little poems in celebration of this love. The delightful distrac- 
 tion it brought to him clearly had one disadvantage, however, in 
 making his thesis all the harder for him to write. But he got 
 through it, and returned home as " Dr Goethe," having bidden 
 Frederika good-bye with tears ; and, if we are to credit his later 
 accounts, with some peculiar superstitious feelings and omens, 
 which in the most impressive manner, as he tells, repeated them- 
 selves years after.* 
 
 An unfortunate visit which Frederika, with her mother and 
 sister, paid to Frankfort, did much to disenchant Goethe. The 
 girls, in their country dresses, looked out of keeping with the 
 mirrors, the pictures, the bric-a-brac and porcelain of the fine 
 houses of Frankfort, and, soon after they returned home, to 
 Goethe's relief, he announced his change of mind and purpose 
 in reference to Frederika in the most fitting terms. Jean Paul 
 naively said in the " Campaner Thai :" " The hearts of young 
 girls, like new water-butts, at first let everything drop through, 
 imtil at length the vessels swell and retain their contents." And 
 so, it would seem, they have some need to be. Let us hope, at 
 
 * Das Andenken an dieser peinlichen Abschiedsbesuch hat Goethe so sehr gemeiden, 
 dass er sich in spateren Jahren der Einzelnheiten nicht mehr zu erinnern wusste. Es 
 bleib ihm nur Friederikens Bild gegenwartig, die sie, mit Thranen in den Augen, ihm 
 noch auf's Pferd hinauf die Hand zum Lebewohl reichte. — Viehoff, i. 310. 
 
282 GOETHE. 
 
 any rate, that it was so with Frederika. Goethe's more apolo- 
 getic German biographers will have it so, because afterwards she 
 was courted by the eccentric and latterly insane Lenz; but 
 somehow a suspicion will arise upon one that the heart of a 
 certain type of genius only too much resembles the hearts of 
 young girls in being like new water-butts in at least one important 
 respect ! And we do trust there is no truth whatever in what is 
 hinted at in this passage, which, for a good reason, we shall not 
 translate. >* 
 
 " Sehr ausfuhrlich wird Goethe's Verhaltniss zu Friederika Brion 
 besprochen ; und hier bringt der Verfasser eine Notiz, welche gewiss 
 alien Freunden des Scandals sehr erwiinscht sein wird, dass namlich 
 Friederike gegen das Ende der achtziger Jahr zu Urmatt (einem Dorfe 
 an der Strasse von Rothan nach Strasburg) einen Sohn Geboren 
 habe, der in friihem Alter zu Stephansfeld bei Strasburg starb. Unser 
 Gewahrsmann, sagt Leyser, ist der einzige noch jetzt lebende Enkel 
 des Pfarrers von Sesenheim, der sich Friederikens noch personlich 
 erinnert, offenbar der Sohn von Christian Brion (dam Goethe'schen 
 Moses), der dem verfasser aufs bestimmteste versichert, Friederike 
 sie nie, wie man lange Zeit glaubte und las, in Paris gewesen." 
 
 IV. 
 
 Goethe's life now enters on a new phase. We have hence- 
 forth to view him as the author. His youth is past, and his 
 genius begins to assert itself with due assurance. Already in 
 1767-8 he had written " Die Laune des Verliebten " (The Caprice 
 of the Lover), a play in verse and in one act, which now appears 
 at the opening of his collected works, a trifle with but little pro- 
 mise of what was to come. It is very remarkable that Herder, 
 whom he met in Strasburg under the circumstances he has so 
 exquisitely detailed in the "Wahrheit und Dichtung," with all his 
 wealth of influence and inspiration, and his fine insight, does 
 not seem to have at first detected Goethe's great powers, or to 
 have urged him very warmly to production, speaking of him as a 
 likeable fellow, but restless as a butterfly. The comedy, "Die Mits- 
 chuldingen " (The Accomplices), had been submitted to Herder, 
 but without drawing from him much commendation. A careful 
 perusal of this play, however, suffices to remove any surprise at 
 Herder's lack of enthusiasm over it. It is conceived in a very 
 conventional manner — moving through a series of rather common 
 
GOETHE. 283 
 
 comedy stage-devices ; and there is, indeed, little that would fore- 
 tell Goethe in it, save now and then a wonderfully compact line 
 or two, and a few apt and happy phrases, such as this, from 
 Sophie's soliloquy — the rhyme, instead of cumbering seeming only 
 to add point and grace : — 
 
 " Und ach ! ein Madchen ist wahrhaftig iibel dran ! 
 1st man ein bischen Hiibsch, gleich steht man jedem an ; 
 Da summt uns unser Kopf den ganzen Tag von Lobe ! 
 Und welcher Madchen halt wohl diese Feuer probe ? " 
 
 Sophie and Alceste are not greatly beyond commonplace in 
 conception. 
 
 We are fain to imagine, indeed, that Goethe was in later years 
 disinclined to acknowledge fully the benefits he derived from 
 Herder, as deeming this might lessen his own merits ; and he 
 actually makes a mis-statement to the effect that while in Stras- 
 burg he never communicated to Herder his plans of " Goetz " 
 and " Faust," while existing documents attest that he did. 
 Equally remarkable is it that had Goethe's attitude been as in- 
 dependent as he says, he should have continued to play the part 
 of an admirer and devout disciple of this somewhat self-centred 
 and autocratic man, this good-natured blusterer (Gutmiithigen 
 Polterers), and even in these days should have written thus : — 
 " Herder, Herder, be to me what you are. If I am destined to 
 be your planet, so will I be, and willingly and truly a friendly 
 moon to your earth. But you must feel that I would rather be 
 Mercury, the last and smallest of the seven, to revolve with you 
 about the sun, than the first of the five that turn round Saturn." 
 It is evident, therefore, that in his relations to Herder he was 
 not quite so able to distinguish the great from the less worthy 
 elements in him, as he is inclined to make it appear that he did 
 in his Autobiography. 
 
 The "Gutmiithigen Polterers," indeed, so very indifferently 
 characterises Herder that one is seized with a suspicion that 
 Goethe, by the use of it, meant in so far to repay Herder in his 
 own way for those repeated and somewhat cutting remarks which 
 Herder had made only too freely about the "sparrow-like 
 elements in Goethe's character." That such things could dwell 
 with Goethe, as they would with any vain man, is proved by the 
 seriousness with which in the Autobiography he dwells on these 
 rather satiric hexameters of Herder's, in which we would a,dmit at 
 
284 GOETHE. 
 
 once that Herder had gone a little beyond the licence of good 
 manners in dealing with Goethe's name, had he not addressed 
 the lines to Goethe himself. The whole affair, indeed, shows 
 some lack of humour on Goethe's part. 
 
 There was really at that time more recognition of superiority, 
 pure and simple, than Goethe found it grateful to his feelings 
 afterwards to allow without qualification. But even in the Auto- 
 biography the inspiring power of Herder is recognised. 
 
 " He was five years older than I was ; which, in younger days, 
 makes a very great difference ; and as I acknowledged him for 
 what he was, and tried to value what he had already done, he of 
 necessity gained a great influence over me. But the situation 
 ■was not comfortable; for the older persons with whom I had 
 hitherto been in communion had perhaps spoiled me by indul- 
 gence ; but from Herder, let one do what one would, one could 
 not hope for approval. Now, therefore, as on the one hand, 
 my great affection and reverence for him, and on the other, the 
 dissatisfaction which he awakened in me, were constantly con- 
 tending with each other, there began in me an inward struggle, 
 
 the first of its kind I had yet experienced As to the 
 
 fullness of these few weeks that we lived together, I can honestly 
 say, that whatever Herder has since produced, was then revealed 
 in germ ; and thus I fell into the happy condition of being able 
 to attach myself wholly to something higher, and to expand all 
 that I had hitherto thought, felt, or made my own." 
 
 As on other and perhaps in some cases less important points, 
 Goethe's biographers are noticeably divided on this question of 
 Herder's influence, and give forth most conflicting verdicts. 
 Viehofif regards Herder's influence as having been pretty much 
 of a negative kind, and would actually convey the impression 
 that Herder's chief service to Goethe lay in having laughed and 
 jeered him out of trifling fancies, derived from his father, such as 
 seal-collecting, and an excessive devotion to Ovid's Metamor- 
 phoses. Schafer again holds that to Herder was due the first 
 awakening in Goethe's mind of the sense of poetry as the last 
 and highest expression of the external reason of man, and a 
 general elevation of Goethe's ideas of life and history, t Grimm 
 
 * Herder's Einfluss waren zunachst mehr negative Art. Er verkleiderte Goethe 'n durch 
 Spott und Satyre die Kleinchen, von seiner Vater uberkommen Liebhaberein, z B, da 
 Interesse an einer Siegelsammlung, i., p. 117. 
 
 t Schafer i., p. 105. 
 
GOETHE. 285 
 
 says that now Goethe got his first glimpse of what constitutes the 
 essence of German character,* and Leyser avers that it was an 
 excellent school of self-abnegation in which Goethe suddenly 
 found himself through his intercourse with Herder, t Mr Lewes 
 here at least follows Schafer : — 
 
 " Herder's influence on Goethe," he writes, " was manifold, but 
 mainly in the direction of poetry. He taught him to look at the Bible 
 as a magnificent illustration of the truth that poetry is the product of 
 a national spirit, not the privilege of a cultivated few. From the poetry 
 of the Hebrew people, he led him to other illustrations of national 
 song ; and here Homer and Ossian were placed highest. It was at 
 this time that Ossian made the tour of Europe, and everywhere met 
 believers. Goethe was so delighted with the wild northern singer 
 that he translated the song of ' Selma,' and afterwards incorporated 
 it in Werther. Besides Shakespeare and Ossian, he also learned 
 through Herder to appreciate the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' and the 
 exquisite picture there painted he was now to see living in the parson- 
 age of Frederika's father." % 
 
 But there was one other specific service which Herder did to 
 Goethe — a service which was more likely to be detected and 
 efficiently signalised by a Frenchman than by an Englishman, or 
 even by a German. We have seen that the introduction to the 
 French theatre and to French literature had formed an epoch in 
 Goethe's youthful life in Frankfort ; and, in spite of his failure 
 fully to satisfy himself about artificial rules of unities and so forth, 
 it is clear that he had not till now escaped from some elements 
 in the French influence ; he was, in fact, still striving to accom- 
 modate his ideas of life to certain artificial standards. In order 
 to the attainment of complete freedom, he needed to be guided 
 to a loftier perception of life as furnishing in itself the suggestion 
 of artistic expedients — to the perception, in a word, of art as 
 supremely the representation of reality — of humanity in its 
 highest moments and most permanent features. This lesson 
 was to come ; but it could only be communicated alongside of a 
 complete detachment from the French influence. Herder's 
 peculiar idea of ^t Lied, or song, with which he was then deeply 
 preoccupied, seeking with all the intensity, and yet the univer- 
 sality of his taste for historic illustrations of his doctrine, could 
 not but have had an inspiring effect on Goethe. From Herder 
 
 * Vorlesungen, p. iz8. 
 
 t Leyser, p. 67. % Lewes' Second Edition, 1864, p. 81. 
 
286 GOETHE. 
 
 he first got clear ideas of what the " Lied " specifically is. It is 
 not, urged Herder, something merely artistic and musical ; it is 
 not merely harmonious and brilliant — that the most artificial and 
 wire-drawn of drawing-room productions may be ; it must be the 
 sincere utterance of a real passion or sentiment, deriving its 
 melody from the intense simplicity and suggestiveness with 
 which its course is unfolded to the imagination, thus steeping it 
 in the glow of universality. Nothing that is not in its first 
 inception sincere individually can touch a wider chord, but this 
 wider chord once deeply touched, the production is human, 
 and not merely, national. These ideas were often unfolded in 
 Goethe's ear as the two talked over the idea of the " Stimmen der 
 Volker," and as the collection of specimens grew under Herder's 
 hand. Goethe's own songs of that period, show distinctly the 
 influence of this association. At any rate the verses written at 
 Leipzig before meeting Herder have a different flavour from 
 those written in Strasburg and after his return home. 
 
 And this point deserves all the more to be emphasised because 
 Goethe himself tells us that, after having committed to the bril- 
 liant ordeal of the fire most of his earlier writings, after his return 
 from Leipzig and his illness, he had preserved The Lover's Caprice 
 and The Accomplices, and had gone on improving and retouch- 
 ing them with what he calls the unattainable model which 
 Lessing had given in the Minna, ever in his eye ; and nothing, 
 he says, was of greater concern than to enter completely into 
 Lessing's mind and views. But it is evident that Herder's aims and 
 Lessing's so far as they bore here were identical in directing back 
 to life and nature, and elevating the freedom of Shakespeare and 
 the English dramatists at every point above the frivolity and cold 
 rule of the French. 
 
 These considerations, then, give us the cue what to seek for at 
 this point, and we are certainly not very long in finding it. 
 
 M. Emile Montigny, in the course of some elaborate articles in 
 the "Revue de I'Instmction Publique," for 1867, after remarking 
 on the importance of Goethe's early contact with French litera- 
 ture, in which he found the bonne heure, " affording the first true 
 happiness to his spirit," goes on to write as follows : — 
 
 " Ce fut h. Strasbourg, en 1770, que la presence de Herder et le 
 mouvement littdraire de I'Allemagne d^tachferent Goethe de notre 
 littferature. Ddjk plus d'une fois il avait cherchd avec inquietude le 
 
GOETHE. 287 
 
 pole qui devait dirig-er ses efforts. II ne le trouvait plus en France, 
 lorsqu' \ ses yeux brilla la lumineuse apparition de Lessing. Comma 
 il accueilit avec transport les oeuvres du critique allemand, qui, sur 
 les ddbris de la vieille dcole frangaise, ouvraient aux generations de 
 nouvelles routes, leur decouvraient des perspectives inconnues ! Enfin 
 Goethe avait trouv^ sa voie ! Herder et Shakespeare I'y engagferent 
 rdvoltement, et bient6t Goetz de Berlichingen et Werther apprirent k 
 I'Allemagne qu' elle possedait un grand poete. La France perdit k 
 cette r^vdlation du g^nie de Goethe un admirateur et un ami, pour 
 quelque temps du moins. Et en effet, k ce moment, il y a un abime 
 entre Goethe et la France, un abime plus large et plus profond que 
 le Rhin : Goethe a besoin de conviction, et il ne trouve en France que 
 la raillerie et I'incrddulite ; Goethe sent la vie affluer en lui, autour 
 de lui, et chez nous les esprits, comme les oeuvres, lui semblent alors 
 frapp^s de stdrilitfe." 
 
 So that it is hardly too much to say, as we may later take 
 occasion to demonstrate more in detail, that the German 
 Romantic school in its more efficient phases took rise here, in 
 the reaction of Goethe against French rules and French influ- 
 ence, under the inspiration of Lessing and Herder. Without 
 this inspiration, it is hardly possible that Goethe would have 
 allowed himself to be so completely possessed by national ideas 
 or German historical records as the whole account of the incep- 
 tion of the " Goetz " and " Faust " show that he was, since in 
 this, as he confesses, he strove against some powerful elements in 
 his personality. It is only, indeed, when we have full regard to 
 the new and bracing atmosphere into which Goethe was intro- 
 duced by Herder that " Goetz," at all events, becomes possible ; 
 and criticism, as well as distinct records, unhesitatingly affirms 
 that effect and cause are only properly related, when Herder's 
 great, though indirect, share in the " Goetz " and the " Faust " 
 is explicitly recognised. 
 
 Even Mr Lewes allows that Goethe did some injustice to Her- 
 der in this matter — more especially respecting " Goetz von Ber- 
 lichingen." Serious injustice we should say, which somewhat 
 lessens our faith in Goethe as a truthful reporter of facts that he 
 could not have forgotten. His desire to qualify, in all possible 
 ways, his indebtedness to Herder, or encouragement received 
 from him, without seeming positively to indicate anygrudge against 
 him, is so patent as in itself to give rise to some suspicion. We 
 have seen that he declared that when in Strasburg he abstained 
 
288 GOETHE. 
 
 from communicating to Herder his scheme of " Goetz " and 
 " Faust," when it is sufficiently proved by contemporary docu- 
 ments that he did communicate them.* We have already, in our 
 sketch of Herder, quoted Herder's letter to his bride, in which 
 he gives his impressions of " Goetz," highly appreciative, and also 
 wisely discriminating. It is evident that he wrote in much the 
 same terms, but more fully, to Goethe himself Goethe at the 
 time professed to agree with these criticisms, and to regard them 
 as faithful and well based, as will be seen from this extract from a 
 letter which he wrote to Herder at the time : — 
 
 " Your letter," he says, " was a true consolation to me. I myself 
 already rank the work lower than you do. Your judgment that 
 Shakespeare has quite spoiled me I fully admit. The work must be 
 redone, fused together afresh, freed from dross, and recast, with 
 newer, sounder metal, then once more it shall be presented to you." 
 
 Is this consonant with the style in which Goethe treats the 
 matter in the " Autobiography," when he calmly sets down the 
 circumstances thus : — 
 
 " I began one morning without having made any previous sketch or 
 plan. I wrote the first scenes, and in the evening they were read 
 aloud to Cornelia (his sister). She praised them highly, but doubted 
 whether I would persevere; nay, she even expressed a decided disbelief 
 in my doing so. This only incited me the more to my work ; the 
 next day I wrote on, and so also on the third. Hope increased with 
 these daily additions, and, as I went on, step by step, everything 
 grew more and more living, and the matter, moreover, had become 
 thoroughly my own. I kept, without interruption, at my work, look- 
 ing neither backward nor forward, neither to the right nor to the left ; 
 and in about six weeks I had the pleasure to see the manuscript 
 stitched. I first sent it on to Merck, who spoke sensibly and kindly 
 about it. I then sent it to Herder, who, on the contrary, expressed 
 himself in an unkindly way, and with severity, and did not fail, in 
 some lampoons written for the occasion, to give me nicknames on 
 account of it. I did not allow myself to be put out by this, but looked 
 clearly at my object. The die was now cast, and the only point was 
 how best to play the game. I saw plainly that even here no one 
 would advise mej and, as after some time I could regard my work 
 as if it had been produced by another, I, indeed, perceived that in my 
 
 * *' In one of the many inaccuracies of his Autobiography^ he says that he withheld from 
 Herder his intention of writing ' Goetz,' but there is a passage in Herder's worlc on German 
 art (Von deutschen Art und Kunst, p. 112), addressed to Goethe, which very plainly alludes 
 to this intention. Such oversights are inevitable in retracing the minor details of the past 
 ^Life 0/ Goethe^ p. 80. 
 
GOETHE. 289 
 
 attempt to renounce unity of time and place, I had also infringed on 
 that higher unity which is so much the mere required. Since, with- 
 out plan or sketch, I had simply yielded myself up to my imagination 
 and to inward impulse, I had not deviated much at the outset, and 
 the first acts could pretty well pass for what they were intended. In 
 the following acts, however, and especially towards the end, I was 
 unconsciously carried along by a wonderful passion. In trying to 
 describe Adelheid as amiable, I had actually fallen in love with her 
 myself, my pen involuntarily bestowed itself on her, the interest in 
 her destiny gained predominance. As,- apart from this consideration, 
 Goetz, towards the end is without activity, and afterwards returns 
 only unfortunately to participate in the peasants' war,* it was but 
 natural that a charming woman should supplant him in the mind of 
 the author, who, by casting off the fetters of art, thought to essay a 
 new field. This defect, or rather faulty superfluity, I soon discerned, 
 since the nature of my poetry has always impelled me to unity. In- 
 stead of the biography of Goetz and German antiquities, I now kept 
 my own work before my mind, seeking more and more to give it his- 
 torical and national substance, and to remove that which was fabulous 
 or proceeded merely from passion. In this, I certainly sacrificed 
 much, for the inclinations of the man had to yield to the convictions 
 of the artist. I had, for instance, pleased myself highly by making 
 Adelheid enter into a terrible nocturnal gypsy scene, and perform 
 wonders by her beautiful presence. A closer scrutiny banished her, 
 and the love-affair between Franz and his noble and amiable lady, 
 which was very circumstantially carried on in the fourth and fifth 
 acts, was much condensed, and could only be suffered to appear in 
 its chief points. I therefore determined, without altering anything 
 in the first manuscript, which I still possess in its original shape, 
 to re-write the whole thing, and did this with such activity, that, 
 in a few weeks, a completely new piece lay before me. I went to 
 work on this with all the greater zest, the less my intention was ever 
 to have this second poem printed. I looked on this likewise merely 
 as a kind of preparatory work, which, in the future, I should once 
 more lay at the foundation of a new treatment to be accomplished 
 with more of industry and care." 
 
 Now, it is abundantly clear from this extract that it was the first 
 draught of the " Goetz " (which Goethe had executed in these 
 busy six weeks), that was sent on to Herder. Passing over the 
 small discrepancy which, by the by, is not without significance, that, 
 according to contemporary letters, the manuscript was not first 
 sent to Merck, but sent on to Merck after it had been read by 
 
 * Bauernkreig. 
 T 
 
290 GOETHE. 
 
 Herder, it is more important to remark that Mr Lewes, even while 
 admitting the injustice to Herder in words, rather throws dust in 
 the reader's eyes through his evident, if not overweening, desire 
 to relieve Goethe from the imputation of anything more than 
 simply pardonable forgetfulness. But Mr Lewes's statements in the 
 matter are not consistent ; nay, they are culpably careless and 
 transparently contradictory. Unless he can give very definite 
 proof, which we fear he will find it difficult to do, that, in spite of 
 Goethe's clear statement in the "Autobiography," it was the second 
 and not the first version of " Goetz " that was sent on to Herder, 
 what does he gain from his rather rash inference thus couched : 
 — " That Goethe did not, on reflection, so entirely concur with 
 the objections he was at first so ready to admit, appears from the 
 fact that he did not recast his work."* What can this mean? we 
 ask in wonder. Mr Lewes has just told us, in a paraphrase of 
 Goethe's own words in the Autobiography, that he did recast 
 it, producing the second verson, which Mr Lewes says he 
 does not regard with such interest, critical or biographical, as 
 that earlier one, which, thanks to the thoroughness of Goethe's re- 
 casting, remained intact to be printed in after years. Though we 
 are always glad to be favoured with any expressions of Mr Lewes's 
 extensive literary experience, we confess we do not derive much 
 help for the point in hand by learning that " from a tolerably ex- 
 tensive acquaintance with authors in relation to criticism, I should 
 think it highly probable that the longer Goethe pondered on Her- 
 der's letter the fainter became his pleasure in the praise, and the 
 stronger his irritation at the blame. I have known a feeling of 
 positive gratitude for a criticism slowly change into an uneasy and 
 almost indignant impression of injustice having been done." It is 
 just within the range of possibility that all this may have been true 
 of Goethe's experience then; but the fact remains that he did re- 
 cast the ' Goetz ' into a second version ; and, so far as we can 
 learn, followed precisely the line of Herder's criticisms in doing 
 so, aiming to make it artistically wrought, rather than " merely 
 schemed or thought out." 
 
 When, therefore, Goethe says that he could find no one to 
 advise him about " Goetz," we are struck mute, for both Merck 
 and Herder were, by his own account, all too ready to advise him, 
 the latter, as he says, giving him offence thereby — offence which 
 
 * Lewes, p. 130. 
 
GOETHE. 29r 
 
 wrankled in his heart forty years afterwards, though to Herder 
 he wrote at the time thanking him for his criticism "as being a 
 consolation to his heart," and taking no notice whatever of the 
 wicked lampoons which so disturbed his mind half a century 
 later. Oh, these lampoons ! why did he not print them as he did 
 that earHer one which made fun of his name ? As he printed the 
 one and not the other, we have our serious doubts ! We shall 
 see afterwards some of the causes which led Goethe to attempt to 
 lessen the amount of the friendly benefit he derived from Herder 
 in early days, and this taken in connection with the obtaining idea 
 of self-celebration in self-development will, to candid minds, seem 
 enough to explain so far this peculiar instance of ingratitude and 
 calculated disingenuous perversion, such as great minds have surely 
 very seldom been guilty of But even the greatest when they 
 venture on the path of prevarication are little stronger than lesser 
 men, and unconsciously find themselves out also. 
 
 It is beyond measure evident, therefore, that Herder was not 
 so niggard of his praise as Goethe would like to make it appear 
 in the " Wahrheit und Dichtung," and that, while he criticised 
 frankly, he also encouraged and aided. And it is as clear as can 
 be that to Herder was due the awakening of Goethe to the sense 
 of superior power and character ; and as this lesson is always a 
 most valuable one to a young man, we cannot but regard Goethe 
 as being fully more indebted to Herder for moral and intellectual 
 benefit, than he says he was. So we reluctantly conclude that 
 Goethe's chapter on Herder belongs rather more to the poetry 
 than to the truth — to the " Dichtung " rather than to the " Wahr- 
 heit." 
 
 Would it have detracted from his great glory in later times if 
 he had been a little more just, if not a little more generous ? 
 Surely not. " Goetz" made the young man famous. Mr Lewes 
 is true to himself and to his subject when he writes : — . 
 
 " The effect on the public was instantaneous, startling. Its bold 
 expression of the spirit of Freedom, its defiance of French criticism, 
 and the originality no less than the power of the writing, carried it 
 triumphant over Germany. It was pronounced a masterpiece in all 
 the salons and in all the beer-houses of that uneasy time. Imita- 
 tions followed with amazing rapidity, the stage was noisy with the 
 clang of chivalry, and the book-shelves creaked beneath the weight 
 of resuscitated feudal times." * 
 
 * Lewes, p. 130. 
 
292 GOETHE. 
 
 Certainly, everything considered, it is not pleasant to find 
 Goethe in later years distinctly confirming impressions contrary 
 to the facts. We find the following in Eckermann, in one of the 
 later years : — 
 
 " We came back to Herder, and I asked Goethe which of his works 
 he thought the best. His ' Ideas for the History of Mankind ' (Ideen 
 zur Geschichte der Menschheit), replied Goethe, ' are undoubtedly the 
 best.' In after days he took the negative side, and was not so agree- 
 able. 
 
 " ' Considering the great weight of Herder,' said I, ' I cannot un- 
 derstand how he had so little judgment on some matters. 1 cannot 
 forgive him, for instance, particularly just at that period of German 
 literature, for sending back the manuscript of ' Goetz von Berlichingen ' 
 without any praise of its merits, — nay, even with detractory re- 
 marks.' 
 
 " ' Yes, Herder was unfortunate in this respect,' replied Goethe ; 
 and he added with some spirit, ' indeed, if he were now with us, he 
 would not comprehend us.' " 
 
 But Goethe is very careful to make due record of any help he 
 had given to Herder ; and thus impresses it on the mind of his 
 listener on another occasion ; — 
 
 " In the first volume of Herder's ' Ideen,' there are many ideas 
 which belong to me, particularly in the beginning. These matters 
 were then all fully discussed between us. What led to this was that 
 I was always more inclined to a patient observation of nature through 
 the senses than Herder, who continually wanted to hurry to some 
 result, and before I had got through my examination, had grasped at 
 an idea. But it was precisely this kind of mutual stimulus that made 
 us useful to each other.* 
 
 It is evident also that, in spite of all differences, Goethe was 
 up to the very last glad to get Herder's advice and help in many 
 things. We find Herder's wife, for example, writing to him dur- 
 ing that visit to Italy : — 
 
 " Goethe visits me almost every day. He was here yesterday at 
 afternoon. He is almost like a chameleon ; and no sooner does he 
 make me well disposed than he undoes it again. ... I really believe 
 that he changes as often as he speaks. He is now writing out his 
 Plant System, and awaits thy time of return with anxiety. He intends 
 to translate it into Latin, and thou shalt correct it for him. ... He 
 
 * Falk, pp. 36-7. 
 
GOETHE. 293 
 
 has read the First Book, and that upon Christianity, of thy ' Ideen,' 
 and has had great gratification in it." * 
 
 Another friendship of this earlier time needs some words of 
 celebration. We have already referred to Merck, whose influence 
 on Goethe was decidedly powerful, though in a different direction 
 from that of Herder. Merck was a man of refined taste, and 
 quick critical discernments, though clearly impatient, cynical, and 
 little inclined to regard with favour some developments of sensi- 
 bility and sentiment. He was, like Dr Johnson, a great enemy 
 of cant, and added to that a ready vein of Swiftian satire, which 
 made him very effective in dealing with some of the vagaries of 
 poetry and fiction. This satirical tendency greatly increased on 
 him as he grew older, and doubtless had something to do with 
 the sad circumstances in which he finally ended his career.! We 
 have already, in sketching Herder, indicated generally the main 
 facts of Merck's life — how, by his own merits, he rose from a 
 comparatively low position in life (being the son of a poor 
 apothecary), to power and influence, forming a point of attraction 
 for all that was cultured and graceful in Darmstadt, where he 
 enjoyed the full esteem and friendship of the Landgravine. He 
 was military paymaster there. 
 
 While Herder's influence on Goethe lay chiefly in impelling 
 him into new fields of idea, and in suggesting new themes as well 
 as new modes of treatment, Merck stood as a corrective to all 
 phantasy and extravagance. He was ever ready also to testify 
 
 * It is very noticeable that Mr Hayward in his Goethe (Blackwood) accepts implicitly 
 Goethe's statements in the Autobiography about Herder's sneering faultfinding with the 
 '■Goetz," giving no hint whatever that' something— nay, a very great deal— is to be said 
 for Herder, and that upon far more important matters than " inevitable small oversights," 
 as Mr Lewes has named them, " in retracing the minor details of the past." Generally 
 speaking, the one defect of Mr Hayward's volume is, that he does not in very many cases 
 verify Goethe's statements by reference to the wide array of contemporary writings which 
 German biographical literature now furnishes. He has not read Herder's letters so care- 
 fully as he should have done, nor Wieland's about the wi^mar period. This is the more 
 remarkable that Mr Hayward is no Goethe worshipper, and has spoken plainly of Goethe's 
 defects on the moral side and their influence on his art. Our sketch of Goethe was 
 finished before this generally excellent and well-directed little book came into our hands 
 and all that we can now add in respect to it is this note. 
 
 t He died by his own hand, leaving some doubt on his memory about some monetary 
 difficulties. 
 
294 GOETHE. 
 
 against Goethe's tendency to that over-elaboration which is to 
 blame for so much of the coldness in his writings, and to which, 
 as M. Scherer has said, may be traced many changes for the worse 
 in the later versions of not a few even of the Lieder. Merck's 
 companionship, if it did not have so deep or so permanent results 
 as that of Herder's, was assuredly as valuable to Goethe at the 
 moment, since it was on the very side that Goethe then tended 
 to excess that Merck was by genius and taste so well fitted to 
 direct him. And the chief enterprise on which they engaged was 
 an admirable medium to give opportunities for the exercise of 
 this restraint. Goethe himself is much more just to Merck than 
 he is to Herder ; writing thus in the Autobiography: — 
 
 " Born with quick mind and understanding, he had acquired a great 
 deal of elegant knowledge in modem literature more particularly, and 
 had not neglected to pay some attention to all times and places in the 
 history of the world and of man. He had the talent of judging with 
 great acuteness and decision. He was regarded as a thorough man 
 of business, and an able accountant. He readily gained the entrde 
 everywhere, as a pleasant companion for those who had not already 
 come under his sarcastic lash. He was long and lean in figure ; a 
 sharp, prominent nose was a noticeable feature ; light-grey or blue 
 eyes gave something tiger-like to his glance, which wandered scrutin- 
 isingly here and there. In his character, there was a wonderful con- 
 tradiction. By nature a good, noble, and upright man, he had 
 become embittered against the world, and allowed this morbid feeling 
 to master him so far that he felt an irresistible inclination wilfully to 
 become a rogue. Sensible, quiet, and kind at one moment ; in the 
 next, he might be suddenly moved — just as a snail puts out its horns — 
 to do something that might hurt or even seriously injure another. 
 Yet, as one can easily enough associate with what is dangerous when 
 one believes oneself to be quite safe from it, I felt the stronger 
 inclination to live with him, and to enjoy his good qualities, in that I 
 had a confident faith that he would not turn his bad side to me. By 
 this instability of inclination, this necessity of treating men in a 
 malignant and spiteful way, he destroyed social life on the one hand, 
 on the other, fostered in himself with care an inward disquiet which 
 opposed his internal comfort, so that he was subject to a kind of 
 dilettantish impulse to production. In this he indulged the more 
 readily, that he could express himself both in prose and verse happily 
 and with ease. I myself still possess poetical epistles, full of bold- 
 ness, force, and Swift-Uke gall. These are highly remarkable from 
 their original view both of persons and things, but are at the same time 
 written with such biting and wounding power that I could not publish 
 
GOETHE. 295 
 
 them even at present, but must either destroy them or preserve them 
 as striking illustrations of the secret discord in our literature. The 
 fact that in all his labours he proceeded negatively and destructively 
 was unpleasant to himself, and he often declared that he envied me that 
 innocent love of setting forth a subject which arose from the pleasure 
 I took alike in the original and in the imitation. For the rest, his 
 literary dilettantism would have been rather useful than injurious to 
 him, if he had not felt an inconquerable impulse to enter also on 
 technical and mercantile matters. For when once he began to curse 
 his faculties, and was discontented with himself, because he could 
 not, with adequate genius, satisfy his claims to practical talent, he gave 
 up now plastic art, now poetry, and looked to mercantile and manu- 
 facturing undertakings as means to bring in money, while they 
 afforded him pleasant amusement." 
 
 Such was the man who, on account of his mixed cynicism and 
 cheerfulness of nature, his mode of questioning, and his love of 
 English literature, was called by Goethe Mephistopheles-Merck, 
 and by Herder Socrates-Addison, designations which cast as much 
 light on the men who bestowed them as they do on him on whom 
 they were bestowed. Goethe, after returning home from Stras- 
 burg, paid a visit to Darmstadt, where he was at once made at 
 home in the Merck circle, having been highly recommended to 
 Merck's attention by Herder ; and there he met, as an important 
 member of that society, Caroline Flachsland, Herder's betrothed. 
 
 Merck, who was an intimate friend of Schlosser, now editor of 
 the Frankfort Gelehrten Anzeigen, and one of his contributors, 
 warmly recommended Goethe as a writer for the journal ; and 
 during the whole of the year 1772, while Goethe was chiefly in 
 Frankfort, one of his leading interests lay in his contributions to 
 that paper. His father, indeed, viewed the connection only as 
 tempting Goethe into desultory ways of thinking and expressing 
 himself, and seriously urged him to stop. But this the son did 
 not consent to do for a time. 
 
 Dr Wilhelm Scherer has given a very interesting account of 
 this period in the Deutsche Rundschau for October 1878. The 
 paper was started in the beginning of 1772, and appeared every 
 Tuesday and Friday — a, little sheet of four pages in small octavo. 
 Dr Scherer says : — 
 
 " That volume for 1772 is a priceless document for Goethe's de- 
 velopment, and, indeed, for the development of German literature 
 
296 GOETHE. 
 
 generally. Nowhere else was there such a distinguished literary 
 circle as that in which Herder was honoured as the leader, — it was, 
 in fact, a special organ for the expression of his ideas. Nowhere else 
 could the new thoughts, which the future was to hear clearly in our 
 poetry, be expressed with such unimpeded simplicity and unitedness, 
 and made influential by association with philosophy. And nowhere 
 else was the revolutionary impulse so considerately viewed in relation 
 to life as here. In spite of the freedom with which spiritual matters 
 were handled, the religious tendency of the journal was distinctly 
 conservative. The extremest ' enlightenment '-men were ridiculed. 
 Before this judgment seat the highly extolled Reason was not treated 
 with any particular reverence. . . . For preachers and teachers it held 
 forth clearly that we must represent Christ, not as a morose tyrant, 
 but as a loving and self-sacrificing friend of man. For the under- 
 standing of the Bible the sympathetic feeling of the poet was essen- 
 tial, and through that we must understand the Eastern mind. The 
 dominating idea for the interpretation of national feeling in relation 
 to universal or human feeling was completely Herder's." 
 
 This was the journal to which Goethe in that year, 1772, con- 
 tributed so liberally, many of his articles further exhibiting the 
 peculiar influence of Herder in the tone of patriotism and healthy 
 German sentiment by which they were pervaded. Dr Scherer 
 gives several specimens of this, remarking of them, — ^'^ Here we 
 feel blows the air of ' Goetz von Berlichingen.' " * 
 
 Dr Scherer also quotes a characteristic letter of Herder to 
 Merck to this effect : — " In your newspaper articles you are ever 
 Socrates-Addison ; Goethe mostly appears as a young high- 
 spirited lordling, with terrific scratching claws ; and if I once 
 come it will be the Irish driver with the whip." 
 
 This sufficiently indicates Goethe's savage ways in that earlier 
 time, and doubtless not a few felt the weight of his lash. 
 
 A visit paid to Merck in 1773 is notable for a little incident, 
 which is recorded by Goethe of himself when journeying towards 
 the appointed meeting-place with Merck, and which brings out 
 very prominently one tendency of Goethe's, to try to solve any 
 question of practical difficulty by reference to chance or omens : — 
 
 During this journey down the Lahn to meet Merck, the 
 thought occurred to Goethe that he should once for all settle the 
 question that would at times arise, as now, whether he should 
 abandon all thoughts of being a painter. We must allow Mr 
 Lewes to describe his method of solving the difficulty. 
 
 * Wir fuhlen's heir weht die Luft der Goetz von Berlichingen 
 
GOETHE. 297 
 
 " The test was curious. The river glided beneath, now flashing in 
 the sunhght, now partially concealed by willows. Taking a knife 
 from his pocket he flung it with his left hand into the river, having 
 previously resolved that if he saw it fall he was to become an artist ; 
 but if the sinking knife were concealed by the willows, he was to 
 abandon the idea. No ancient oracle was ever more ambiguous than 
 the answer now given him. The willows concealed the sinking knife, 
 but the water splashed up like a fountain, and was distinctly visible." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Goethe's career from this point is one of unchequered success, 
 and also one of ceaseless self-gratification. Even when he seems 
 to share the prevalent unrest and morbid dissatisfaction, there is 
 an undercurrent of epicurean superiority in his manner and bear- 
 ing, as we can still read of in letters and other records — a thing 
 which not a few felt and expressed on contact with him then not 
 less than in later years. Before the ' Goetz ' had been published, 
 that is, in the spring of 1772, he had gone to Wetzlar, ostensibly 
 to please his father by getting some insight into practice in the 
 Supreme Court of Appeal, but really to follow projects of his 
 own in the way of poetry, and many other things, connected, in 
 their degree, with the " wild, unruly thoughts," with which Mr 
 Lewes somewhat ostentatiously credits him. The importance of 
 the Wetzlar life arises from Goethe's characteristic appropriative- 
 ness, what has been named his " objectivity," and need of real 
 experience as the foundation of his art-product. There he be- 
 came acquainted with a young man, Kestner, and his bride, 
 Charlotte Buff, with whom, after some " idyllic days," he fell 
 deeply in love, so deeply that he is free to express his surprise at 
 the power of will still left to him. " I could not hide from my- 
 self," he says, " that this adventure must come to an end, be- 
 cause on the expected promotion of the bridegroom in office 
 depended wholly the union of the young man with the amiable 
 girl ; and since a man, if he has any resolution, essays to will the 
 inevitable, I determined to go away of my own free will, before 
 I was driven by unbearable suffering.'' 
 
 And this he did, returning home in the end of the autumn ; 
 but his resolution did not save him for hankerings, which, with 
 true German sentiment and frank effusiveness, he serves up in 
 
298 GOETHE. 
 
 letters to Kestner — the best and safest depository for them, per- 
 haps, in the circumstances. " God bless you, dear Kestner," one 
 of them runs, " and say to Lotte that I often believe I can forget 
 her, but then I have a relapse, and it is worse with me than ever." 
 If this had not been written by the man who wrote " Goetz," and 
 " Werther," and " Faust," would we not say that it was " spooney" 
 in the extreme ; and looked at in itself can it be " transfigured 
 into" anything else, because its writer wrote these. But he has 
 fancies, and meditates suicide, and compares methods, as he lies 
 ■ — a most faithful reflector of the spirit of the time, — with " wild, 
 unruly thoughts " specially his own, in addition. 
 
 " I placed a costly, well-sharpened dagger every night at my bed- 
 side, and every night, before extinguishing my candle, I tried whether 
 I could send the sharp point a couple of inches or so into my breast. 
 This, however, never came to pass; and so I ended by laughing at 
 myself, resolved to throw hypochondria and crochets to the winds, hav- 
 ing resolved to live [and write]. To do so cheerfully, however, it was 
 necessary that I should work out some poetic problem whereby all 
 that I thought, felt, and fancied, during those experiences, could be 
 expressed. ... I went to Homburg, and there I gained a wholly 
 new love of life, from discovering how much pleasure a miserable 
 thing Mice me could afford such excellent people ! " 
 
 And very soon he " has sources of joy which he cannot detail 
 even to Kestner and Lotte ; he confesses himself almost as happy 
 as they two lovers can be, for he has found his " maiden," whom 
 he calls his " little wife " — Antoinette Gerock, namely, who, he 
 assures Kestner, is exceedingly like Charlotte's sister, Lenchen, 
 whom he had loved almost as deeply as he loved Charlotte (!) 
 And then, doubtless, he was a most composing element in the 
 feuds between Maximiliane Brentano and his young wife, and 
 found the exercise of his conciliating diplomacy as delightful as 
 "playing with the young Madam's step-children, and accompanying 
 her piano with the bass." And this, notwithstanding that he needs 
 to assure us that " although there was nothing passionate in our 
 intercourse, it was painful, because she was unable to reconcile 
 herself to her new condition." But Mr Lewes, considering every- 
 thing, is surely too much of an alarmist, when he reflects, that 
 "if not passionate, the relation was sentimental and danger- 
 ous ! " 
 
 We really cannot follow Goethe through his transformation- 
 
GOETHE. 299 
 
 scene love-affairs. Very soon the news of poor Jerusalem's death 
 aifords him the suggestion of a plot round which to weave his re- 
 cent gloomy and would-be suicidal experiences ; and in four busy 
 weeks he had produced " the Sufferings of Werther." The effect 
 was tremendous ; for undoubtedly the book expresses, in a power- 
 ful way, the morbid sentiment and unhealthy life-weariness of the 
 period, as well as presents delicately some phases of passionate 
 love. But the persons pourtrayed maintained that the portraits 
 were unfaithful, — only true enough for purposes of vulgar identi- 
 fication ; and that, thus, the work was as inartistic as the violence 
 that had been done to private life and friendship was unpardon- 
 able. To them Goethe replied in the most conciliating manner : 
 — " Thou hast, dearest Kestner, exhausted everything, cut me off 
 from excuse so completely that nothing is left for me to say. Yet 
 I know that my heart has still more to say, if it could but express 
 it. But I shall be silent, though I must still cherish the sweet 
 presentiment and hope that Fate has in store for us that which 
 will bind us yet more closely to each other. . . . The thing 
 is done, the book is out, and you must forgive me if you can." 
 
 Next, at the demand of gallantry, he wrote " Clavigo," in some 
 respects a fiasco, and " Stella," which holds a very subsidiary 
 place amongst his works.* Then his career speedily becomes 
 charged with the interest of a " profound passion," but one from 
 which Goethe found it possible to escape when it began to place 
 him in quite too false a position. The lady concerned was Anna 
 Elizabeth Schonemann, the daughter of a rich banker of Frankfort, 
 known to all Goethe-students as " Lili," for whom Goethe wrote 
 many songs and poems, notably the extravaganza of "Lili's mena- 
 gerie.'' She was a great coquette, though only sixteen, and one is 
 almost inclined to say that she must have been like one of Burns' 
 heroines of song — " wanton and cantie as a kitthn." She flirted 
 with many, and subdued most, as we learn ; and readers of a cer- 
 tain type have no doubt been, and will be, charmed by the lovers' 
 game of chess, which was now to be played, as if with the full 
 understanding of the parties, between her and Goethe. Each 
 was to try the strength of each, and to go no further than flirting. 
 But Goethe lost the game on his own confession. He fell really 
 and truly in love for once ! " She served him as he had served 
 
 * Mr Lewes traces the weakness of the drama to the lack of a biographical element, 
 p. 185. 
 
300 GOETHE. 
 
 poor Kathchen in Leipzig," says Mr Lewes, with singular direct- 
 ness, "and as in Leipzig he dramatised his experience under the 
 form of the ' Laune des Verliebten,' so here he dramatises the 
 new experience in an opera — ' Erwin and Elmire,' wherein the 
 coquetry of a mistress brings a lover to despair — a warning to Lili 
 which seems not to have been altogether without effect." * 
 
 It is characteristic of Goethe that sincere and deep as was his 
 passion for Lili, he no sooner went through an informal betrothal, 
 than he began to be persecuted by a sense of the disparity of 
 their stations, and must try the effect of absence to cool his 
 ardour. While away on that famous Swiss tour, Lili's relatives, 
 not quite unnaturally, took occasion to put barriers in the way of 
 the union ; and, then, soon after Goethe returned, he was invited 
 by the Duke to take up his abode at Weimar, where his history 
 interweaves itself with that of the court, with all the intrigues 
 and the liaisons, and cannot be viewed apart from them. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Goethe's life in Weimar was a wonderful and unique mixture 
 of excess, self-study, self-aggrandisement, and industrious labour. 
 After a short period of what Mr Lewes naively calls dissipation,* 
 the duke and the poet settled down to their work which, whether 
 of a poetical or political cast — for Goethe was a Privy Councillor 
 and not without political duties, — had due variety of theatricals by 
 lamplight and moonlight, under the roof and under the open sky, 
 liaisons, scientific experiments, and journeyings occasionally in 
 disguise. Goethe — thanks to his wonderful health and the 
 sinewy nature of his constitution — was steadily productive. His 
 genius was untiring. After a period of ultra-classicality, which 
 wonderfully fell in with certain relations now formed — "Iphigenia" 
 was written mainly for the attractive Caroline Schroter to play in 
 — he see-sawed between ultra-Gothic, as seen in parts of the 
 " Faust ;" sentimental and morbid, or semi-psychological experi- 
 ments, as seen in the Elective Affinities and " Wilhelm Meister ;" 
 Greek affectations, as seen in "Tasso;" and sickly, over-real, 
 though elaborated records of personal episodes as in the "Roman 
 
 * Lewes, p. 184. 
 
 t He dwells on this " dissipation," and he says he does so " because the notion that a 
 court-li e affected Goethe's genius by corrupting his mind is preposterous." 
 
I GOETHE. 301 
 
 Elegies ;'' and now and then a lyric or true Lied, which recalled 
 all the glory and the associations of his youthful time. Mr Lewes 
 is quite certain the idea that the Weimar court-life corrupted his 
 genius is preposterous ; but it is a sober and a somewhat sadden- 
 ing matter-of-fact that no more "Goetzes" were forthcoming; 
 that Goethe more and more passed out of the range of these 
 healthy sympathies which are somehow essential to great, simple, 
 and enduring creation ; and that the most ambitious and sustained 
 works of his Weimar life, — works which Goethe himself would 
 have regarded as the best testimonies of his activity at Weimar, — 
 Mr Lewes seriously regards as fantastic, diffuse, symbolic merely, 
 over-informed with speculative ideas, too often touched by purely 
 psychological subtleties and refinements. 
 
 But one or two episodes in the Weimar life we must unwillingly 
 refer to, as they are either inseparably connected with great works 
 or decisively determined Goethe's fate at certain points. First, 
 there is the liaison with the Frau von Stein j next, the friendship 
 with Schiller ; third, the residence of Herder at Weimar ; fourth, 
 the relation with Christiane Vulpius ; fifth, the intercourse with 
 Napoleon ; and sixth, the scandal with Bettina Brentano. 
 
 I . " Every person at Weimar had at least one liaison," said 
 Schiller, with some feeling of revulsion; and though he came 
 to reconcile himself so far to the state of affairs, his expressions 
 of surprise and something more on first being brought face to 
 face with the phenomena are entirely honourable to him. And 
 in this he is wholly at onfe with Mr Lewes, though Mr Lewes 
 expresses it somewhat differently, when he urges over and over 
 again, whether consistently or inconsistently, that the great need 
 of Goethe was " a quiet and pure domestic life." Goethe had 
 not been long at Weimar when he began, according even to the 
 most public and authentic reports, duly to perform his part in 
 the " great game " that was set agoing. He reached Weimar in 
 November 1775, and was received with the utmost honour by 
 all manner of persons. The duke and the duchess vied with 
 each other in their attentions to him, and thought themselves 
 well rewarded if Goethe let fall some particularly good thing in 
 the course of his brilliant talk. On May 18, 1776,— six months 
 or so after his arrival, — we find him writing in the journal which 
 he sent to Augusta Countess von Stolberg, a most worthy and 
 fitting repository of such confidences also : — 
 
302 GOETHE. 
 
 " I breakfasted with the Duke. After that, I went to the Frau von 
 Stein — an angel of a woman — to whom I am often indebted for the 
 quieting of my heart, and many of the purest sensations of pleasure, 
 and to whom I have not yet told anything of you, which I confess 
 has cost me some effort. But I shall do it to-day — shall say to her 
 a thousand things about Augusta. We went into ' my garden,' — her 
 husband, her children, and her brothers, and two misses Alten Meer 
 joined us. We also went for a walk, and met the Prince and the 
 Duchess' mother, who joined us. All were highly pleased. I left the 
 party and went to the Duke for a short time, and afterwards I supped 
 with Frau von Stein." 
 
 Lili was, of course, not forgotten as a friend; the truth is, she 
 was betrothed; and Goethe, amid all his proprieties, never deemed 
 it the least out of place that he should "look up" his old loves 
 or write to them, telling them about his later ones. Frau von 
 Stein was double Lili's age. She was a mature, experienced, and 
 as things went at Weimar, a high-minded woman, though Mr 
 Lewes, as we shall see, says that she was "a vain woman." She 
 was the eldest daughter of Hofmarshal von Schardt, and was 
 Maid of Honour (Hofdame) to the Duchess Amalia,. — one of the 
 most attractive forms in the Weimar suite. In 1764 she married 
 the ducal Master of the Horse, Baron Frederick von Stein, a man of 
 very cold and distant character. It is evident that there was a good 
 deal of the Platonic in this attachment, but whether it throughout 
 maintained its platonic character is a point on which Goethe's 
 biographers are much divided. Mr Lewes, who may well be 
 listened to on such a point, shall here be quoted, both as to the 
 passion itself and the degree of its closeness. First, of the 
 passion : — • 
 
 " Hitherto, he has been captivated only by very young girls, whose 
 youth, beauty, and girlishness were the charms to his wandering 
 fancy J but now he is fascinated by a woman- a woman of rank and 
 elegance, a woman of culture and experience, a woman who, instead 
 of abandoning herself to the charm of his affection, knew how, with- 
 out descending from her pedestal to keep the flame alive. The others 
 loved him, — showed him their love, — and were forgotten. She con- 
 trived to keep him in the pleasant fever of hope ; made herself 
 necessary to him ; made her love an aim [To whom ? To Goethe, 
 we suppose], and kept him in the excitement of one 
 
 "Who never is, but always to be blest." 
 
 " Considering the state of society and opinion at that period, and 
 
GOETHE. 303 
 
 considering, moreover that, according to her son's narrative, her hus- 
 band was scarcely seen in his home more than once a week, and 
 that no pretence of affection existed between them, we can under- 
 stand how Goethe's notorious passion for her excited sympathy in 
 Weimar." 
 
 And again as to its intimacy, in an extract from Goethe's 
 journal, which should have received a gloss from Mr Lewes, 
 under date 4th and 6th June 1776 : — 
 
 " Here, my dear lady, is the tribute. I will see if I can keep my reso- 
 lution not to come. You are not quite safe with me. Yesterday there 
 were again some moments in which I truly felt how I love you. ... So 
 you could do me the unkindness of remaining away yesterday. Truly 
 what you do must be right in my eyes ! But it made me sad ! . . . . 
 You are a darling to have told me all ! When one loves, one should 
 tell everything. Dearest angel, and I have again three words which 
 will set you at rest, but only words from me to thee ! I shall come 
 to-day." 
 
 And was it then in this way that Goethe realised his own words 
 written under her portrait, when first he saw it :— " What a glori- 
 ous poem it would be to see how the world mirt-ors itself in this 
 soul." At any rate, as in former cases, Goethe, after a period of 
 great bliss with this " dearest angel," becomes oppressed with the 
 weight of " chance desires," and must set off on that memorable 
 journey to Italy for soothing excitement and relief. For details 
 of that journey, curious readers must turn elsewhere ; and we 
 must look to another point for a moment. 
 
 2. Schiller's friendship was beneficial, and only beneficial, to 
 Goethe. They had for a time each misunderstood the other and 
 kept aloof. Goethe, in Italy, had been disgusted with "The 
 Robbers," and still more at its success. He regarded Schiller as a 
 rival, and as likely to spoil the taste which he had been working 
 for all these years to form. He studiously remained at a dis- 
 tance from the younger poet ; and these feelings may to some 
 extent, though not altogether, account for the coldness and stiff- 
 ness of Goethe, which so repelled Schiller on their first meeting, 
 as to cause the younger poet to say to his friends, " that no sub- 
 stantial intimacy, good feeling, or co-operation, not even a cor- 
 respondence, would ever be possible between them." 
 
 They remained thus in passive opposition to each other till 
 they met at Jena in 1794, when a conversation on scientific 
 
304 GOETHE. 
 
 teaching revealed the existence of a common ground, based on 
 common tastes, aims, and aspirations. Very soon they began to 
 co-operate in various designs, first the Horen, then the Musen- 
 Almanack, then the Xenien — the last a series of epigrams, 
 Schiller's share in which Goethe was always ready to rate far 
 above his own ; but which certainly had a wonderfully beneficial 
 effect on German literature. It has sometimes been suggested 
 that Goethe was drawn out of his true path by allowing himself 
 to be led by Schiller into philosophical studies and the writing 
 of epigrams ; but that may very well be met by the fact, that at 
 this time Goethe confessed an unquenchable need for new lines 
 on which to adventure. His curiosity was informed by Schiller's 
 ardour — even he could not withstand it. While Goethe strove 
 to make Schiller more real and natural, Schiller assuredly infected 
 Goethe with something of his own earnest idealism and romantic 
 elevation of tone. They were in much true complements to each 
 other ; and in the relation Goethe comes out more unaffectedly 
 lofty and loveable — more disinterested, more inclined " to look 
 not only to his own things, but also to the things of others," than 
 anywhere else. Mr Lewes has well said : — 
 
 " Goethe had much to give, which Schiller gratefully accepted ; 
 and if he could not in return influence the developed mind of his 
 great friend, or add to the vast stores of its knowledge and experi- 
 ence, he could give that which was even more valuable, sympathy 
 and impulse. He excited Goethe to work. He withdrew him from 
 the engrossing pursuit of science, and restored him once more to 
 poetry. He urged him to finish what was already commenced, and 
 not to leave his works all fragments. They worked together with the 
 same purpose and with the same earnestness, and their union is the 
 most glorious episode in the lives of both, and remains as an eternal 
 exemplar of a noble friendship." 
 
 Truly, Goethe in no relation appears to more advantage than 
 in this, where he gave more than he received, and seemed to 
 find joy in self-abnegations, rising to an elevated and beautiful 
 sympathy. 
 
 3. Herder's position in relation to Goethe at Weimar is much 
 more complicated and difficult to make clear. Two things must 
 be distinctly borne in mind in trying to do both these great men 
 justice. The first is, that the whole social atmosphere could not 
 but have been deeply offensive and irritative to Herder ; for his 
 
GOETHE. 305 
 
 sense of domestic and moral ties was formed in an entirely dif- 
 ferent school, and the whole influence of his profession (which' 
 we must honour him for endeavouring to maintain) only con- 
 firmed his earlier impressions of all these matters. It is, there- 
 fore, easy to reahse the profound restlessness and discontent that 
 must have been stirred in him, when he was brought face to face 
 with the things that were regarded as innocent and everyday 
 matters at Weimar. While the Duke wounded the spirit of his 
 good Duchess Louisa, by his association with the actress Jage- 
 mann, and Goethe carried on his liaison with Frau von Stein, 
 Herder's purer ideas, derived from the much abused philistine 
 Bourgeoisie, were intensely shocked ; and while he laboured in- 
 cessantly to purify the Church, the intrigue of the Court reflected 
 itself back upon him in the intrigues of the clergy, who tried in 
 every possible way to torment and annoy the superintendent. The 
 purification of the Church, on which he had set his heart, was 
 thus rendered impossible, through the complications and compro- 
 mises, coil upon coil, by which he found himself surrounded. 
 As we have said, he was in an entirely false position, and found 
 it most difficult either way to extricate himself. And, no doubt, 
 these circumstances, which every day fretted and grieved him, had 
 their own effects on his not quite buoyant or gentle temper, and 
 also on his judgment of artistic products. 
 
 And secondly (and here it is simple matter of fact), Goethe's 
 whole relation to art by this time, alike as revealed to us in his 
 theories and his practice, was directly opposed to the principles 
 which Herder had devoted all his powers to dpvelope and to 
 illustrate. Goethe had become a classicist of the worst type to 
 Herder's view, and betrayed his contempt for whatever was in a 
 certain sense Christian in the plainest and most offensive ways, 
 and did not conceal that much in what was truest German was 
 repugnant to him. His journey to Italy only confirmed him in 
 this, arid made him more outspoken ; and certainly when we read 
 of his own discontent and ill-temper with everything German on 
 his return to Weimar, we need not wonder much at Herder's 
 being more and more repelled. Even Wieland was. 
 
 It is great matter of surprise to Mr Lewes that the enthusiasm 
 with which Goethe, in Italy, received Herder's Ideen, should not 
 have been shared by Herder on receiving what Goethe sent to him 
 from Rome (p. 300). The matter does not so greatly surprise us. 
 
 U 
 
3o6 GOETHE. 
 
 How could Herder conscientiously admire much, nay, a great 
 deal in the " Italianische Reise," not to speak of the later Roman 
 Elegies, in which every principle that he had tried to make effi- 
 cient in literature was defied. In the excessive expression of 
 mere personal tendency, in the evident delight in the representa- 
 tion of the merely fleshly or sensual side of experience, Herder 
 could but see the departure from sound rules and the signs of a 
 coming degradation. And so he spoke and wrote. But there 
 was something more than merely ill temper or personal pique in 
 it ; and even now Herder's words on these points solicit and 
 even demand reiteration. 
 
 A few words more in explanation of Goethe's peculiar injus- 
 tice to Herder. One point on which Goethe was vain-^on which 
 he openly and ostentatiously piqued himself — was his power of 
 attracting and of binding to himself those whom he regarded as 
 worthy or likely to be useful to him, or to increase his pleasure 
 or fame. One of his greatest triumphs was the conciliation of 
 Schiller : one of his greatest defeats was Herder's repulsion from 
 him in later years. Goethe himself, as we have seen, very plainly 
 acknowledged that " this man's power of attraction was very 
 great ; " and that he carried Wieland also away from him, with 
 his allegiance. In nothing could Goethe have been more deeply 
 wounded than in this. He is too shrewd to speak of it openly 
 in a tone of querulousness, but we can read between the lines 
 that he never forgot and never forgave this, as it seemed to him, 
 defection and rebellion. Whether or how far any such smoul- 
 dering feeling of personal wrong can justify open misreport of 
 fact, and conscious tampering with the verities of literary history, 
 or whether or in what degree such offence can be condoned or 
 overlooked in consideration of great literary services, are ques- 
 tions on which we shall not now make any attempt to pronounce ; 
 but that Goethe was consciously guilty of such in his Autobio- 
 graphy, in his treatment of Herder, appears to us clear matter of 
 fact, about which, on its once having been emphatically pointed 
 out, with certain proofs of it, candid minds cannot have two 
 opinions. 
 
 4. From the details of the relation with Christiane Vulpius one 
 may well be excused for shrinking. But Goethe's life cannot be 
 written without the devotion of a large space to it, and many of 
 his works are connected with it. Christiane Vulpius was the 
 
GOETHE, 307 
 
 daughter of a mined drunkard, and first came into contact with 
 Goethe by presenting a petition to him at Weimar, begging him 
 to help a struggling brother, in the month of July 1788. She 
 was one of those fr^sh and bright-looking girls, whose freshness 
 and brightness suggest indulgence. Goethe, who had just returned 
 from Italy, fell in love with her ; very shortly afterwards took her 
 to his house, where, by and by, he established also some of her 
 relations. When once we can overlook a certain lack of taste 
 and self-respect in the formation of this connection, there is 
 nothing but praise to be spoken of Goethe's faithfulness in it. He 
 stood by Christiane, though he could not raise her to his own 
 social level ; was considerate for her in many ways ; bore with 
 her, and married her, to legitimatise his son, amongst other 
 things, eighteen years after the connection was formed, and when 
 she, unfortunately, had yielded to the temptation to drink. But 
 Goethe's poetic celebration of his earlier relations to her are far 
 from being in good taste, however elaborate and artistic ; and it 
 is very difficult to keep the scales even when we have to hold in 
 our eye also the relations with the Frau von Stein, who was in a 
 sense discarded when Goethe formed this new alliance. His be- 
 haviour in the matter is certainly not that of a man of a very high 
 honour, or of an overnice sensibility. Mr Lewes tells us that, at 
 this crisis, to the Frau von Stein " He offered friendship in 
 vain ; he had wounded the self-love of a vain woman ; there 
 is a relentless venom in ignoble minds, when the self-love is 
 wounded, which poisons friendship, and destroys all gratitude. 
 It was not enough for the Frau von Stein that he had loved 
 her so many years with a rare devotion^' &c., &c. And so Mr 
 Lewes, seeing that he admits the " rare devotion " was now to be 
 " transfigured into " cold friendship, to the grief and the wound- 
 ing of a heart that had been true to Goethe, lays himself open, as 
 we think, to the accusation of, metaphorically and in a literary 
 sense, kicking a poor woman when " she is down," — robbed of 
 that which she had come to count her joy and pride, as Mr 
 Lewes plainly says she was right in doing. Does a king, or even 
 a queen, surrender a crown without struggles and regrets, and 
 does not scripture itself say that the man (genius or no genius) is 
 the head or crown of the woman ? Ah ! fine, very fine, Mr 
 Lewes's apologies for Goethe, and justifications of him ; but 
 scarcely so his tone towards the woman, who years after, when 
 
3o8 GOETHE. 
 
 Goethe was weak and ill, showed that true sympathy and love 
 could raise her above the " vanity '' and " ignobihty '' with which 
 she is credited — facts Mr Lewes records almost in the very same 
 page. And surely never did biographer create greater mountains 
 of blame out of casual molehills of expression than Mr Lewes 
 tries to do in italicising such passing common-place phrases, in the 
 Frau von Stein's letters, as " our former friend Goethe," and the 
 expression used of Goethe's son, that he was apt to be too free 
 in "« club belonging to his mother's class" — which, alas! was 
 likely to be only too near the mournful fact. The Frau von 
 Stein had never bound and pledged herself in friendship to 
 Christiane Vulpius ; and she only says, somewhat plainly, in a 
 private letter, what Mr Lewes himself says, that Christiane Vul- 
 pius belonged to a lower social grade than she did — Mr Lewes 
 explaining by this very circumstance the greatness of the scandal 
 that the connection caused. And as for Goethe's son, if there 
 was libel in the Frau von Stein's expression, it was because of its 
 truth, and that comes by publication. 
 
 5. Few men, we think, could regard Goethe's relations to 
 Napoleon as being highly honouring to him as a man. It is all 
 very well to say that he was an artist and a courtier ; both of which 
 aspects of his activity have been used to justify him in this re- 
 spect. In the then position of his country, prostrate uilder the 
 foot of a tyrant, the Free Towns actually without the power even 
 to procure one of his own books, and have it transmitted without 
 a licence, it is hardly exhilarating to read in Mr Lewes's life : — 
 
 " A few days after [the reception by Napoleon of Goethe and Wie- 
 land with the Duke of Weimar at ErfurtJ Napoleon was in Weimar, 
 and great festivities were set on foot to honour him ; among them a 
 chasse on the battle-field of Jena (!) a grand ball at Court ; and ' La 
 Mort de Cesar ' at the theatre, with Talma as Brutus. During the 
 ball. Napoleon talked at great length with Goethe and Wieland. 
 Speaking of ancient and modern literature, Napoleon touched on 
 Shakespeare, whom he was too French to comprehend, and said to 
 Goethe : ' Je suis dtonnd qu' un grand esprit, comme vous, n'aime pas 
 les genre tranches.' Goethe might have replied that les grands 
 esprits have almost universally been the reverse of tranches in their 
 tastes ; but, of course, it was not for him to contradict the Emperor. 
 As Johnson said on a similar occasion : ' Sir, it was not for me to 
 bandy words with my sovereign.' After speaking magniloquently of 
 tragedy, Napoleon told him he ought to write a * Death of Csesar,' 
 
GOETHE. 309 
 
 but in a grander style than the tragedy of Voltaire. ' Ce travail pour- 
 rait devenir la principale t4che de votre vie. Dans cette tragddie il 
 faudrait montrer au monde comment C^sar aurait pu faire le bon- 
 heur de 1' humanity si on lui avait laiss^ le temps d' ex^cuter ses vastes 
 plans.' One cannot keep thinking of Goethe's early scheme to write 
 Julius Casar, and how entirely opposed it would have been to the 
 genre tranchh admired by Napoleon. 
 
 " A proposition more acceptable than that of writing tragedies at 
 his age, was that of accompanying Napoleon to Paris. ' Venez k 
 Paris, je I'exige de vous ; IS. vous trouverez un cercle plus vaste pour 
 votre esprit d'observation, Ik vous trouervez des matiferes immenses 
 pour vos creations podtiques.' He had never seen a great capital like 
 Paris or London, and there was something very tempting in the invi- 
 tation. F . von Miiller says he often spoke with him on the probable 
 expenses of the journey, and of the Parisian usages ; but the incon- 
 venience of so long a journey (in those days), and his own advanced 
 age, seem to have checked his desire. 
 
 " On the 14th October he and Wieland received the cross of the 
 Legion of Honour." 
 
 6. The extraordinary story of the connection with Bettina 
 Brentano, or von Arnim, derives its chief significance from its 
 undoubted bearing on certain of the later works, for which it 
 supplied some materials. This Bettina was the daughter of 
 that Frau Maximiliane Brentano, with whom Goethe had some 
 " dangerous " (as Mr Lewes calls them) love passages in early 
 times, as well as some pleasant pastime in playing with her step- 
 children, and accompanying her on the piano with his bass ; and 
 this fact may or may not be taken to communicate an additional 
 psychological interest to the whole affair. Though it is evident 
 that Bettina in after days did a good deal in the way of dressing- 
 up the accounts of her adventures with t!he poetic sexagenarian, 
 there is much by which they can be checked, and, on the whole, 
 a coherent idea gained of the real facts. Bettina clearly, in spite 
 of her craving for notoriety in her mature life, as for something 
 more than notoriety in her youth, managed afterwards to culti- 
 vate intellectual clearness in some directions, for she is reported 
 to have said to Lord Houghton,'that Goethe treated women very 
 much as, in his childhood, he treated flowers and birds — " pulling 
 off the leaves to see how the petals were joined to the calyx, or 
 plucking birds to observe how the feathers were inserted into 
 the wings." 
 
310 GOETHE. 
 
 Bettina Brentano began life in the most peculiar manner. She 
 was living with her grandmother at Offenbach, when she made 
 the acquaintance of Gunderode, a young canoness, in a convent 
 at Frankfort, and became so greatly attached to her that half her 
 days were spent in watching the coming and going of this sister, 
 who assuredly did not much befit the insignia she wore. She 
 was sentimental, and far from averse to a little flirting. The two 
 read " Werther " together, and discussed the charms of suicide 
 in a most edifying way. Neither acted on the results of their 
 deliberations, and separating, they wrote long letters to each other. 
 After a considerable separation, the first thing Gunderode said 
 when they met was, " The other day I spoke to a physician, and 
 he showed me that it was very easy to kill oneself" Where- 
 upon she opened her dress, and showed the child the weak 
 spot. To show the rapidly-shifting feelings possible to these 
 Rousseau-Goethecised women, next day Bettina brings to Gun- 
 derode a young French hussar officer, with a high bear-skin cap, 
 and, introducing him to Gunderode, says, " There, I have 
 brought you a lover ; he shall make life dear to you ! " But, 
 apparently, Bettina reckoned without her host. The hussar 
 lover was not enough for Gunderode ; and it is mournful to read 
 that about three weeks later she stabbed herself on the very spot 
 that she had shown to Bettina. 
 
 " Beginnings are pleasant," said Goethe. This was Bettina's 
 beginning in the ways of sentiment. Her relations to Goethe 
 were in keeping with it. Bettina of course gets access to 
 Goethe's mother, writes letters to her constantly — letters of the 
 wildest and most passionate description. Frau Goethe scolds a 
 little, and affects to put the impetuous child aside with an air of 
 pragmatic superiority that is delightful to behold ; but she en- 
 courages her at the same time, with an odd mixture of fun and 
 gratified pride in the greatness of her son, who thus fascinates 
 and conquers. If it had been desired to stop intercourse with 
 Bettina, nothing could have been easier, but the old Frau Goethe 
 desires no such thing. On the contrary, Bettina is at last invited 
 to stay with the old dame ; and the old dame, it is abundantly 
 clear, has a secret pleasure in Bettina's way of exciting her ardent 
 feelings with pictures and stories and anecdotes of the " divine 
 poet.' If it may be said that Frau Goethe was inclined to study 
 and to analyse this young heart, not the less did she regard all 
 
GOETHE. 311 
 
 this exaggerated ardour and devotion as a tribute of glory indi- 
 rectly reflected upon herself. At last the day was fixed for the 
 " child's " meeting with Goethe. Poor Bettina cannot eat, cannot 
 rest, can hardly breathe indeed ! The Privy Councillor comes at 
 last — regards her there with some surprise, receives her in a 
 somewhat distant and stately way ; but Bettina, who had already 
 played tricks, and may be said to know her " subject," cuts the 
 knot, if she does not untie it. As soon as he sits down she 
 jumps upon his knee, nestles in his bosom, and falls asleep there. 
 When she awoke, she calmly tells us, " a new life had begun." 
 She is sometimes almost blasphemous in her addresses to him, 
 less in this than in others which we could not quote : — 
 
 " Through thee shall I enter into immortal life ; through the beloved 
 into the godly doth the loving one enter ; for love is the overstream^ 
 ing into salvation.'' 
 
 Probably Goethe's feelings in the circumstances wer-e what the 
 Yankees call "mixed," but one feeling, we are justified in saying, 
 soon came into prominence. It was the feeling of something 
 novel in his emotions, which might be suggestive for fiction, if 
 not elaborated into verse. Therefore, he could not afford to 
 thrust Bettina aside, or to check the passionate outflow of her 
 treasures of affection. He rather for a time drew them out and 
 encouraged them. Mr Lewes is very concerned to rebut the idea 
 that Goethe ever entertained for Bettina and her demonstrations 
 anything else than a good-natured and patient toleration. He 
 sets forward many facts to show that the poet was really inidifferent 
 to her, and to prove that passages in the poems which have been 
 thought to apply to Bettina were really directed to another lady. 
 He says that Goethe after a lapse of time became tired of her-r— 
 which is probable enough. He became tired of ladies who were 
 hardly likely to be in some ways so troublesome. But the one 
 awkward fact is not removed. Goethe for a time remained on 
 friendly terms with Bettina, saw her frequently, and was under 
 the necessity of quarrelling with her before he could get rid of 
 her, and even after all that, did not meet her overtures for recon- 
 cihation quite like a man who had been very deeply hurt at the 
 liberties she had assumed toward him. The bald truth is that 
 Bettina gave the same cause for dismissal at first that she did at 
 last ; and the fact that she remained for a considerable time on 
 
312 GOETHE. 
 
 friendly terms with him, bears as much against the supposition of 
 Goethe's complete indifference to her as her mistakes as to dates 
 and persons in her correspondence bears against the possibility 
 of their being altogether genuine. The relationship, indeed, was 
 hardly creditable to either, and less creditable to Goethe than to 
 " the child." 
 
 Herr Rosenkranz, with his peculiar subtlety and determination 
 to find the deepest significance in everything connected with 
 Goethe, has some of the most ingenious and pretty fancies about 
 Bettina that we ever remember to have read. We must translate 
 one or two little passages, just to show how constructive and ideal 
 German criticism may become : — 
 
 " Bettina is an idyllic nature. She exhibits herself even as a child; 
 her character is essentially based on feminine feeling, as between 
 plastic and musical form she struggles towards a promised and definite 
 
 configuration She gives us the intuition, in which her feeling 
 
 satiates itself with a truly oriental, pictorial splendour In this 
 
 struggle towards form, Bettina is romantic, only the romantic is with 
 her idyllic. The impulse towards the Nature-life in its secrecy — the 
 flowers, the bees and butterflies, the dancing boat on the wave, the 
 dreamy suggestion of the Clouds drifting in the sky, the passion for 
 the glistering sunshine, the deep delight in all these is idyUic. Their 
 true productiveness, therefore, has never had any end, as indeed hers 
 has not 
 
 " The Catholic Church calls itself the mother of the faithful, and 
 this guardian-like relationship passed to Bettina, the child, in full 
 strength. Art in all its forms is very welcome to this churchly 
 
 mother, if they have in view her glorification The Catholic 
 
 Church has a holy service, and the Saints who individually dedicate 
 themselves to worship, cannot seldom absorb in themselves the whole 
 Divinity, and from themselves again give forth in streams its tender 
 lovingness. The worldly and protestant Goethe became Bettina's 
 object of worship, and she did not even shrink from naming him her 
 God. Where, however, this object of worship did not meet her 
 expectations, she repudiated him ; his ' Wilhelm Meister,' and his 
 ' Wahlverwandtschaften,' were certainly not to her taste, and she has 
 not concealed it. 
 
 " But, generally, and in consequence of her peculiar nature, it may 
 be said that just in so far as the holy service of the Catholic Church 
 is a reproduction of the antique polytheism, so has she finally pro- 
 jected for Goethe a monument as a true Olympian Zeus." * 
 
 * Neue Studien li., p. 104-105. 
 
GOETHE. 313 
 
 The irony of the relationship may perhaps be seen in this 
 repudiation of "Wilhelm Meister," and the "Elective Affinities," 
 by Bettina. 
 
 As in this case of Bettina, it cannot be said that the positions 
 in which Goethe found himself were invariably without their 
 ludicrous side, notwithstanding the stateliness and the statuesque 
 pose he sought to assume. Here is another instance of this, out 
 of the later Weimar period also. We quote from the Quarterly 
 Review: — 
 
 " The theatre which used to be the scene of his glory, he has for 
 some time deserted ; whimsically driven away by the performance of 
 a mastiff dog in the Forest of Bondy, introduced under the auspices 
 of amateurs, which the Court had its reasons for indulging. The pro- 
 fane animal (we mean the dog) persisted in pulling a bell by biting a 
 sausage which was tied to a rope, and the spectators (who of old were 
 apt to pique the poets by clamouring for ' a bear and some boxers,' in 
 the midst of their best passages) most pertinaciously found food for 
 merriment in the exertion of this histrionic brute." * 
 
 But this taste was not confined to Weimar, or else soon spread 
 from it. The writer goes on to add:—" In the opera of 01)Tnpia, 
 at Berlin, an elephant was one of the dramatis personse, till on 
 the third night of the representation, the lads in the hind legs 
 having quarrelled with those in the fore legs, the mighty beast 
 was extended on the stage in terrible convulsions." 
 
 As for the much-praised Duke of Weimar, this " man of noble 
 soul and noble endowment " of Mr Carlyle, he had one great 
 fault — he was a foul-mouthed man — one of the worst kind too— 
 the utterly shameless kind, whom not even the reproof and 
 reproach of a pure-minded and honest man could stir out of the 
 stagnant atmosphere of his self-satisfied sensuality, even in talk 
 and memory. Are there not " some things which, though we all 
 know them well, should yet be treated as secrets, because this is 
 favourable to modesty and good morals " ? Amdt, in one of his 
 accounts of his wanderings, tells of a meeting of the Duke of 
 Weimar and the Baron Vom Stein, at Cologne in 1815, where it 
 seemed to be the delight of the Duke to irritate the Baron by 
 loose talk. Amdt, in particular, details one instance, when the 
 Duke spoke about the poet Werner — on whom, as our readers 
 will remember, Mr Carlyle made an essay — who lived for some- 
 
 * Article *' Tour in Germany," Quarterly Review^ Vol. xxxi., p. 176. 
 
314 GOETHE. 
 
 time at Weimar, so that the Duke had the opportunity of observ- 
 ing him. Arndt naively says that the Baron's crest began to 
 rise at his easy-going loose style of talk. " The poor fellow," 
 said the Duke of Weimar, " had got the notion that by a kind of 
 material transmigration of the soul he was to make a sort of 
 entrie into all conceivable female natures till he had found the 
 one God had specially created for him. It was his poetical physio- 
 logy," added the Duke. " Poetical ! " exclaimed Stein ; " you 
 mean princely ! " The Duke wound up with the moral, that, as 
 a matter of fact, every man had done the same : " You, too," he 
 said, turning to Stein, " have, I daresay, not always behaved like 
 a Joseph." " If that were so," said Stein, " it concerns me 
 alone ; and I have always hated filthy conversation, and do not 
 think it the proper thing for a German prince to talk in that 
 way before young officers." There were several of these present 
 along with older men.. The Duke was silent, and then there 
 followed a deathlike silence. After a few minutes the Duke 
 calmly passed his hand across his face, and continued the con- 
 versation as though nothing had happened ; but the company had 
 been by turns hot and cold. . . . The Duke seemed here simply 
 the easy, offhand scoffer and mocker, or superfine sceptical anno- 
 tator or commentator, a Mephistopheles who probably dragged 
 Goethe down oftener than he raised him up. It was odd, too, 
 that he had always a penchant to irritate and provoke Stein, and 
 amuse himself at his irritability ; for through it all, and in spite 
 of the blows and counterblasts of the Baron, in princely indiffer- 
 ences at the Duke, like one of the gods of Epicurus." Arndt else- 
 where says that the talk of this " man of noble soul and noble 
 endowment " of Mr Carlyle, was often such that no man would 
 have ventured even to indicate it in print. When we meet 
 with a coarse, foul-mouthed poor man, whose circumstances and 
 upbringing are in part his excuse, we shun him, and plainly call 
 him so ; why should we not, like men, plainly say so of a coarse, 
 foul-mouthed man, whose upbringing and circumstances are his 
 condemnation ! Surely Mr Carlyle's worship of the hero some- 
 times runs to indiscriminate worship of the great and successful 
 merely. It is true that Duke Carl did not a little for literature ; 
 his services would have been yet greater had he sometimes been 
 more self-respecting. From the above anecdote which will suggest 
 much, we may discover the kind of atmosphere out of which 
 
GOETHE. 31s 
 
 Goethe drew some of his inspirations for art ; and also 
 experience some sympathy with Herder in the position in 
 which he found himself in Weimar, and his utter repulsion from 
 this kind of filth. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Goethe's fine artistic sense, to which he aimed at making so 
 much subservient, grew less and less clear and efficient as he 
 advanced in years. His interests increased, and in some degree 
 grew conflicting. His scientific curiosities impelled him into 
 the region of special experiment, and he piqued himself on dis- 
 coveries in the fields of physiology and optics. Some of these 
 were soon demonstrated to be partial, incomplete, if not even 
 worthless. His theory of colours, which denied that white light 
 is composed of the prismatic colours — colours being produced, 
 in his idea, by a transparent medium between light and dark- 
 ness — was unfortunate ; and yet he held to it in face of the 
 scientific world, which he called by very hard names. More 
 successful was he in his theory of plants, deriving, as he did, the 
 whole after-forms from the leaf as modifications of it. So far his 
 ideas of the development of the vertebral structure of the skull, is 
 an application of the same principle — the brain itself being an 
 ascending series of modifications of one vertebral form — bone 
 structures, like vegetable growths, following in their development 
 one identical type. Here he may be said to have so far 
 anticipated Mr Darwin. 
 
 Some good German authorities regard this scientific devotion 
 as mistaken, and as one which had something to do with that 
 peculiar atrophy of healthy creative power which, at last, overtook 
 him. On this point Tieck has said a few pregnant words, in a 
 passage dealing generally with the later Weimar life. We may 
 quote what of it bears more directly on the point in hand : — 
 
 " How capricious, how severe and stiff he is — humour and imagina- 
 tion are as though queriched in his courtly age. It is the nature of 
 the stiff, pedantic father, who was a wonderful man, which at all times 
 now comes most prominently forward in him. Passion Goethe had 
 almost wholly lost, and ever as he grew older, the more un-German 
 he became. One, indeed, may well wish that he had never come to 
 Weimar and to the court. . . . His court-life, his title, his politi- 
 cal power, greatly injured him ; he should have remained in the liter- 
 
3i6 GOETHE. 
 
 ary world, then he would have properly developed his original 
 character. Still more rapidly he fell from his original height after the 
 Italian journey. Then he fixed on abstract ideas of taste, on the 
 classical and the ideal. Also he concerned himself with natural 
 science, which he should have let alone ; for he really had no call to 
 it, though on his works in that department he laid more store in his 
 old days than he did on his poetry. ... I have so often won- 
 dered, and do still wonder, at the excellence of his early poems, that 
 when I now hear so many ill-judged panegyrics, I am half of a mind 
 to do in my old age what I sometimes thought of doing in my youth — 
 that is, write, by way of change, a book against Goethe. In his writ- 
 ings, whether earlier or later, a separation must be made ; not all are 
 alike good and significant ; and this posterity will affirm." * 
 
 We may thus admire Goethe as the artist, and admit fully the 
 value of his earlier works, without falling prostrate before Goethe 
 as the man ; and, as a wise discrimination in this respect, will guide 
 us even to some of the weak points in his art, we may thus be 
 only realising the distinction between the good and the evil in 
 them, which Tieck seriously proclaimed that posterity would affirm. 
 
 In this later period Goethe had made ;iiany friends who have 
 celebrated, in various ways, his greatness, his affability, his mar- 
 vellous powers. But they are all, in one respect, fatally one- 
 sided, and alike fail to satisfy the impartial inquirer, who would 
 fain discriminate faithfully. They are satellites revolving round 
 a sun, receiving from him all the light they reflect, never sub- 
 mitting it to the least process of analysis. Could we apply to 
 them the spectroscopic test, it would give the identical band 
 to be found by direct application to Goethe himself. Red 
 at the one end, violet at the other, with all the intermediate bars 
 in relative position. Eckermann, Soret, Falk, von Miiller, — the 
 materials may differ, but the spirit is the same. Goethe, indeed, 
 could not permit really independent judgments in close and 
 daily companionship with him ; he demanded the tribute of wor- 
 ship, and no reporter has revealed to us any more than the man 
 as he wished to appear to those who were favoured. This is the 
 note of all these memoirs, and the reader who would understand 
 Goethe must submit them one and all to a series of tests. The 
 stateliness, the vigour, the persistent pursuit of the one ruling 
 idea of Goethe's life, they do fully reflect, as well as that attrac- 
 tiveness and fascination which he so supremely exercised over a 
 
 * Koepke's Tieck's Leben, ii. p. 289. 
 
GOETHE. 317 
 
 wide circle, and his personal kindliness, consideration and almost 
 zealous concern for those who thus attached themselves to him 
 likewise ; but no more than this ; and little further of faithful 
 guidance is to be got from the most popular memoirs. It is most 
 significant in every aspect of it that the man to whom the world 
 seemed to deny nothing — offering up to him, at all stages, a full 
 and sweet cup from which to drink — fame, fortune, success, hearts 
 which he blighted, or hearts which be filled with the savour of a 
 true and self denying love, should yet, in the ripeness of years, 
 have passed away in that March morning of 1832, with words on 
 his lips expressing the dominant dissatisfaction and restless striv- 
 ing of his life — " more light ! more light! " 
 
 IX. 
 
 Goethe's life will, for critical purposes, divide itself into four 
 great epochs. There is first, the period of early, spontaneous, 
 unreflective health, when he was still in open sympathy with the 
 life around him. This period is marked by the " Goetz," the 
 inception of " Faust," and the earlier Lieder. Next comes the 
 period of division determined by conscious appropriation of 
 experiences characterised by mixed motifs, beginning with 
 Werther, and exhibiting the suggestion of what, as we shall see, 
 an expert German critic has well called the worship of mere 
 " Naturkraft " in direct opposition to free-will. (Mr Carlyle and 
 others have talked as though, with Goethe, the spirit of the 
 " Werther " gave place to a serener and wholly different atmos- 
 phere : it shall be our business to show that, much as he tried to 
 escape from this influence, it returned upon him, Hke the 
 monster conjured up by Frankenstein, and invested his " Wahl- 
 verwandschaften," his " Wilhelm Meister," and other works of 
 later years, with the self-same atmosphere of necessity and Natur- 
 kraft.) His third period, coincident with confessed struggles to 
 rise above certain personal associations and tendencies, is marked 
 also by attempts to escape from this influence, and to find relief 
 in variety by classical studies — and it includes especially 
 " Tasso," " Iphigenia," and the " Italian Journey." The fourth 
 period exhibits Goethe as the confessed and confirmed self- 
 experimenter and unrestful Necessitarian, with the pure " Natur- 
 
3i8 GOETHE. 
 
 kraft " supreme in all his product ; his wide culture only subser- 
 vient to its expression, but the conscious illustration of this 
 obtaining influence rendering true concentration (apart from 
 clearness of mere style) almost impossible to him. As if under some 
 fatality he is compelled to take up the old lines of influence and to 
 weave them together. If we shall find ourselves unable to agree 
 with certain critics, like Mr Lewes and M. Scherer, in saying 
 that Goethe's later works (such as the second part of " Faust " 
 and the " Wanderjahre ") are disconnected alike by form and 
 conception from his earlier ones ; we shall assuredly not attempt, 
 with Rosenkranz and others, to establish a bond between them, 
 save, indeed, on the ground of detecting in the earlier works 
 germs of the same tendencies, which cause these critics to dis- 
 credit what Goethe himself (a true critic) regarded as his most 
 complete and powerful works. Our criticism will bear so un- 
 favourably on Goethe, in some of the aspects in which we must 
 view him, that it is with a sense of relief we have in our German 
 readings, met witli hints — if no mrore than somewhat unsystematic 
 hints— that good critical heads among the Germans themselves 
 reached the same conclusion and had the boldness to utter it. We 
 shall first hear what Borne has to say : — 
 
 " Goethe, as artist, knows Necessity but no Freedom His 
 
 style is delicate and pure, therefore he pleases. He is distinguished, 
 therefore he is esteemed by others. But I carefiiUy enquired whether 
 the smooth skin covered health and strength ; and I found it was not 
 so : I found no vein which could show on the lily-white hand, the 
 way to the heart. Goethe has something dignified ; but this 
 dignity does not come from his excellence, but rather from his suc- 
 cessful assumption, from etiquette. Like a King, he has cunningly 
 and thoughtfully ordered and arranged all . . . so as to compel hon- 
 our and fear. Enough for them for whom such homage is enough j 
 but not enough for us who serve only with the heart. Goethe's 
 thoughts are all walled round and fastened. He desires even that his 
 reader should no more go out once he is inside. The door shuts 
 behind him, and he is imprisoned. Goethe, because he is really 
 narrow, narrows." * 
 
 This seems a severe impeachment of Mr Carlyle's hero ; but 
 Borne is not alone. A more exact, and perhaps a soberer, critic 
 
 writes : 
 
 * Aus meinem Tagebuch von Ludwig Bcirne. Pp. 23 and 77-78. 
 
GOETHE. 319 
 
 " Goethe had all the fine tact of Lessing, with a much richer 
 imagination, but he was without Lessing's manliness ; he had all 
 the tenderness and sensibility of Herder, but was without his faith. 
 So far as the mere handling of the subject was concerned, he was, 
 we may say, the greatest of our poets, but he had no enthusiasm 
 for anything but himself, and his works are but the flattering por- 
 traitures of his own individuality. In his study at Weimar he was 
 wont studiously to dispose of himself in relation to the lights, so 
 that he might appear to strangers who visited him there under 
 the most effective aspect ; so his works, each and all, were but arti- 
 ficial means of throwing a favourable light upon himself He had 
 sympathy with the world only in so far as it served his ends. For 
 the affairs of his country he had no eye — he positively hated them. 
 He even sung the praises of Napoleon, because Napoleon acutely 
 flattered him ; and during the Wars of Liberation (18 13) he shut 
 himself up in his study, and busied himself with Chinese or Ori- 
 ental trifles, and disgusted with an age that acknowledged some- 
 thing greater than himself. This man, however, to his contem- 
 poraries, appeared the greatest man alive, for he could not flatter 
 himself as he did, without at the same time flattering a countless 
 number of souls as base as his own ! His talent also threw a 
 poetic beauty over the inclinations of an aristocracy which, boasting 
 a high refinement, submitted willingly to a deep national degrada- 
 tion." * 
 
 A third voice has to be heard, dealing more particularly with 
 the " Wahlverwandschaften," in this wise : — 
 
 " It is a bad piece this romance. Unfree nature-power, so he 
 teaches us, raises itself in man over the power of free-will, particu- 
 larly in the affairs of love, where the better self of man and the laws 
 of human society cannot control it. The romance might be taken for 
 a justification of adultery, if it were not that by Goethe's expressed 
 intention it was not so. The poet will by it once again, as in Werther, 
 expose a disease of the time; that he expresses; every part of the ro- 
 mance is alive with it, . . . but it is alive because the poet had him- 
 self surrendered to the prevalent disease, and had not yet risen out 
 of it into a clear atmosphere. It was certainly no weighty, but a 
 
 * Mr Lewes discredits Menzel (p. 256) as having been completely rejected by England, 
 the translation of his work meeting with such hopeless want of encouragement, " that I 
 am perhaps wrong to waste a line upon it." But then why did Mr Lewes waste so many 
 lines on it ? and docs the want of success in England in the lea«t determine whether 
 or not there was any truth in what Menzel said ? Borne and Tieck and others as 
 noted, have, however, said the same thing ; nay, even Schiller once said precisely the same 
 thing. 
 
320 GOETHE. 
 
 dirty episode out of the poet's life, out of the chronique scandaleuse 
 of his Weimar surroundings that he made the nucleus of this work." 
 
 Tieck speaks to the same effect : — " The ' Wahlverwand- 
 schaften' has always seemed to me disgusting. All is here cal- 
 culated, and that to give effect to doubtful points. Edward is an 
 intolerable fellow, and is, besides, so pretentious. Mittler also, 
 ' on whose worth Goethe apparently lays great weight, is a low 
 character." 
 
 A fifth voice is that of Herr Gutzkow, which, we dare say, Mr 
 Carlyle would taboo, and Mr G. H. Lewes would discredit. But 
 Herr Gutzkow has readers, and he has some insight, and a deft, 
 ironic way of putting it. " The sound human understanding," he 
 says, " which had still been powerful enough to penetrate through 
 other phenomena in corrupt literature, had no more place. 
 Goethe's ' Seven Loves,' — among them that love for the trans- 
 parent female juggler, who herself had an old weak-minded 
 husband, and whom we must name 'Frau von Villemer,' was 
 everywhere handled with the greatest pathos. In Heidelberg 
 they erected a tablet on the Castle, — ' Here, best of all, rested 
 Goethe, in his walks ofiSis!' 1815! Was it still the young 
 poetic Goethe of 1777 ? No ; it was the Excellency, the old — 
 almost seventy years old — courtier. Assuredly among the night- 
 ingale thickets, he has still a comic rendezvous ! No wonder 
 that foreign nations should hold us Germans for empty fools !" * 
 What has been hinted in Gath, and plainly spoken in Ashke- 
 lon, may be published in Damascus, the hero-worship that is so 
 assailed in its native land, may be successfully assaulted in a dis- 
 tant country. We have now found the cue what to search for ; it is 
 the " Naturkraft " in its associations with that daimonic influence 
 which Goethe ineffectively made the excuse for the vagaries and 
 the helpless self-surrenders to which, by artistic pretences, he 
 endeavoured to give the aspect of conscious results of will. It 
 was a kind of refined jugglery ; but no man can rise above his 
 own character, any more than water can rise above its own level. 
 That he did so juggle is a tribute to certain moral facts in human 
 nature. Regard man merely as a means to an end, as an instru- 
 ment to be played on by certain forces, as a mere something 
 moved by secret and unapproachable and irresponsible powers ; 
 and you empty life of all moral harmony and true meaning. 
 
 * Gutzkow's Dionysus Longinus, p. i6. 
 
GOETHE. 
 
 321 
 
 Goethe's life is faithfully pictured in his art, in so far as we see 
 there the representation of lives lived according to impulse, yet 
 receiving direction from occult influences which impart a unity 
 that could never have flown out of these impulses themselves, 
 however well regulated by any system projected by the character. 
 This is Werther ; but in strictness it is Goethe also ; this is Wil- 
 helm Meister; but in strictness it is also Goethe once again; 
 and more strange still, it is, as we shall see, Egmont likewise, and 
 still also Goethe. Both author and characters abnegate will, and 
 surrender themselves to destiny, or some phantasy that stands in 
 the place of it, and both would repudiate the idea of liberty in 
 any such sense as the ordinary mind conceives, or can conceive, 
 of it, and with this liberty the essential idea of self-sacrifice perishes 
 also. Self-determination, self-direction, is only competent, with- 
 in certain narrow limits, to self-formation, — that is necessarily the 
 moral limit of such free action as is possible. Mr Lewes himself 
 says the same thing, but tries hard to fence and guard, and, at 
 the same time, to say something different. He writes : — 
 
 " Although Werther is not Goethe, there is one part of Goethe livr 
 ing in Werther. This is visible in the incidents and language as well 
 as in the character. It is the part we see reappearing under the vari- 
 ous masks of Weislingen, Clavigo, Faust, Fernando, Edward, Meis- 
 ter, and Tasso, which no critic will call the same lay figure variously 
 draped, but which every critic must see belong to one and the same 
 genus : men of strong desires and weak volitions, wavering impres- 
 sionable natures unable to attain self-mastery. Goethe was one of those 
 liiho are wavering because impressionable, but whose wavering is not 
 weakness; they oscillate, but they return into the direct path which 
 their wills have prescribed. He was tender as well as impressionable. 
 He could not be stern, but he could be resolute. He had only, there- 
 fore, in imagination to keep in abeyance the native force of resolu- 
 tion which gave him mastery, and in that abeyance a weak wavering 
 character stood before him, the 01 iginal of which was himself ! " 
 
 And still more characteristic of Mr Lewes, perhaps, are the 
 few sentences which precede and introduce those just given : — 
 
 " Werther is not Goethe. Werther perishes because he is wretched, 
 and is wretched because he is weak. ' Goethe was king over him- 
 self.' He saw the danger and evaded it; tore himself away from the 
 woman he loved, instead of contitiuing in a dangerous position^ * 
 
 * Lewes's " Life and Works of Goethe," p. 150. Mr Lewes himself notes radical changes 
 with respect to the destination of " Wilhelm Meister" due to Goethe's residence in Italy- 
 such changes as involved a complete bisection of the book into two disparate elements. 
 
 X 
 
322 GOETHE. 
 
 Now, it is exactly here that the crucial question with respect to 
 Goethe arises, and we really cannot bring ourselves to agree with 
 Mr Lewes in so categorically asserting that Goethe always returned 
 into the direct path that his will had prescribed. We hold that 
 it was not so, that, though he could observe and control certain 
 elements in himself for purposes of art, nothing is more patent 
 than his weak and continuous and permanent submissions under 
 the merest impulses and impressions, which impart more and 
 more a certain flimsiness, lack of concentration, or power to vary 
 his types of character, or to discriminate and to mark out success- 
 fully their varying grades of importance in relation to the action. 
 
 I^aube represents a large class of critics in considering the 
 Wanderjahre, for example, as an icy product of the weakness of 
 age, lacking in the pathological interest, and the truer passion, 
 what are essential to a true romance ; * and in this he would 
 even be joined by Mr Lewes ; but surely it is, in some degree, 
 unphilosophical, if not uncritical, to isolate and set aside certain 
 works, and to decline to regard them as associated with certain 
 lines of tendency which Goethe himself emphatically states were 
 ever, more or less, consciously present to him. When it is said 
 that all Goethe's characters are leading characters, it is not 
 necessarily praise,t for relation should be observed in this 
 also, and such relation is impossible amid a morbid reflec- 
 tiveness and self-expression. Instead of the second part 
 of " Faust " and the " Wanderjahre " being decisively separated 
 from his earlier works, we hold that they are but the final 
 expression of a process which is to be traced proceeding and 
 deepening, as we find Goethe surrendering himself more and 
 more to certain theories or fancies or superstitions. To make 
 this clear, we must try to trace out the progress of the " Natur- 
 kraft and demonic" influences; and in doingso, we shall see 
 how deeply Goethe's art is throughout one with his life. 
 
 Nothing can really be more plain than that the chief point of 
 Goethe's religion consisted in this deference to the " daemonic," 
 though it is most remarkable that Mr Lewes, for whatever reason, 
 has not so much as once referred to it in his life of Goethe. Clear 
 in arrangement as that work is, and admirable for the skill with 
 which criticism is blended with narrative without impairing the 
 
 * Deutsche Litteratur, p. 213. 
 
 t Jede Person in seinem Romanen und Dramen behandelt er, als ware sie die Haupt- 
 person. — Heine. 
 
GOETHE. 323 
 
 sense ot unity, yet we must be allowed to ask the question, How 
 is it possible that a man's life could be fully and faithfully written 
 if one element — which he himself over and over again emphati- 
 cally declared was dominant in it, and determined its develop- 
 ment at the most critical periods — is studiously and completely 
 ignored ? Goethe was in the habit not only of recognising it in 
 the events of his later years, but of reading quite seriously in its 
 light the incidents of his earlier life also. We find him soberly 
 saying to Eckermann in 1830: — 
 
 " Not merely we are the love, but also the beloved object that 
 charms us. And then — what we must not forget — we have as a 
 powerful third element, the daemonic (DSmonisch), which accom- 
 panies every passion, and which finds its proper element in love. 
 This was particularly active in my connection with Lili ; it gave 
 another turn to my whole life, and I do not say too much when I 
 assert that my coming to Weimar, and my presence here now, were 
 immediate consequences of it." 
 
 This daemonic influence with Goethe was vital and determina- 
 tive. Great men possessed subtle powers of attraction and 
 fascination because of it. It was a part of them ; yet, in a sense, 
 distinct from them — a tertium quid of potent power that held in 
 it the capacities of becoming a magic medium of influence on all 
 sides. It was, in fact, a medium through which great personalities 
 worked, and could only successfully work. There is a sense in 
 which all events are in the hand of Providence ; but that com- 
 monplace morality was not what Goethe had in his mind, or 
 meant to express, when he said to Eckermann in 1828, "No 
 productiveness of the highest kind, no remarkable discovery, no 
 great thought, which bears fruit and has results, is in the power 
 of any one ; such things are above all earthly control." He was, 
 in fact, thinking of the daemonic, which was, in reality, nearly akin 
 to Mr Carlyle's heroism. Napoleon had it; so had the Duke 
 Carl ; Goethe himself was invested by it, and could not perform 
 any action whatever apart from it. Particularly was he under its 
 influence in his love affairs ; and though he once declared that 
 " man in his turn must endeavour to carry his point against the 
 daemonic,"* this is hardly consistent with other utterances of his; 
 and, as we shall see, his efforts to relieve himself from its dictates 
 were successful only as to facts and not as to influence. He got 
 
 * Eckermann ii., p. 374. 
 
324 GOETHE. 
 
 rid of Lili, but he admits that the influence of that relationship 
 followed him, as indeed it deserved to do, if he is sincere in 
 saying (which, however, Mr Lewes has surely all too bluntly asserted 
 he was not) that " She was the first, and I can also add she is the 
 last I truly loved; for all the inclinations which have since 
 agitated my heart, were superficial and trivial in comparison." 
 
 Notwithstanding that Mr Lewes has dismissed the Autobio- 
 graphy from an authoritative position on the ground of its 
 prevailing falseness of tone, especially in all that bears on the 
 passionate side of Goethe's life, he has simply to re-erect it into 
 a most efficient authority in this individual instance, in order that 
 he may find a kind of half-justification for Goethe's desertion of 
 Lili in the superficiality of his passion for her. And this he does 
 in the face of Goethe's deliberate statements elsewhere to the 
 contrary. To us, it is above everything evident that Goethe, in 
 the Autobiography, is desirous to present this episode with as 
 much reserve and calmness as is consistent even with a general 
 statement ; but even there, it is conspicuously intimated that it 
 was an affection which absence only intensified. And once for 
 all, we think that Goethe's deliberate expression is more authori- 
 tative than Mr Lewes's ipse dixit on such a point ! 
 
 We may perhaps be excused if we pause a moment to note how 
 peculiar it is that in its fundamental conception this idea of love 
 as. daemonic is almost identical with the idea of love put by Plato 
 into the mouth of Diotima, addressing Socrates, who has spoken 
 of love as a glorious God : — 
 
 " He is no God, Socrates, but rather a spirit (Aat/iwv), a great spirit, 
 one of those beings who occupy a middle place between gods and men ; 
 for, as God himself can hold no intercourse with man, and all the 
 fellowship which exists between heaven and earth is realised through 
 this intermediate order, which bridges over the chasm between them. 
 These spirits are many, and Love is one of them." * 
 
 And we may pause a moment longer to note another peculiar 
 fact bearing on the literary history of the " daemonic," in which 
 Mr Carlyle might, by a word or two, aid us. It is indeed a very 
 noticeable circumstance that he should have completely missed 
 Schiller's meaning in one important point, in his translation of 
 that remarkable passage from the ninth letter in the "^sthetische 
 Erziehung des Menschen," which he gave in his Essay on " The 
 
 * Symposium, 203, et ieg. 
 
GOETHE. 325 
 
 State of German Literature" (p. 43, vol. i., Miscellaneous 
 Essays, ed. of 1837), and again in his Life of Schiller, p. 156. 
 One sentence in these translations stands : — " Here from the 
 pure aether of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of 
 Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollution of ages and generations, 
 which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it." Now 
 what, according to our accessible authorities, Schiller wrote was 
 this : — " Hier aus dem reinen ^ther seiner ddmonischen Natur 
 rinnt die Quelle der Schonheit herab, unangesteckt von dem 
 Verderbniss der Geschlechter und Zeiten, welche tief unter ihr in 
 triiben Strudeln sich walzen." We can hardly realise a man 
 translating " damonische Natur '' as " spiritual essence," and the 
 possibihty suggests itself that Schiller may have altered the 
 phrase after having come fully under the influence of Goethe, 
 and heard him speak, as he was wont to do, of the dsemonic. 
 Were it so, this would be curious ; but we cannot believe it is so ; 
 for these letters, which were written to the Duke of Holstein- 
 Augustenburg, were first published in the Horen in the year 
 1795, before which time Goethe and Schiller were friends, their 
 correspondence having begun in 1794.* 
 
 In other forms this deference to the daemonic appears, per 
 meating and colouring Goethe's most dramatic productions. As 
 we take it, this element has directed or formed a whole succes- 
 sion of symbols in the second part of " Faust," connected with 
 " The Mothers." We fail otherwise to find any relevancy or 
 coherence in one complete section of that remarkable work. If 
 fault is to be found with this portion from an artistic point of 
 view, it is to us pervaded by the deepest personal and autobio- 
 graphical suggestion, fully justifying, to our mind, Mr Bayard 
 Taylor when he says : — " Perhaps the most satisfactory com- 
 mentary on ' Faust ' would be a biography of Goethe, written 
 with special reference to this one work." The key, which by 
 necessity leads to the tripod, is the symbol of the intuitive 
 power by which creative genius is determined to its highest 
 effort, — by which, as if under some unknown and indefinable 
 force, the daemonic — it is led to reveal the inner workings of the 
 spirit and of the world, which it cannot itself fully comprehend 
 or reduce to any exhaustive formula ; the essence and deeper 
 
 • Our edition of Schiller is that of Cotta of 1834. 
 
326 GOETHE. 
 
 intention of any great work of art being always, as Goethe often 
 urged, wholly incommunicable to the intellect. 
 
 Goethe's confessions of complete fascination in the creation 
 of his Adelheid in the first form of " Goetz,'' and also the 
 peculiar determinations towards the unhistorical and passionate 
 in " Egmont," may be regarded as illustrations of the same 
 tendency. 
 
 Even with respect to the composition of some of his songs, he 
 seems to admit that the daemonic was peculiarly active — active 
 in such a special and direct sense,, that he himself could distin- 
 guish and classify. In some cases, he said the subjects of his 
 Gedichte had been long carried about with him and had " occu- 
 pied his mind as pleasant images, as beautiful dreams, which 
 came and went, and by playing with which his fancy made him 
 happy ;" but there were others where the case had been totally 
 different. " They have been preceded by no impressions or 
 forebodings, but have come suddenly upon me, and have insisted 
 on being composed immediately, so that I have felt an instinc- 
 tive and dreamy impulse to write them down on the spot. In 
 such a somnambulistic condition, it has often happened that I 
 have had a sheet of paper lying before me all on one side, and I 
 have not discovered it till all has been written down, or I have 
 found no room to write any more. I have possessed many such 
 sheets written crossways, but they have been lost one after 
 another, and I regret that I can no longer show any proofs of such 
 poetic abstraction or possession." 
 
 X. 
 
 The uprisal of this daemonic influence into clear consciousness in , 
 Goethe's life, dates from the departure on the Swiss journey, the 
 separation from Lili, and the writing of " Egmont," which distinctly 
 bears the impress of this pecuUar development. Henceforth we can 
 trace quite distinctly in Goethe the contest or opposition through 
 which, as we may say, he accomplished his mission as he understood 
 it. He sets himself consciously and deliberately into a sphere above 
 that of ordinary natural ties or of moral relations — one which, by 
 virtue of the " dsemonic," is special to him on the ground of his 
 genius, and thus he moves in a world apart from that of the 
 
GOETHE. 327 
 
 " dim, common populations." Herein with Goethe lies strictly 
 the conception of the "artistic" life. The daemonic is not to be 
 absolutely followed, but it suffices to limit the field of ordinary 
 sympathy ; and even it is to be viewed simply in relation to ar- 
 tistic result. Will is thus made the slave of impression, the mere 
 transmitter to the mind of images capable of being moulded 
 into certain forms. Goethe's business in life is to draw from 
 opposing experiences the peculiar psychological or imaginative 
 suggestions that they are best fitted to yield. He relieves him- 
 self distinctly from any obligation, save merely an aesthetic or 
 artistic one. His attachments, the more deep and genuine they 
 are, are the less to be honestly yielded to as likely thereby to 
 become permanent, and to close certain avenues of impression ; 
 and his constant endeavour to gratify them without committing 
 himself to any of the permanent obligations that they might in- 
 volve, lies at the bottom of his restlessness. If he travels, it is 
 to seek escape from some persecuting attraction, which is only 
 so sufficiently deep-rooted as that absence intensifies it, and yislds 
 something to experience of a novel and secret kind. A new 
 and more ideal phase of the daemonic influence, as he conceives, 
 is thus yielded. A kind of refining and spiritualising glamour is 
 cast over natural passion, and a definite tendency to self-occupying 
 and morbid analysis of certain cravings and suggestions that 
 cannot, under the best construction be regarded as wholly healthy 
 and natural, is sanctioned. 
 
 The will, in fact, is discharged of its function, so far as re- 
 spects the moral aspect of things ; it is detached wholly from con- 
 science, and is made, as far as it can be made, a minister to subdue 
 to a harmonious form the whole circle of thoughts, emotions 
 and impressions which, under an idea of individual perfection, 
 are thus transmuted into ends instead of means. By a conscious 
 and deliberate theory, Goethe thus fortifies, and, as it were, 
 claims a preeminence for, the very elements in his personality 
 which, viewed in relation to common interests and ideals, intensi- 
 fied the loosest and weakest of his natural tendencies. In this, 
 he represents not the highest Greek ideal, as has been very 
 superficially said of him, for that ideal has no medium of activity 
 or creative power, apart from the concurrent aims and tendencies 
 of the life around it, which at every point is absorbed by it, 
 giving colour and weight; but rather the renascent conscious 
 
328 GOETHE. 
 
 paganism of a corrupt period, when there was no longer any 
 great common ideal, sufficient to inform and elevate and spirit- 
 ualise personal conceptions, and to subdue and direct the 
 vagaries of private caprice and self-indulgent excess. Religion 
 itself, with Goethe, becomes merely a means to the end of at- 
 taining a false and isolated individual perfection. Man has, in 
 fact, no higher purpose on earth than obedience to the aesthetic 
 or more properly artistic development, in which, as self-directing, 
 the daemonic is supreme. All interests of life lie subject to this, 
 and are only narrowing and restrictive if not kept subservient. 
 Here, again, we see how he cuts himself loose from anything 
 analogous to " common consent,'' not to speak of the self-denial 
 which, in view of that common consent, may re-unite genius 
 with the " dim, common populations." Goethe is thus the true 
 modern exponent of the art-pour-art idea : he is the great 
 teacher of the emasculating doctrine of " sincerity," which 
 claims completely to justify the artist by the light of his own 
 individual impression alone. He is subjective in spirit, however 
 objective in his methods. And this is no mere deduction from 
 unguarded and general statements. Goethe thus speaks of 
 religion, which he was always inclined to rank, not as an end in 
 itself, but as the first among many means that might serve the 
 ends of true culture or aesthetic self-conscious perfection ; — 
 
 " Piety," he declares, " is not an end*, but a means of attaining the 
 highest culture by peace of mind. Wherefore it may be remarked 
 that those who hold piety as end and goal mostly become hypocrites."* 
 
 The religious sentiment in the lower order of minds may 
 exercise an independent and elevating power; but viewed thus 
 it was simply an illusion which served " society " and constituted 
 authorities. In the light of culture, religion stood simply as the 
 pedestal to the statue. This he often urged. 
 
 "Art," said Goethe once, "is based on a strong sentiment of re- 
 ligion, on a profound and mighty earnestness ; hence it is prone to 
 co-operate with religion, but its sphere is independent." 
 
 The complete surrender of the will, the utter and ecstatic 
 resignation of all the faculties under the triumphant consciousness 
 
 • Frommigkeit ist kein Zweck, sondern ein Mittel, urn durch die reinste Gemiithsruhe 
 zur hSchsten cultur zu gdangen. Desswegen lasst sich bemerken, dass diejenigen, welche 
 FrOmmigkeit als Zweck iind Ziel aufstecken meistens Heuchler werden. — Ethisches — Werke, 
 vol. i, p. 435, Weimar edition, 1834. 
 
GOETHE. 
 
 329 
 
 of identity with a superior will, and yet the rapt consciousness of 
 closer union with other souls, which is of the very essence of 
 true religious life, was thus impossible to Goethe ; and never 
 were we more surprised than when we read the following in a 
 review which is generally marked by careful thinking and con- 
 cern for the true interests of religion, however indifferent to dog- 
 matics : — 
 
 " It was a marked feature of the man,'" says this article, " to go 
 with all his profoundest spiritual exercises into his closet, to shut 
 to his door, and another day to say as much as was needful in 
 words that ' half conceal and half reveal the soul within.' All 
 his thoughts, like chaste beauty, hide themselves in coy reserve 
 behind a beautiful drapery. And when his whole soul is thrilling 
 with emotion, he calls to his aid a droll misleading humour. . . . 
 Goethe's strong love of everything individual and characteristic 
 was closely connected with his religion. How carefully and de- 
 voutly he cultivated his own individuality, defending himself 
 against all heterogeneous influences, and maturing every gift, is 
 well known as a peculiarity of the man. This is the place to 
 claim for this peculiarity a profound religious basis. He there- 
 fore, like the Stoics and Spinoza, submitted and resigned himself 
 once for all."* 
 
 A more extraordinary utterance we do not remember to have 
 read. Heine, we thought, had gone too far in trying to make out 
 the presence of a profound Spinozism in Goethe ; but surely 
 Goethe's facility in yielding himself to the outward pleasures of 
 life, with other ends in view_than that of Spinozistic calm through 
 self-effacement and holy mergence in the great All, and of asso- 
 ciating himself with others for the express purpose of exciting 
 thoughts, emotions, and sensations susceptible of artistic mani- 
 pulation, does not make in favour of the idea, unless, indeed, we 
 must view it in the light of these remarkable words of Goethe's 
 own in this matter, which seem to throw more light on his 
 proclivity than might at first appear : — 
 
 " Alias Spinozistische in der poetischen production wird in der 
 reflexion Machiavellismus." t 
 
 But Heine never wrote without guard and qualification, as wit 
 ness this passage in his own French : — 
 
 * Theological Review, 1869, p. 82. t Ethisches, vol. I., p. 443. 
 
330 GOETHE. 
 
 " Je ne sais plus ou j'ai lu que Herder, impatiente de la voir con- 
 tinuellement occupd de Spinoza, s'dcria un jour : 'Si Goethe pouvait 
 une fois prendre un autre livre latin celui de Spinoza ! ' Du reste, 
 cela ne s'applique pas seulement k Goethe, mais k une foule de ses 
 amis, connus plus ou moins comme pontes, qui s' attachferent de 
 bonne heure au panthdisme. Cette doctrine fleurit pratiquement 
 dans I'art AUemand, avant d'arriver chez nous k la puissance comme 
 th^orie philosophique. Au temps m^me de Fichte, quand I'idealisme 
 se glorifiat k 1' apogee le plus dlev^ dans le domaine de la philosophie, 
 il ^tait violemment d^truit dans le domaine de I'art, et c'est alors, 
 qu'^clater chez nous cette fameuse revolution artistique qui n'est pas 
 encore termin^e aujourd'hui, et qui commence au combat des roman- 
 tiques contre I'ancien regime classique. C'est une chose remarquable 
 que cette nature paienne de Goethe tout satur^e de notre sentimentality 
 chr^tienne, que ce marbre antique, anim^ de pulsations modernes ; 
 que ce souffrances du jeune Werther qu'il 6prouva aussi vivement 
 que les joies d'un dieu de la vieille Grfece. Le panth^isme de Goethe 
 est done tres different de celui des paienes. Pour resumd mes iddes 
 Goethe ^tait le Spinoza de la po^sie ; tous ces Merits sont animds du 
 m^me souffle qui nous frappe quand nous lisons les oeuvres de 
 Spinoza. L'hommage que Goethe rendit k la doctrine de Spinoza ne 
 peut Stre I'objet d'un toute. Au moins s'en occupa-t-il pendant toute 
 sa vie ; au commencement de ses M^moires, comme dans le dernier 
 volume qui vient de paraitre, il I'a reconnu avec une franchise tou- 
 jours ^gale."* 
 
 The same influence which removed Goethe from any sympathy 
 with the common religious experience, also removed him from 
 any earnestness in common political effort. These things were 
 only related to him as they could directly further his art. " What 
 the man loses,'' said he always, " the artist gains."! It was 
 doubtless a perception of this truth which caused Heine to say 
 with his usual incisiveness : — " Without doubt Goethe sometimes 
 chants great histories of emancipation, but he chants them as an 
 artist." 
 
 Goethe was thus surely more of an Epicurean, than a Stoic ; 
 and the idea of a " retreat " on his part, carrying the profoundest 
 spiritual experiences into his closet, seems to us, we confess, 
 utterly unintelligible. In truth, that which was most unreal in 
 the religious life was the most real to him as a poet-^and here 
 again we find him sharply separating between the reality of re- 
 
 * Heine's L'Allemagne, p. 197. 
 
 t This in opposition to the more human and elevating axiom : — " Der Mensch gewinnt 
 was der Poet verliert." 
 
GOETHE. 331 
 
 ligious experience in itself and its possibilities in view of poetic 
 creation, to the disadvantage and discredit of the former. The 
 more superstition had influence over a character, the more poetic 
 he was. Not faith, but the over-faith falls in as helpful here — 
 not the " Glaube," but the " Aberglaube." Not inconsistently, 
 but the reverse, Goethe seriously and deliberately founded upon 
 a basis of superstition the empire of poetry, by the admission into 
 it, as something essential, of an element, which, as a realist, he 
 would have discredited ; and he has actually gathered this doc- 
 trine up into an axiom thus : " Superstition is the poetry of life, 
 therefore it does not injure the poet, to be superstitious." * 
 
 The peculiarly realistic aims of Goethe — the passion for art as 
 pure representation — contending with the mystical and the 
 symbolic which he was never able to subdue, accounts for a good 
 deal of the restlessness of his character, and his too scrupulous, 
 and at the same time unscrupulous curiosities. And the reason 
 why — more especially in his later years — these two tendencies 
 were not more completely reconciled, lay in the predominance 
 of the self-conscious, artificial and self-analysing disposition which 
 was so greatly promoted by his pecuUar submission to these 
 demonic and fatalistic ideas. Instead of the calm which is so 
 often claimed for Goethe, he was essentially restless, inquisitive, 
 longing for the solution of remote intellectual problems, in which 
 the moral element was always merged — " Light, more Light ! " is 
 his prevailing motto, in life as in death ; but the love and affec- 
 tion by which alone the light can be attempered and diffused is 
 forgotten or disregarded. 
 
 He looked at Hfe through a mist of self-excited sensibility, but 
 he was constantly trying to rise above it ; and thus assumes an 
 aspect of restless egotism, and false superiority — a cold calculat- 
 ing reserve and fastidiousness, which affects all his more sustained 
 and commanding work. His most ambitious characters, while 
 they are over-intellectualised, never really pass into clearly ex- 
 pressive types for this reason. " Wilhelm Meister," says Tieck, 
 "will always he beyond the common intellect, because his char- 
 acter becomes ever more and more general- symboUc." Oosterzee 
 has said the same in his study on Goethe, with more special 
 reference to the moral and religious bearing : " The appearance 
 
 * Der Aberglaube ist die Poesie des Lebens, deswegen schadet's dem Dichter nicht. 
 aberglaubisch zu seyn,— Ethisches— Dritte Abtheilung. 
 
332 GOETHE. 
 
 and activity of Goethe have a strong symbolic significance, but 
 no prophetic side ; in other words, he lets us see Nature and 
 man as in a mirror, very much as they really are, but in spite of 
 his symbolic tendency, not as they may be."* 
 
 The lack of what may be called a "moral-ideal" pursues 
 Goethe, and denies to him, great as he is, the all-spiritualising 
 graces of perfect simplicity and unity of conception. To make 
 up for it, he poses, he puzzles, he plays tricks ; but all, at last, 
 avails him not. Spontaneity will not be created, nor will true 
 types thus evolve themselves out of alien elements. He is either 
 too hard, real and prosaic, or too mysterious, mystical and 
 determined to surprise and impress us ; and there is no true 
 gradation and intermingling of the two. Look at "Wilhelm 
 Meister" — Mignon with her mystery, Mariana with her " Natur- 
 liche," and Phiiina with her figure spoiled, and the wobbling fold 
 of that petticoat ! 
 
 That wonderful grace more derived from character than from 
 creative genius, which so deeply influences us many times even 
 in contact with far lesser men, is awanting here. How is it that 
 we so thoroughly feel it in reading Goldsmith, notwithstanding his 
 worldly foolishness ; in reading Johnson, notwithstanding his 
 brusqueness, his dogmatism, and his pomposity of style ; in read- 
 ing Robert Bums, with his unwavering tribute to constant love 
 and true friendship, in spite of his falls, his remorses, and 
 wayward inconsistencies ; in Cowper, notwithstanding his didac- 
 ticism and religious effeminacy ? Still more expressly, how is it 
 that we feel it in reading the lays of Arndt or Korner, or the 
 " Reden'' of Fichte — not to speak of the dramas of Lessing. 
 Two things are essential to the greatest influence of literary 
 creation. The first is the presence of a great imaginative ideal, 
 directly exhibited ; the second is the presence of a great moral 
 ideal or personal character, implicitly exhibited. Without the 
 former there can be no great creative literature; without the 
 latter, that literature is ever in danger of drawing those influenced 
 by it away from the perception of any possible ideal in the sordid 
 daily life that they live. It but creates for them a world apart, 
 into which they escape from the burdens of actual life as by 
 reaction. The conscience is caught up. in the train of imagina- 
 tion, and is held as it were suspended like the coffin of Mahomet, 
 
 * Oosterzee, pp. 66- . 
 
GOETHE. 333 
 
 between the two worlds, influencing neither. It is only when 
 the author himself reserved for practical life a clear conscience 
 and sacrificed unostentatiously for its sake that the moral ideal is 
 recovered for art, not as a direct infusion of conscious teaching 
 (for that were alien to art's freedom), but as a sweet, unconscious 
 influence imparting healthy savour to all. In this way art is a 
 Redemption, illumining reality by the ray of its own ideal, and 
 making life more attractive and lovely ; rendering each one who 
 becomes subject to its influence, more and more inclined to 
 reverence the "realised ideal" that may often be discovered 
 amid lowly scenes and in obscurest circumstances — Great 
 
 " In loveliness of noble deeds 
 More strong than all poetic thought." 
 
 XI. 
 
 Goethe, then, did not act on Lessing's maxim, " cultivate your 
 character," and his works too clearly tell the tale in reflecting his 
 history — his self-consciousness, his eager curiosity, his mysticism, 
 and his mistifications, alongside of the utmost and sometimes 
 even repellent realism. His motto was rather " cultivate your 
 genius." And yet, behold the tribute which a grand moral 
 character compels even from Goethe, who cannot in our eyes 
 completely except himself from the defect over which he thus 
 seems to mourn. 
 
 " We want a man like Lessing. For how was he great, except in 
 character, — in firmness of purpose .'' There are many men as clever 
 and as cultivated, but where is such character? Many are full of 
 esprit and knowledge, but they are likewise full of vanity ; and that 
 they may shine as wits before the short-sighted multitude, they have 
 no shame or delicacy — nothing is sacred to them."* 
 
 We should scarcely have expected a French critic to sum up 
 Goethe's characteristics on this head more clearly than any of 
 his German or English biographers ; but this nevertheless is the 
 case ; and though M. Mezibres hardly pushes far enough on the 
 lines which one or two of his remarks certainly suggest, he shows 
 exquisite insight into the individuality with which he deals ; 
 
 • Goethe to Eckermann in 1825, 
 
334 GOETHE. 
 
 certainly in this passage he has not borrowed from Mr Lewes or 
 anybody : — 
 
 " La facility avec laquelle il ddnoue ses liens et se d'dtache de ses 
 affections lui donne I'apparence de I'dgoisme. II est en effet dgoiste 
 en ce sens qu'il se pr^occupe fort rarement de ses devoirs envers 
 autrui, qu'il ne croit gufere en avoir qu'envers lui-mtoe, et 
 qu'il se considfere comme ayant satisfait k toutes les exigences de la 
 loi morale quand il a travailld k son propre perfectionnement. Les 
 doctrines spinosistes, nous I'avons dit, le conduisent k s'isoler, k ne 
 rien attendre des autres, k ne leur rien demander, mais aussi k ne se 
 croire, tenu k rien envers eux. II incline, vers une morale trfes- 
 differente de la morale du ddvouement, trfes-oppos^e k celle du 
 christianisme, qui ne demanderait k I'homme que d'accomplir des 
 progr^s personnels et d'dlever son intelligence au plus haut degr^ de 
 perfection. II semble qu'il suive un instinct imp&ieux, qu'il obfisse 
 k une loi superieur ; lorsqu'il se ddveloppe librement dans la pldnitude 
 de son ind^pendance, sans un souci tr&s-grand des douleurs et des 
 regrets qu'il peut semer sur sa route. Au point de vue moral, rien de 
 plus detestable. Par cette tendance, Goethe a m^rit^ qu' on le soup- 
 gonnit friquemment d' ^goi'sme. Au point de vue littdraire, rien de 
 plus f^cond. C'est I'&ergie du sentiment personnel qui fait I'origi- 
 nalitd de son gdnre et imprimd k ses conceptions un caractere si indivi- 
 duel, des son extreme jeunesse.'' 
 
 If we take in connection with the chief thought here so ad- 
 mirably expressed by M. Meziferes, the following remark of Mr 
 Bayard Taylor, we shall come a step closer still to one of the 
 secrets of Goethe's strength and weakness : " Even the love of 
 woman seems to have been to Goethe more an unrest than a 
 bliss, as is clearly shown in his relations to Frederika and Lili." 
 So writes Mr Bayard Taylor.t This suggests a peculiar limita- 
 tion of Goethe's experience even in the fruitful field of love — an 
 experience not so uncommon and yet most necessary to the poet : 
 but what we are now most concerned with is the unrest which is 
 admitted to have succeeded on all his amours. He himself was 
 always so nervously intent on appropriating from them certain 
 directly-serviceable elements, that he sacrificed even the calm en- 
 joyment with which he is often credited, and which he hopelessly 
 sought. We mean the blissful repose that comes of complete 
 self abnegation in the last, and highest, and purest manifestation 
 
 * Mezieres, p. 192-3. t Translation of Faust. Note, vol. ii., p. 460. 
 
GOETHE. 335 
 
 of the passion of love, such as a few poets in all ages have 
 attained to, and under the unexciting joys of which they have 
 sung their most lasting lays, though that itself could never become 
 the direct and expressed subject of their song. As Mr Browning 
 says in " One word more," addressing one whom he has called 
 " My moon of poets ; but more " : 
 
 " No artist lives and loves and longs not 
 Once, and only once, and for One only, 
 (Ah, the prize !) to find his love a language 
 Fit, and fair, and simple, and sufficient — 
 Put to proof art alien to the artists' 
 Once, and only once, and for One only. 
 
 So to be the man and leave the artist 
 
 I shall never in the years remaining 
 
 Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues. 
 
 Make you music that should all express me. 
 
 So it seems : I stand on my attainment 
 
 Oh, their Raphael of the dear Madonnas, 
 Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno, 
 Wrote one song — and in my brain I sing it, 
 Drew one angel — borne, see, on my bosom." 
 
 Goethe, supreme as he often is, rose as little to this height — 
 romantic height, if you will — as any great artist. Yet, after all, 
 if Goethe enriched his genius by these restless experiments, it 
 was rather by unconscious than conscious appropriations. 
 Chance did more for him than character or will. This is im- 
 plicitly confessed in the varied stories of his travels, which were 
 all dictated, as he fancied, by the difficulties or compromising 
 positions in which love-affairs had placed him. It was so in 
 Frederika's case ; so it was in Lili's ; and so it was to prove in a 
 still more important connection artistically, which here demands 
 a somewhat fuller consideration. 
 
 As the Swiss journey was undertaken to aid him in shaking 
 himself free from Lili, so his second Italian tour was at all events 
 in part projected to test the effect of distance and absence on his 
 passion for the Frau von Stein. It did not stand the test. Mr 
 Lewes does not definitively say this ; but there is almost absolute 
 proof that it was so. " He had before confessed that he loved 
 her less when absent from her," says Mr Lewes, which somewhat 
 maladroitly intimates that such cool self-observing experiments as 
 
336 GOETHE. 
 
 are certainly not favourable to the perpetuation of love, and are, 
 in fact, a prophecy of the break that must soon come. Therefore 
 we regard it as quite natural that " the length of his absence now 
 seems to have cooled his ardour." But what follows is delight- 
 fully frank, as indicating that Goethe did not always act on the 
 sage advice of the old song — to be " off with the old love before 
 you are on with the new." Mr Lewes continues : " He had been 
 a twelvemonth away from her when the charms of a young 
 Milanese wUh whom lie was thrown together (!) in Castel Gan- 
 dolfo, made him forget the coldness, almost approaching [to] rude- 
 ness, with which he had hitherto guarded himself from female 
 fascinations (!)/ with the rashness of a boy he falls in love, and then 
 learns that his mistress is already betrothed. I am unable to tell 
 this story with any distinctness, for he was nearly eighty years 
 old when he wrote the pretty but vague account of it in the 
 Italidnische Reise, and there are no other sources come to hand. 
 Enough that he loved, learned she was betrothed, and withdrew 
 from her society to live down his grief (!). During her illness, 
 which followed upon an unexplained quarrel with her betrothed, 
 he was silently assiduous in attentions ; but although they met 
 after her recovery, and she was then free, I do not find him 
 taking any steps towards replacing the husband she had lost. As 
 may be supposed, the tone of his letters to the Frau von Stein 
 became visibly altered : they became less confidential and com- 
 municative ; a change which did not escape her." A passage which 
 is so marked by turns eminently suited to the subject that no 
 comment on it is necessary. 
 
 Mr R. H. Hutton has been bold enough to apply the term 
 " spooney " to Goethe, and has done something to justify it ; but 
 we cannot help thinking that this was open to the objection of a 
 too free use of plain terms in the region of the "higher 
 criticism." 
 
 We must reluctantly discuss Goethe's love affairs a little more 
 fully, and our justification for this must be that he himself claims 
 that his works are but the fragments of the grand confession of 
 his life. And such things, let us say, would hardly have any right 
 to occupy our attention, as being private and personal, were it 
 not that they left their impress on Goethe's art — great and monu- 
 mental though it was — ^left their influence, in a manner, so sub- 
 stantial and permanent, that his biographers and commentators 
 
GOETHE. 337 
 
 cannot ignore them, and find it needful constantly to draw infer- 
 ence from the works to the man, and vice versa. 
 
 Let us, for an instant, contrast the influence exercised on him 
 by Lili and Christiane Vulpius, bearing in mind the epithets 
 which have been so frequently applied to the latter connection, of 
 " degrading," and so on. A certain qualification is to be made 
 to Goethe's own deliverance on his deep love and devotion to 
 Lili, but hardly in the direction that Mr Lewes suggests. When 
 Goethe spoke of his love for Lili, it was in the light of a mere 
 passional attraction. That it was of the strongest character is 
 proved by the only course that he saw open to him by which, so 
 far, to subdue it; but that he did take this course is proof enough 
 that certain elements were lacking in it to raise it to the level of 
 love which could prompt him to real self-denials, and made possible 
 the constancy with which he sustained his relation to Christiane 
 Vulpius. That is the one thing that, in some degree, recovers 
 our respect for Goethe, the man. That he, who was so dependent 
 on certain forms, so courtly, in a word, should have faced all the 
 discomforts inevitable not from a liaison which was eti regie, but 
 from what was practically a mesalliance, which is, socially, a very 
 different thing, does kindle in us something akin to admiration, 
 such as no episode in his life had -yet stirred. What makes us 
 uncomfortable in the reading of the whole affair, is not Goethe's 
 determination to be faithful, and his final decision openly to ac- 
 knowledge the uneducated woman as his wife, but that the accom- 
 modating and false air of the past — of Weimar with its liaisons — 
 pursues him, and causes him to write such letters as the follow- 
 ing to the Frau von Stein, which, we confess — though it may be 
 a weakness in us —we cannot read without a tingling sense of 
 shame that so great a genius should have been so indiiferent to 
 one of the obtaining laws of modesty and true self-respect. This 
 is the letter :— 
 
 " It is not easy for me to write a letter with more pain than the one 
 I last wrote to thee, which was probably as unpleasant for thee to 
 read as for me to write. Meanwhile, at least, the lips have been 
 opened, and I hope that never may we henceforth keep them closed 
 against each other. I have had no greater happiness than my confi- 
 dence in thee, which formerly was unlimited, and since I have been 
 unable to use it, / have become another man, and must in future still 
 ■ m.ore become so. I do not complain of my present condition. I have 
 
 Y 
 
338 GOETHE. 
 
 managed to make myself at home in it, and hope to keep so, although 
 the climate once more affects me, and will, sooner or later, make me 
 unfit for much that is good. But when I think of the damp summer 
 and severe winter, and of the combination of outward circumstances 
 which makes existence here difficult ; I know not which way to turn. 
 I say this as much in relation to thee as to myself, and assure thee 
 that it pains me infinitely to give thee pain under such circumstances. 
 I will say nothing in my own excuse. But I would beg thee to help 
 me so that the relation which thou objectest to may not become more 
 objectionable, but remain as it is. Give me once more thy confidence : 
 see the case from a natural point of view, let me speak to thee quietly 
 and reasonably about it, and I dare to hope that everything between 
 us will once more be pure and friendly.'' 
 
 All which means, if words can mean anything, that Goethe 
 regarded the woman's most natural attitude of coldness under 
 neglect and the access of a rival, as neither pure nor friendly. 
 Assuredly there is nothing " spooney " in such a letter as that : 
 it is business-like, concise, diplomatically conciliatory for its pur- 
 pose, and Mr R. H. Hutton should seriously re-cortsider his right 
 to use any such term as " spooney " in reference to such transac- 
 tions ! For our part, we are inclined to think that the reserve of 
 biography is not sufficiently studied and insisted on. When we 
 have seen a man properly in one such love-affair or liaison, 
 we have seen him in them all; and literature has a right to 
 insist that Goethe's own axiom should be more faithfully ob- 
 served in reference even to himself. " There are some things 
 which, though we all know them, should still be treated as secrets, 
 because it is favourable to modesty and good morals." 
 
 "Goethe's culture as a writer," says Mr Carlyle, "in a passage 
 which he has himself celebrated by quotation, is perhaps less re- 
 markable than his culture as a man. He has learned not in head 
 only, but [also] in heart; not otA^ from (!) Art and Literature, but 
 [also] by (!) action and passion, in the rugged school of experience. 
 If asked what was his grand characteristic, we should say not know- 
 ledge hut wisdom. . . . It is thus that heart speaks to heart, 
 and the life of one man becomes a possession to all. 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 {?)" 
 
 It is not a bit more remarkable that Mr Carlyle, when he waxes 
 
GOETHE. 339 
 
 most eloquent over Goethe's nobility and wisdom as a man, should 
 write bad — very bad — English, as in the above (where the 
 bracketed " also's " are pleonastic), than that he should perceive 
 meekness and gentleness in a love, which is at once so calm 
 and active, whose rejection is implied rather than pronounced. 
 
 M. Scherer has called the connection with Christiane Vulpius 
 "a degrading connection with a girl of no education, whom 
 Goethe established in his house to the great embarrassment of 
 all his friends, whom he either could not or would not marry 
 until eighteen years later, and who punished him as he deserved 
 by taking a turn for drink — a turn which their unfortunate son 
 inherited ;" which to say the very least, does not " put too fine a 
 point upon it." And Mr Matthew Arnold, while in all other 
 points he holds to his professed intention of summarising M. 
 Scherer's opinions, is delicately gallant enough to avail himself of 
 the chance of charging it on poor Christiane on his own account, 
 thus to secure that artistic delicacy and relief which he so seldom 
 misses. 
 
 Looked at from the conventional level merely, there is much 
 to be said for this view ; and yet, as Mr I.ewes has pointed out, 
 Goethe found intellectual pleasure in Christiane's society also, 
 and his mother was not only fond of her, but trusted her as a 
 daughter, receiving her, with her boy, precisely as though she 
 had been Goethe's wife. Here Goethe, as is evident, found 
 an individuality which, on his own account, and by the voucher 
 of actual facts, was the first that had impressed him with 
 the possibility of permanence. By it, as a plain matter of fact, 
 he came nearest to realising that pure domestic life which Mr 
 Lewes says was so desirable for him. 
 
 So far as we can see, Christiane Vulpius was the first woman 
 who so thoroughly inspired and permanently attracted Goethe as 
 to prompt a real and sustained self-sacrifice. It might have been 
 better if Goethe had sooner thought of marriage; but that he did 
 think of it, at a time when a man in his position might have 
 been most inclined to escape from such obligations, is testimony 
 enough to his devotion to Christiane. The evil in Goethe's life, 
 in our idea, did not so much lie in the connection with Christiane 
 Vulpius, as in what had gone before it, and in the habit of view- 
 ing such things in a light and frivolous way, after the style of the 
 Weimar Court, where, as Schiller said with a tone of surprise if 
 
340 GOETHE. 
 
 not of horror, " every one had had at least one liaison" What, 
 in our idea, is forever to be regretted is, that Goethe did not 
 meet Christiane Vulpius sooner. The women he had hitherto 
 been enamoured of, had attracted him by the very qualities 
 which could not bind him ; and the fact is enforced at all events 
 in his earlier treatment of women. They are pleasant pastimes ; 
 they are sweet, tender, affectionate, playful things like kittens, 
 but of no depth ; and as they cannot hold a man's affection, 
 their claims are limited by the direction of his caprices and 
 vagrancies. What he could, in his own idea, understand and 
 exhaust and prove himself superior to, was soon, by Goethe, con- 
 signed to the rank of unregarded things — of things that had 
 served their purpose ; and in Goethe's treatment of women we 
 see exhibited, in the clearest form, the principle of action which, 
 in certain ways, made him strong ; but kept him weak and ineffi- 
 cient as a dramatist on at least one side. 
 
 Goethe, in spite of his reluctance to give the tie with Christiane 
 that final sanction in the eye of the world which was so desirable, 
 enjoyed more of rest in his relation with her than with any other; 
 and his peculiar and long-maintained aversion to marriage illus- 
 trates what we have laid down as one of the obtaining defects of 
 his character — an incapacity definitively to risk any narrowing of 
 his field of impression and fancied enjoyment, by the formation 
 of specific ties, and the frank acceptance of particular obligations. 
 And this unrest, which, as has been said, particularly character- 
 ised his relations with women, has left very clear tokens in his 
 works. 
 
 XII. 
 
 This necessity, as Goethe recognised it, for a constant with- 
 drawal from any influence that threatened to be permanent was 
 in part the result of natural tendency — a dislike of responsibility 
 and of subjection to order on the moral side ; — and in part the 
 result of his daemonic doctrinej though he would never have 
 adopted the daemonic doctrine had he not been so constituted. 
 But it sufficed to justify, and to yield a savour of support to, his 
 natural bias and his tendencies to artificial and superstitious 
 influences. Where these were not active in any strength, Goethe 
 had actually to stimulate them artificially. He could not work 
 
GOETHE. 341 
 
 without their aid. It is because of this constant stirring, as it 
 were, of a mist round the region of his own ordinary emotions 
 that he may seem to Hft himself above them and to look down 
 upon them in their turmoil, and thus consciously add, if one may 
 speak so, to his appearance of height, that we find a certain 
 egotism and artificiality in his most powerful dramatic creations 
 — an indescribable but not the less actual superficiality and false- 
 ness in his experience wherever it professes to touch at once the 
 deepest and the most simple forms of human suffering, in spite of 
 the greatness of his self-control, and the cold penetrating force of 
 his intellect. We can actually behold him in this process of 
 self-excitement and stirring up of his emotions, as well as in the 
 attitude of the superior and observer of them. The sincerest things 
 which he wrote were records of real experiences, wholly unex- 
 pected and occasional, which surprised him out of his intent and 
 absorbed self-scrutiny. These were his lyrics — the Gedichte — which 
 demanded no more than a brief and happy moment of self-forget- 
 fulness to unfold and to immortalise his experiences, and allowed 
 no room for self-reflection. But we are inclined to agree with 
 M. Scherer, as against Mr Matthew Arnold, that by his later ela- 
 borations, he generally failed to improve them. Mere nicety of 
 term took the place so far of direct and sincere expression. And 
 it is for the same reason that Goethe generally failed in the 
 faithful dramatic presentment of any strong character. He 
 could not divest himself of the colourings of these special 
 impressions of his, and infected his heroes with the hue of his 
 own individuality. He is thus happiest when he depicts charac- 
 ters of lax fibre, weak will, and indefinite individuality and aspi- 
 ration — mastered by some daemonic impulse, and seeking 
 vaguely after a good of which they know not, as in " Werther," 
 " Wilheim Meister," and " Faust." Any reader will at once under- 
 stand what we mean in reference to the former two ; and as 
 regards " Faust," it will be enough to quote the very pregnant 
 words of Rosenkranz, who, though he is too determined to find 
 a philosophic basis for a contrast between " Wilheim Meister" and 
 " Faust," yet confesses to the vagueness of Faust's purposes. He 
 writes : — 
 
 " Faust is properly the revolutionary spirit, breaking totally with 
 the actual world, and withdrawing into himself more and more, that 
 he may subject the universe to himself from the stand-point of his 
 
342 GOETHE. 
 
 idea. He carries with him, from the very first, in the depths of his 
 consciousness, the conviction that no help can come to him from 
 without ; that outside of himself there is nothing capable of affording 
 him repose. Yet, with such determination does he pass from ideas 
 to realities, that he will not even accept the foundation for his activity 
 as already existing within him, but is intent on creating such for him- 
 self He will wrest the land from the sea, in order that it may be 
 entirely the product of spirit, and on such soil, thus imperiously riven 
 from nature's realm, he desires to find a standing ground for himself 
 and for others." 
 
 It is very characteristic of Goethe in this light that he con- 
 fessed a preference for those "problematical natures who remain 
 a puzzle to others, because they have never come to a proper 
 understanding of themselves." He never came to a proper 
 understanding of himself, and indeed, on principle, would pro- 
 bably have objected to doing so ; and certainly he was as far as 
 possible from being Greek, though Mr Lewes has called him so. 
 This is seen in his determination not to reduce the elements of 
 his personality to grand, simple outlines. He failed even to do 
 this indirectly, having, as it would appear, a repugnance to those 
 characters, which are, so to speak, embodiments of one passion 
 or idea, such as alone suffices for decisive action ; characters, 
 therefore, most necessary to the true dramatist. 
 
 As Goethe's conduct was, as we have seen, constantly directed 
 by reference to some outside influence, some shadow of fate, or 
 destiny, or the daemonic, so it bounded the circle of his creative 
 power, and determined not only his choice of subjects and 
 characters, but compelled him to adopt an extraordinary and 
 supernatural machinery which took the place of the will or 
 "active power" in his heroes. Lessing ended the old stage 
 tradition of the conventional heroic, and elevated the heretofore 
 contemned bourgeoisie by exhibiting in them the spring of true 
 moral force, and goodness amounting to nobility. Goethe again 
 revolted against this standard, by raising up around his characters 
 an atmosphere of supernatural favouritism or " spoiled-child-of- 
 nature "-hood, by which the subject was raised to the level of a 
 conventional aristocracy, a point that gives occasion to a most 
 remarkable confession in " Wilhelm Meister," which students will 
 readily remember, and which actually colours some of the symbolism 
 of the second part of " Faust." In fact, the whole tone of the 
 
GOETHE. 343 
 
 " Social Romances," so called, is saturated by this. As no open- 
 ing could consistently be made for the play of this element in 
 " Egmont," as Goethe had, in a word, directly to picture action, 
 he failed ; whereas, the reason of his success in " Faust " lay not 
 alone in the fact of its substance being drawn from the popular 
 imagination and belief, as Heine so neatly said, but rather in this 
 that the foundation of the legend actually embodied the mediaeval 
 element of vague supernatural influences, directly determining the 
 complete destiny of Faust, thus affording the most admirable 
 ground for the indirect expression of Goethe's more subtle, if 
 peculiarly individual ideas. These necessarily demanded more 
 and more of symbolism as he proceeded — symbolism which could 
 not possibly escape from receiving colour from his more secret 
 experiences. The further that he followed his subject from the 
 ordinary conditions of earth into that world of the mind in which 
 the legend itself justified Goethe in following Faust, for the union 
 of Faust and Helen was forefigured there — a point on which 'we 
 shall in a moment see, Schiller made the most incisive and philo- 
 sophic criticism. 
 
 This indefiniteness, this lack of power to act decisively under 
 clear and legitimate promptings of the will which pursues Goethe, 
 infects his work, giving especially to Wilhelm Meister the sugges- 
 tion of intolerable unnaturalness which De Quincey found in it, 
 and that air of poetic mystery, as if like the heroes of Homer, the 
 chief character was snatched into a protecting cloud of Fate and 
 thrust forth again in the most propitious moments, to find a firm 
 and suitable standing-ground where else he could never have 
 found it. This element, combined with the ultra-modern air that 
 is most skilfully imparted to it, is the secret of the attractiveness 
 of " Meister," but also of its danger through its false sentiment 
 and morality. Even Schiller, who was certainly no realist, could 
 not help finding grave fault with the tendency, when it passed 
 into its most visible and extreme development, though generally, 
 as we should almost expect of him, he wavered between admira- 
 tion of the fateful and mysterious elements which have so much 
 scope in the machinery, and the adoption of transparently 
 artificial devices to reUeve the general effect. Schiller's earlier 
 impressions, as recorded in these letters to Goethe, show great 
 penetration and forecast, as in this : — 
 
 " It is, indeed, a delicate and a difficult circumstance for the novel 
 
344 GOETHE 
 
 that, in as far as the character of Meister is concerned, it should not 
 conclude either with decided individuality, or with any complete 
 ideality, but with something between the two. The character is in- 
 dividual, but only as regards its limitation, and not as regards its 
 substance ; and it is ideal, but only as regards its capabilities. It, 
 therefore, denies us the immediate satisfaction which we demand 
 (definiteness), and promises us a higher one — nay, the highest — ^which, 
 however, we can only trust it may afford us at some distant future. 
 .... Meister's worth lies in his mind, not in what he effects ; in his 
 aspirations, not in his actions ; hence, as soon as he is about to give 
 an account of his life to another, it must appear to him wanting in 
 purpose." 
 
 But the longer and the more thoughtfully Schiller studied 
 " Wilhelm Meister," it is clear that the more one fatal defect 
 forced itself upon him : — 
 
 " Your Meister appears to me to contain too much of tragedy. I 
 mean of what is fateful, incomprehensible, subjectively marvellous. 
 This, it is true, is quite consistent with the poetic depth and obscurity, 
 but scarcely with the clearness which ought to obtain in a novel, 
 and which is so eminently the case in yours. It is hardly satisfactory 
 to come on this want of solidity where one expects to find oneself 
 everywhere on firm groimd, and to meet with puzzles where all is 
 otherwise so well unravelled to the understanding. In short, it seems 
 to me that you have here made use of such means as the spirit of the 
 work did not fully authorise you to employ." 
 
 And yet, as we have said, he had counsels that seemed to 
 encourage a devotion to mere stage resource as in this case: 
 Jarno, in his hard and dry manner, has in the seventh book told 
 Wilhelm that he does not possess any talent for acting, and 
 Schiller having noted this, says seriously: "Jarno seems to me 
 to be the. right man to tell Wilhelm that Theresa could not make 
 him happy, and to give him a hint which female character would 
 suit him. Such single and plain-spoken words would, at the right 
 moment, at once rid the reader of a heavy burden, and act like a 
 flash of lightning to illuminate the whole scene." 
 
 When Goethe attempted to paint action in unison with a 
 definite purpose or strong character, his failure was complete. 
 We see this so conspicuously in Egmont that further reference is 
 hardly necessary. M. Scherer is here surely right : — 
 
 " Egmont belongs by the date of its publication to the period 
 which followed Goethe's day in Rome. But in vain did he try to 
 
GOETHE. 345 
 
 transform it, he could not succeed. The subject stood in his way. 
 We need not be surprised, therefore, if Egmont remains a mediocre 
 performance, Goethe having always been deficient in dramatic faculty, 
 and not in this case redeeming his defect by qualities of execution, as 
 in Iphigenia. He is too much of a generaliser to create a character, 
 too meditative to create an action. Egmont must be ranked by the 
 side of ' Goetz ; ' it is a product of the same order. The hero is not a 
 living being; one does not know what he wants; the object of the 
 conspiracy is not brought out ; the unfortunate Count does certainly 
 exclaim, as he is going to the scaffold, that he is dying for liberty, but 
 nobody had suspected it until that moment. It is the same with the 
 popular movement ; it is insufficiently rendered, without breadth, 
 without power. I say nothing of Machiavel, who preaches toleration 
 to the Princess Regent, and tries to make her understand the useless- 
 ness of persecution ; nor of Claire, a girl sprung from the people, whose 
 talk is like epigrams from the Anthology. ' Neither soldier nor lover 
 should have their arms tied.' ' Egmont ' is one of the weakest among 
 Goethe's weak pieces for the stage." 
 
 It is, however, perfectly evident, as we shall soon see, that 
 M. Scherer's attempt to fasten upon the influence of Italian art 
 on Goethe's mind, the blame of his incapacity to concentrate his 
 powers on subjects lying outside that range, is not quite well 
 founded. 
 
 Goethe, we may say, was thus by mental constitution unfitted 
 to sympathise with great movements in which epical action is the 
 ground on which heroic character alone can exhibit itself. He 
 did not perceive the importance of this element in a dramatic 
 art which is to be truly national. To lesser men, therefore, fell 
 the office of representing and interpreting this phase. It is all 
 very well to talk of art and of devotion to it, and to speak as 
 though the artist had nothing to do with patriotism and with the 
 difficulties and trials of his time and people ; but the fact re- 
 mains that patriotism and national sentiment are mighty forces 
 in human life, and must, in their higher aspects, be recognised 
 and transfigured by one for whom is to be justly claimed the 
 title of a national poet. He who does not feel sympathy with 
 the patriotic or national impulse in the present will not feel for 
 the most heroic action in the past that self-forgetting enthu- 
 siasm which is the foundation of national drama. Shakespeare 
 wisely included them in his programme, and dealt efficiently with 
 historical and patriotic movements not very remote from his own 
 
346 GOETHE. 
 
 time ; and in so far as Goethe failed to sympathise with or to 
 comprehend the elements necessarily at work in such crises, he 
 exhibited narrowness and failed as the national poet of his 
 country, being compelled to occupy a divided throne, where 
 others, far from his equals in some respects, stand on an equal 
 footing with him before the people. 
 
 It is the same with Goethe in reference to his female charac- 
 ters. He succeeds best when he paints the type of common- 
 place womanhood, plastic under masculine influence ; when he 
 attempts to render peculiar and exceptional temperaments, then 
 he must perforce fall back on puzzles of psychology, as we see 
 it in Mignon and so far in Ottilie. 
 
 And what we can legitimately found on in Goethe's art as 
 throwing light back for us on his character, finds its counterpart 
 in the facts of his life, as we can gather them from his assiduous 
 biographers and editors and commentators. He was able, within 
 a certain range, to discriminate conflicting elements of emotion 
 in women, but not conflicting elements of intellect. 
 
 " In spite of these things, and simply by reason of its truth to one 
 particular moment, ' Werther ' has passed out of date. The book 
 has shared the fate of the hero's blue coat and yellow breeches ; the 
 reader really cannot accept the pathetic in such an accoutrement. 
 There is too great an enthusiasm for Ossian ; and too much rhapsody 
 over nature ; too many outbreaks and apostrophes likewise to beings 
 animate and inanimate, too many torrents (?) of tears. Who could 
 forbear a smile as he reads the scene of the storm, where Charlotte 
 first looks on the fields, then on the sky, and at last laying her hand 
 on her lover's, utters the one word : Klopstock J And then the 
 cabbage passage ! " 
 
 XHI. 
 
 The peculiar point of union which we may detect between 
 Goethe's earlier and later works is to be found here. " Werther " 
 was protected from the last evil consequences by the very 
 influence of Rousseau, which had engendered it. If Rousseau 
 recalled men to nature, and to individual right, he spoke to a 
 true need ; so far, in fact, he was in harmony with the least 
 sentimental of German writers ; and in the revolt against dead 
 forms, some excess may surely be excused. The positive cur- 
 
GOETHE. 347 
 
 rent of influence with which " Werther " was so deeply in har- 
 mony, gave to it a certain dramatic basis and justification, which 
 cannot be extended to some of the later works, in which Goethe 
 united the " Naturkraft " with experiences of a special kind, so 
 directly traversing the natural relations (sexual and other) that 
 the very understanding of the story is made to depend on the 
 comprehension of what is unnatural and inverted. This is 
 especially true of much in " Wilhelm Meister," more notably of 
 the incest story which is found to unite Mignon and the Harper, 
 the confessions of adultery by daughters on the part of mothers ; 
 and most notably of all in the cross-affections between Wilhelm 
 and Mariana and Philina and Frederick and others, in which 
 circumstance we may be said to have the germ, as yet partially 
 formless, of the " Wahlverwandschaften," which it took a few 
 years more to develop, and required a further reach of prurient 
 experience to render possible — a prurient experience found 
 in the relations to Minna Grohmann and Bettina. Reading 
 once again the "Wilhelm Meister" with, we trust, a larger experi- 
 ence which should enable us to make allowance for whatever 
 of weakness allies itself with normal human nature, we have 
 simply to repeat our serious conviction that it is one of the most 
 shameless, prurient, and " debauched " of modern productions, 
 and that author, translators, and euphemistic commentators and 
 claquer-choxMi.&s, have one and all shown themselves much more 
 deficient in that " mental chastity " than was he who originally 
 called the term into use. On the " Wahlverwandschaften " we 
 shall not now pause further than to say that it carries to the true 
 climax that kind of art, whose inherent falseness is shown in this 
 that the radical idea cannot be fully conceived without doing 
 violence to that natural reserve and shame, on which the marriage 
 tie itself is founded. In that novel, Goethe not only did 
 violence to artistic health, he became a conspirator against what 
 is not merely a cherished institution but an element most essen- 
 tial to be conserved in a true civilisation, as Mr Matthew Arnold 
 has so well said. 
 
 This point then we have reached, that in " Wilhelm Meister," 
 and the " Wahlverwandschaften," we have the worst element in 
 "Werther," — the "Naturkraft" carried forward and united to ideas 
 that could only have been gained in such ways as could not " in 
 close words" have been recited in the general ear. Even Ger- 
 
348 GOETHE. . 
 
 many itself would have rebelled at that, as Herder and Wieland 
 rebelled against the dressed-up artistic presentation of it, not 
 scrupling to call it by the right name. Mr G. H. Lewes has said 
 in defence of " Wilhelm Meister " : — 
 
 " All that can be said is, that the artist has been content to paint 
 scenes of life without cotnment, and that some of these scenes belong 
 to an extensive class of subjects, familiar, indeed, to the experience 
 of all but children, yet by general consent not talked of in society. If 
 any reader can be morally injured by reading such scenes in this 
 novel rather than in the newspaper, his moral constitution is so 
 alarmingly delicate and so susceptible of injury, that he is truly 
 pitiable." 
 
 Here Mr Lewes simply evades the difficulty that he has raised, 
 and makes it to appear as though he had settled it. There are 
 certain natural and necessary positions in which the human body 
 is placed, which no painter or sculptor has yet dared to repre- 
 sent, because in such media they would, by general consent, be 
 deemed horrible and repulsive. To use Mr Lewes' phrase, all 
 readers, save children, will at once recognise what we mean. 
 There is a general consent not to talk of these in society, and 
 implied in it a general consent that they shall not be -represented 
 in any artistic medium, because everything that is presumed to 
 appeal effectively to the aesthetic sentiments is certain, under the 
 law of sympathy, to be talked of in society. Now, when Mr 
 Lewes admits that " some of these scenes belong to an exten- 
 sive class of subjects by general consent not talked of in society,'' 
 he suggests a very awkward argument against his own case. 
 Either these scenes are so related to a general and redeeming 
 ideal conception which, without them, could not be effectually 
 exhibited, or they are not. If they are, as is the murder of 
 Duncan and the sin of Lady Macbeth and her remorse, or in 
 the " Cenci" of Shelley (not to speak of the Greek dramatists), 
 where the very suggestion of the awful sin of the father — subtle 
 and delicate as it is — is immediately accompanied by the protest 
 of the whole innocent nature of Beatrice against the outrage she 
 has undergone, art is satisfied — natural ties have been violated, 
 but all the powers of earth and air seem united to wrong the 
 wronger till he render right, arming the tenderest and most trust- 
 ful creatures with the weapons of the furies. 
 
 But is this so in " Wilhelm Meister " ? is it so in the " Wahlver- 
 
GOETHE. 349 
 
 wandschaften " ? We think not. Mr Lewes states the purpose of 
 " Wilhelm Meister" to be, first, the rehabilitation of dramatic 
 art, and, secondly, the theory of education ; and he quotes 
 Schiller on the general intention to the effect that it looks occa- 
 sionally as though Goethe had been writing for players instead 
 of only writing of them. But it might occur to any one to ask, 
 whether dramatic art was likely to be recommended to that por- 
 tion of society which most needed the recommendation, by such 
 pictures of it as are here presented ; and whether education — 
 practical and efficient — was likely to be much benefited by senti- 
 mental axioms which were very much out of keeping with the 
 dramatic drift and tendency of the narrative itself. Viewed in 
 this light, and with these very natural deductions, are these pur- 
 poses adequate to justify, or to penetrate with ideal motive, 
 the admitted descents into scenes such as are not talked of in 
 society ? Only such a motive could justify them ; and we 
 humbly think Goethe has not found it. 
 
 If, again, the character of Meister is so loose, and the work so 
 lacking in the sense of adequate attainment through the experi- 
 ences he has undergone, that he remains in Mr Lewes' suitable, 
 if also select and delicate phrase, a mere "nose of wax," this is 
 another fault in view of art, since Goethe has to derive interest 
 not from the faithful development of his character, but from the 
 creation of a false medium of Chance, or Fate, or Destiny, or 
 the Daemonic, which, as we have seen, lifts the mere " nose of 
 wax" into circumstances efficient only because they are puzzling 
 and mysterious. The wholly false element of symbolism with 
 which Mr Lewes finds so much fault in the second part or 
 " Wanderjahre," takes rise in the first,— the Indenture, the Hall 
 of the Past, and all the affiliated symbolisms are but the vague, 
 tantalizing images which art itself compels Goethe to give to the 
 least healthy and least natural side of his giyn mind, which is 
 presented here, and which, of course, came more into promi- 
 nence as he more and more needed to justify his hero, even 
 on the lines of general interest. Schiller was absolutely right when 
 he detected this point, though it would have been impertinent in 
 him to have in correspondence traced the matter to its real 
 source in the great defect of Goethe's own character and life. 
 The other works of Goethe's later years, if they are less open to 
 the charge of dealing with inverted and unnatural phases of 
 
3S0 GOETHE. 
 
 experience, yet indirectly bear the fullest testimony to the defect 
 of will and of true dramatic perception, which may be traced to 
 his indulgence in fatalistic and fantastical superstitions. 
 
 We have said that the unqualified "Naturkraft," combined with 
 the Daemonic, or Destiny, in its most material or sexual shape, 
 yielding what really forms an inversion or confusion of natural 
 relations under corrupted ideals, is what forms the link relating all 
 Goethe's great novels together. It would require a whole treatise 
 to establish this fully by analysis and instance; but we may by a few 
 little extracts indicate at least what we mean. In the opening of 
 " Wilhelm Meister" we find Barbara saying to Mariana : — " Who 
 knows what circumstances may arise to help us ? If Norberg 
 would arrive even now, when Wilhelm is away ! Who can hinder 
 you from thinking of the one in the arms of the other 1* T wish 
 you a son and good fortune with him ; he will have a rich father." 
 
 Then we learn that, after the playing of " Hamlet," Wilhelm 
 having retired to his room, " immediately undressed himself, 
 and, having extinguished his candle, hastened into bed. He was 
 just falling asleep, when his attention was attracted by a noise 
 which seemed to come from behind the stove. The figure of a 
 king in full armour suddenly presented itself to his imagination, 
 and he rose up in bed to address the ghost. But at that moment 
 he felt himself suddenly locked in the embrace of two tender 
 arms ; his mouth was covered with a shower of the most pas- 
 sionate kisses, and he felt a bosom pressed to (Mr Carlyle has, as 
 in all such instances, ' against') his own, from which he had not 
 the resolution to disengage himself" 
 
 And this again is a portion of a dialogue which takes place 
 between Frederick and Wilhelm towards the close of the " Ap- 
 prenticeship :" — 
 
 " I can understand this species of folly,'' said Wilhelm, " when so 
 merry a pair of mortals meet together ; but how so mercurial a pair 
 could remain so long together, I own is somewhat astonishing." 
 
 " It is the effect of our good and bad fortune," answered Friedrich. 
 " Philina is afraid to presenf herself, she cannot even bear to look 
 upon herself — she is in the family-way. Her figure is completely 
 spoiled — nothing so ludicrously shapeless' was ever seen. A short 
 time ago, she chanced to look at herself in the glass. ' Phaugh ! ' she 
 
 * The German is — ' ' Wer wehrt du, in den Armen des einem an die andem zu denken ? " 
 and there is no doubt that it is there. 
 
GOETHE. 
 
 3SI 
 
 cried, and turned her face away. ' Am I not a very Madame Melina ! 
 Shocking sight ! Do I not look completely deplorable? ' " 
 
 " I must confess," said Wilhelm, " that it does seem laughable to 
 think of you two as father and mother ! " 
 
 " It is a foolish business," replied Friedrich, "that I must, at last, 
 be raised to the honour of fatherhood. But she asserts it, and the 
 time agrees. I must say, however, that I had my qualms, when I 
 thought of that visit, which she paid to you, after you had acted 
 Hamlet:' 
 
 " What visit ?" asked Wilhelm. 
 
 " Nay ! you cannot quite have slept off the recollection of it," 
 answered Friedrich ? " The nice little flesh-and-blood apparition of 
 that night — if you do not know it already — was Philina. The story was 
 a sore trial for me j but if we cannot be contented with such things, 
 we should not be in love. Fatherhood, at any rate, depends on con- 
 viction. 1 am convinced, therefore, I am a father." 
 
 There was thus all too good reason for the fathers running 
 about, asking strangers their opinion if the boys could possibly 
 owe their paternity to them ; and this kind of cross influence, in 
 its funnier form, presents us with the germ of the " Wahlverwand- 
 schaften." 
 
 Again, to exhibit Goethe's penchant for the formless — 
 
 " Philina now began to sing, and dragged forth her friend [Laertes] 
 into the hall to dance with her. ' Time is not a person that we can 
 overtake when he has once passed us,' said she, ' so let us endeavour, 
 while he is passing, to honour him with mirth and cheerfulness of 
 heart.' 
 
 " They had only made a step or two, when Frau Melina walked into 
 the hall. Philina was malicious enough to invite her to join them in 
 the dance, and thus directly to recall to her mind the shape her preg- 
 nancy had brought her to. 
 
 " Oh, that I might never more see a woman in an interesting con- 
 dition / " cried Philina, when she had gone away, " Yet she feels an 
 interest in it," said Laertes. " But she manages so shockingly. Didst 
 thou notice that wabbling fold of her shortened petticoat, which always 
 flows out before her when she moves ? She has not the smallest knack 
 or skill to trim herself a little, and conceal her state." 
 
 " Let her be," said Laertes, " time will soon come to her aid." 
 
 Once more, his determination to exhibit what "is usually con- 
 cealed : " — 
 
 " Wilhelm scarcely noticed aught in her [Mariana's] presence ex- 
 cept herself; all that belonged to her, everything that she had touched, 
 
352 GOETHE. 
 
 was dear to him ; and thus he came at length to feel, in this chao- 
 tic confusion, a charm which the order and dignity of his own house 
 never had communicated. When, on one side, he lifted her bodice 
 that he might get at the harpsichord, or on the other, threw her gown 
 upon the bed that he might find a seat, or when she herself, with 
 unabashed carelessness, did not conceal from him many a natural office 
 \NatUrliche\ which, in consideration of the presence of a second person, 
 is usually concealed, he only felt as though hg was coming nearer to 
 her every moment, as if the relation between them was being more 
 iirmly linked by invisible ties." 
 
 Of Goethe's axioms Mr Lewes has duly celebrated the wisdom. 
 Would he tell us of what Goethe could possibly have been think- 
 ing when he wrote ; — " There are some things which, though 
 we all know them, should yet be treated as secrets, because this 
 is favourable to modesty and good morals;" if some of the things 
 we have now complained of in " Wilhelm Meister " are not in- 
 cluded. And again, would Mr Lewes tell us what is meant by 
 " commonest " and the " beautiful " in the following : — " Men are 
 so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest ; the 
 spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of 
 the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all 
 methods, to nourish in his mind, the faculty of feeling these 
 things.'" 
 
 It is a most remarkable fact that the very sentences in these 
 extracts, which we have put in italics, as the main links in the 
 chain establishing our case, do not appear in any other English 
 translation known to us than that of Mr Carlyle. In Bohn's 
 library translation they are omitted or modified. Now, what was 
 the reason of that ? Were the passages deemed too strong for the 
 sense of decency in translator or publisher ? or was it that some 
 prudent sense of preserving English domestic propriety prevailed? 
 Anyway, it is a testimony not without its own weight, though it 
 suggests- that Mr Carlyle was either all too faithful to the text of 
 his author, or all too little concerned for that same English 
 domestic purity which others had found was not likely to profit 
 by such suggestions from German literature. 
 
 While, therefore, we have, on the one hand, to apologise to the 
 English public for the necessity we have been under of printing 
 such extracts in order to establish clearly our critical estimates ; 
 on the other hand, we must assert that the German people have 
 surely little reason to be proud of that picture of their nation. It 
 
GOETHE. 353 
 
 appears to us that, after the manner of English law, it is the 
 greater libel of the two if it be true— the greater violation of that 
 Goethean axiom — " there are some things which, though all know 
 them, should yet be treated as secrets, because it favours modesty 
 and good morals." If certain of the characters in "Wilhelm 
 Meister " are " players," and thus some loosenesses of life may be 
 allowed to them, what is to be said of the Countess and the 
 Baroness, of Theresa and Natalia, as fair specimens of the aristo- 
 cratic or cultured womanhood of Germany in that day? It would, 
 as we think, show some lack of self-respect, and follow too closely 
 the example of the daughters who, in cold blood, and to mere 
 passing strangers, recited in detail the adulteries of their mothers, 
 if they should compel us to pay to Goethe here the tribute of 
 faithfulness to the life that was lived around him. In spite of 
 Mr Thomas Carlyle and Mr George Henry Lewes, we are reluc- 
 tantly compelled to view this as a picture of the horrible and 
 debased life that the much-famed Weimar court sheltered and 
 approved ; a something which, in bare and prosaic fact, the 
 healthy domestic morality of German life would abhor and re- 
 pudiate, though it has an acknowledged weakness for seeming to 
 acquiesce in anything that comes with the decoration of senti- 
 mentality; and it will only complete its culture, and elevate still 
 further its domestic and social life by continually striving against 
 this weakness. 
 
 " Certain inseparable accompaniments of actual life are not beauti- 
 ful, can never be made interesting, and would, if they were decent, 
 be dull and uninteresting. There is, it appears, a certain excitement 
 in putting such matters into a book ; there is a minor exhilaration 
 even in petty crime. At first such things look so odd in print that 
 you go on reading them to see what they look like ; but you soon give 
 it up. What is disenchanting or even disgusting in reality does not 
 become enchanting or endurable in delineation. You are more angry 
 at it in literature than in life ; there is much which is barbarous and 
 animal in reality that we could wish away ; we endure it because we 
 cannot help it, because we did not make it and cannot alter it, because 
 it is an inseparable part of this inexplicable world. But why we 
 should put this coarse alloy, this dross of life, into the optional world 
 of literature, which we can make as we please, it is impossible to say. 
 The needless introduction of necessary ugliness is always a sin in art, 
 and is not at all less so when such ugliness is disgusting and 
 improper.'' 
 
 * W. Bagehot's Literary Studies, vol. ii. p. 123. 
 
 z 
 
354 GOETHE. 
 
 This side of Goethe's genius has been very infectious in Eng- 
 land as well as in Germany. All our novels of a certain class 
 bear traces of it. The elective-affinity idea is supreme in com- 
 bination with a fatalistic conception, more or less overborne by 
 the daemonic. It would require a volume to exhibit this point 
 fully with illustrations ; but we may say shortly that George Eliot's 
 more recent works on the one side (particularly " Romola," 
 " Felix Holt," " Middlemarch," and " Daniel Deronda") are full 
 of it, and that it is to be found with other accompaniments in 
 the writings of Ouida and Mrs Edwards on the other side. 
 Stephen Guest's victory over Maggie Tulliver, and Mrs Tram- 
 some's early love-affair, for example, as well as Gwendolen's 
 drifting into marriage with Grandcourt against her own promise 
 and resolutions, and her peculiar half-guilty attitude when Grand- 
 court is drowned, are quite in this spirit. In fairness it must be 
 said, however, that George Eliot constantly associates it with 
 , other teachings which do much to modify and ameliorate the 
 influence. The chief of these is the doctrine of self-surrender 
 even in the field of the ideal, by which the female character 
 especially reaches its fullest calm and ripeness, as shown particu- 
 larly in Romola and Dorothea, though how far the two teachings 
 are consistent, and how far they introduce an element of conflict 
 within the ethical " content " of the work itself, is altogether 
 another matter, which must remain to be discussed elsewhere. 
 Miss Thackeray modifies a milder form of the same tendency 
 by a certain healthy English morality ; but it is not always so 
 modified in such novels as " Steven Lawrence, Yeoman," and 
 " Carita ;" while Mr Thomas Hardy actually refines away some 
 of the most striking traits in his Wessex peasants to gain vantage- 
 ground for this fatalism ; and surely Mr William Black runs it to 
 its last dregs in the exhibition he gives of the doom or fate on the 
 family of the Macleods of Castle Dare ! The explanation may 
 probably be found in what Goethe himself says : " Jede gross Idee 
 sobald sie in die Erscheinung tritt, wirkt tyrannisch.'' 
 
 M. Scherer is surely about the last person to allow himself to 
 be repelled from a work of art by little infractions of what might 
 be called a conventional morality. It is not on that ground, 
 therefore, but the purely artistic one that he is moved to make 
 this confession : — 
 
 " I shall not soon forget the many acts of self-sacrifice it cost me to 
 
GOETHE. 355 
 
 finish 'Wilhelm Meister' and 'The Elective Affinities.' As Paul 
 de Saint- Victor has said, " when Goethe goes in for being tiresome 
 he succeeds with surprising perfection ; he is the Jupiter Pluvius 
 of ennui. The very height from which he pours it down only makes 
 its weight the greater.' What an insipid invention is the pedagogic 
 city ! What a trivial world the Wilhelms and the Philinas move in, 
 and in which the Edwards and the Ottilies have their being ! Mig- 
 non has been elevated into a poetic creation, but she has neither 
 charm nor mystery, nor a veritable existence, nor any other poetry 
 pertaining to her— let us say it right out — save the half dozen im- 
 mortal stanzas put into her mouth." 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The object of a true culture is in our idea to awaken a genuine 
 and discriminating interest in all matters that concern the general 
 well-being — in all that makes for the progress and the elevation 
 of the nation first, and of the race next. And as certain 
 activities and developments on the side of political life are* 
 absolutely essential to the prevalence and the extension of liberal 
 education, with its dower of art and aesthetic sensibility, it is a 
 very short-sighted idea of Art which would seek to set aside 
 political and social reform as indifferent or as inimical. These 
 are the very elements out of which the art of the future is to be 
 raised, and the art of the present cannot gain in stamina and 
 health by self-conscious, reactionary, and affected retreat from 
 them. Goethe, looked at in this aspect, appears as one of the 
 narrowest of men. And, as Borne says, he narrows because he 
 is himself really narrow. What a spectacle that was of his Na- 
 poleon-worship, and his attempts to discredit the patriotic efforts 
 of his countrymen in the Wars of Independence ! To behold 
 him, then, burying himself in the study of curiosities and anti- 
 quities, and trying to close his eyes to the fact that great issues 
 were then at stake precisely corresponding to those which, nobly 
 contended for, imparted an association, and gave a value to every 
 antique record that he traced and treasured. And then the in- 
 differences that he showed in his travels — sometimes they were 
 philistinic and vulgar and narrow in the extreme. Could there 
 have been a more convincing proof of it than when in Italy he 
 would not even look at some of the scenes associated with Chris- 
 tian life and Christian heroism. Assisi is surely curious his- 
 
3S6 GOETHE. 
 
 torically, and yet Goethe says of the famous church in which St 
 Francis preached, — " I passed it by with disgust." He scouted at 
 Florence and Savonarola associations, and said to a young Italian 
 who had asked him his opinion of Dante's great poem, that to 
 him the " Inferno " was abominable, the " Purgatorio " dubious, 
 and the " Paradiso" tiresome. " You will always," said Goethe 
 to Eckermann in 1830, "find hatred and contempt strongest 
 and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture." 
 
 But it is very odd indeed to come over and over again on such 
 utterances from a man who is presented to us as a perfect speci- 
 men of culture, in whom, as Mr Carlyle says, there is no hate and 
 whose "love is always wise and meek, and calm and active.'' 
 
 And to him, as to all time-servers and sensualists, events were 
 avengers, "wronging the wronger, till he rendered right." His 
 Napoleon-worship, was it even justified by success in the long 
 run ? No ; Napeolon collapsed, affording a pitiable spectacle of 
 incoherent whimpering childish vanity on St Helena, and as we 
 behold Goethe in his age, still stately, affected, faultless. Apollo- 
 like, we cannot help thinking of his own words, which he so 
 failed to verify in this aspect : " The errors of men properly make 
 them amiable."* And very fitting it is that the man who had 
 thus worshipped Napoleon, and yet did not feel himself anyway 
 compromised by that collapse, should be in noway inclined to 
 trace a fateful irony in his mode of life, and in his art, as he 
 wandered alone in the woods to escape attendance at the theatre, 
 when a mastiff was introduced on the stage to gratify one of 
 the Duke's mistresses — a natural result of the relations that Vart- 
 pour-l'art principle on one side particularly favoured ! Poor 
 Goethe ! Did the man gain what the poet lost then ? or vice- 
 versd? were his sylvan wanderings in these star-lit or cloudy 
 evenings, the serener that here as in other relations he failed to 
 connect art with life ? Let us hope so. But the mistresses were,, 
 even on the confessions of friends, the fashion at Weimar and a 
 bell-pulling dog exhibition might have become more tolerable in 
 recalling the theatre-goers to certain inevitable facts of life and 
 nature had they but properly reflected. 
 
 And yet while Goethe thus by principle cut himself off from 
 all the social and political interests identified with the progress 
 of his country, he was perpetually making outcry about the want 
 
 * Die Irrthiimer des Menschen ihn machen eigentlich liebenswurdig. — Eihisches, 
 
GOETHE. 357 
 
 of a prepared atmosphere of culture, which would enable the 
 poet to speak more effectually to his time. 
 
 He constantly mourned over the want of a genial atmosphere 
 of taste through which the artist might confidently work, pro- 
 ducing the very best that his genius was equal to. In his last 
 days the theme was constantly on his mind and on his lips, as 
 may be seen by the conversations with Eckermann. 
 
 But in respect to this idea of a national spirit which by unity, 
 culture, accessibility to high influences, should present to the 
 poet a prepared atmosphere for his very highest productions, 
 Goethe is by no means consistent in his utterances. Nay, he is 
 very contradictory. Sometimes he seems to think that the poet 
 profits most by finding the elements of national life concentrated 
 in one city as in France and not distributed at distant centres 
 over the country ; while at other times, he seems to hold 
 that great benefits are to be derived in respect of culture from 
 the very distribution of these forces in far-separated centres. To 
 illustrate our point we may place two extracts from Eckermann 
 in contrast. In 1828, we find Goethe saying: — 
 
 " I am not uneasy about the unity of Germany, our good high roads 
 and future railroads will of themselves do their part. But, above all, 
 may Germany be one in love ! and may it always be one against the 
 foreign foe ! May it be one, so that German dollars and groschen 
 may be of equal value throughout the whole empire ! one, so that my 
 travelling-chest may pass unopened through all the six-and-thirty 
 states ! May it be one, so that the town passport of a citizen ot 
 Weimar may not be considered insufficient, like that of a mere 
 foreigner, by the frontier officer of a large neighbouring state. May 
 there be no more talk of inland and outland among the German 
 states ! In fine, may Germany be one in weight and measure, in 
 trade and commerce, and a hundred similar things I will not name ! 
 
 " But if we imagine that the unity of Germany consists in this, that 
 the very large empire should have a single great capital, and that 
 this one great capital would conduce to the development of great 
 individual talent, or to the welfare of the great mass of people, we are 
 in error. 
 
 " A state has been justly compared to a living body with many 
 limbs, and thus the capital of a state may be compared to the heart, 
 from which life and prosperity flow to the individual members, near 
 and far. But if the members be very distant from the heart, the hfe 
 that flows to them becomes weaker and weaker. A clever Frenchman, 
 I think Dupin, has sketched a chart of the state of culture in France, 
 
3S8 GOETHE. 
 
 and has exhibited the greater or less enlightenment of the different 
 departments by a lighter or darker colour. Now, some departments, 
 particularly in the southern provinces, remote from the capital, are 
 represented by a perfectly black colour, as a sign of the great dark- 
 ness which prevails there. But would that be the case if la belle 
 France, instead of one great focus, had ten foci, whence life and light 
 might proceed. 
 
 " Whence is Germany great, but by the admirable culture of the 
 people, which equally pervades all parts of the kingdom ? But does 
 this not proceed from the various seats of Government, and do not these 
 foster and support it ? Suppose, for centuries past, we had had in 
 Germany only the two capitals, Vienna and Berlin, or only one of 
 these, I should like to see how it would have fared with German 
 culture, or even with that generally diffused opulence which goes hand 
 in hand with culture. Germany has about twenty universities dis- 
 tributed about the whole empire, and about a hundred public libraries, 
 similarly distributed. There are also a great number of collections of 
 art, and collections of objects belonging to all the kingdoms of nature, 
 for every prince has taken care to bring around him these useful and 
 beautiful objects. There are gymnasia and schools for arts and in- 
 dustry in abundance ; nay, there is scarcely a German village without 
 its school. And how does France stand with respect to this last point? 
 
 "Then look at the number of German theatres, which exceed 
 seventy. These are not to be despised as supporters and promoters 
 of a higher cultivation of the people. In no country is the taste for 
 music and singing, and the practice of it so widely spread, as in Ger- 
 many ; and even that is something ! 
 
 " And now think of such cities as Dresden, Munich, Stuttgart, 
 Cassel, Brunswick, Hanover, and the like ; think of the great elements 
 of life comprised within these cities ; think of the effect they havfe 
 upon neighbouring provinces, and ask yourself if this would have been 
 the case if they had not for a long time been the residence of princes. 
 
 " Frankfort, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lubeck are great and brilliant ; 
 their effect upon the prosperity of Germany is incalculable. But would 
 they remain what they are if they lost their own sovereignty, and be- 
 came incorporated with any great German Kingdom as a provincial 
 town ? I see reason to doubt this." * 
 
 And then read this, in contrast, spoken at no great interval of 
 time, that is, in 1830: — 
 
 " As for Beranger, his was no hard task. Paris is France. All the 
 important interests of his great country are concentrated in the capital, 
 and there have their proper life and their proper echo. Besides, in most 
 of his political songs, he is by no means to be regarded as the mere organ 
 
 * Goethe to Eckermann, in 1828. 
 
GOETHE. 359 
 
 of a single party ; on the contrary, the things against which he writes 
 are for the most part of so universal and national an interest that the 
 poet is almost always heard as a great voice of the people. With us, in 
 Germany, such a thing is not possible. We have no city, nay, we 
 have no country, of which we could decidedly say, here is Germany ! 
 If we enquire in Vienna, the answer is — this is Austria ! and if in 
 Berlin, the answer is — this is Prussia ! Only sixteen years ago, when 
 we tried to get rid of the French, was Germany everywhere .' Then 
 a political poet could have had an universal effect, but there was no 
 need of one ! The universal necessity, and the universal feeling of 
 disgrace, had seized upon the nation like something daemonic ; the 
 inspiring fire which the poet might have kindled was already burning 
 everywhere of its own accord. Still, I will not deny that Arndt, 
 Korner, and Ruckert, have had some effect." * 
 
 One thing is clear. Goethe, in spite of himself, was compelled 
 to recognise some direct ethical ground on which the artist must 
 stand in relation to the spirit of the period in which he lives. 
 He, indeed, sometimes claims a benefit from the great events 
 which are generally regarded as having done more to distract and 
 to break up (for the time being at all events) the essential unity of 
 Germany, than any other influence whatever. When he wrote 
 the following passage, he forgot that the very claim he makes of 
 benefits derived from the great events of his time is absolutely 
 inconsistent with the professed indifference he obtrusively mani- 
 fested while these events were taking place : — 
 
 " I had the great advantage of having been born at a time when the 
 greatest events which have disturbed the world took place, and such 
 events have continued to occur throughout my long life. I am thus 
 a living witness of the Seven Years' War, of the separation of America 
 from England, of the French Revolution, and indeed of the whole 
 Napoleonic era, with the downfall of the Emperor, and the events 
 that followed it. Thus I have attained results and insight impossible 
 to those who are born now and must learn all such things from books 
 which they will not understand'' t 
 
 -'' Woe betide the man," says Herder, " who is dissatisfied with the 
 scene in which Providence has called him to live and act ; but woe 
 betide the philosopher, likewise, who reasons upon humanity and its 
 morals, if he believes that his own scene is the only important one, 
 and the earliest of all scenes to have been necessarily the worst ; for 
 if all form a part of the drama which is being progressively performed, 
 certain it is that each will, in its turn, present a new and curious phase 
 of humanity." 
 
 * To Eckermann in 1830. t To Eckermann in 1824. 
 
36o GOETHE. 
 
 But Goethe, whilst he clearly perceived the action of a certain 
 *law — the law of reciprocity, or of "give and take," the depend- 
 ence of literature upon life, as we may name it for simpUcity's 
 sake — engaged himself constantly in the representation of what 
 was purely individual and remote. He studied his own tenden- 
 cies in their more specific aspects, and aimed at stamping them 
 with the air of universality through the deHcacies of artistic 
 elaboration, struggling to invest them with human interest by the 
 use of symbol, and by relating them to possible or fanciful lines 
 of development. He plays with abstractions, and attempts to 
 gain interest by faint reflections of individual proclivity. After 
 all the fight, for example, about Euphorion, and the idea or per- 
 son it represents, there can be no doubt that Mr Bayard Taylor 
 is right when he regards it as being more representative of Goethe 
 himself as poet, than of Byron or any other person or idea; 
 and this none the less that Mr Taylor identifies [see his Faust, 
 2d vol., p. 479] Euphorion with the Boy Lenker and Homunculus. 
 This is so far consistent, but only so far consistent with what 
 Goethe himself says : — 
 
 " Euphorion is not a human, but an allegorical being. In him is 
 personified Poetry, which is bound to neither time, place, nor person. 
 The same spirit who afterwards chooses to be Euphorion, appears 
 here [second scene of second act of second Faust] as the ' Boy 
 Lenker,' and is so far like a spectre that he is present everywhere and 
 at all times.'' 
 
 Besides, he is constantly engaged in the attempt to import a 
 puzzle into his works by actually making his characters move in 
 a double play. It is sometimes as though the " players " in Ham- 
 let were to confuse themselves with the legimate dramatis personce, 
 and then to peep at us knowingly from behind their masks in re- 
 mote corners. This was due, in part at all events, to his inability 
 to escape from the romantic influence — a point which shall be 
 more fully considered in a later chapter. 
 
 To this is, in some degree, due the lack of construction in his 
 later tales and dramas, the constant attempt to shadow forth a 
 society with some kind of fantastically ideal basis, and yet inter- 
 secting the living world of fact, and becoming one with it. 
 This air of mystery and individual caprice, which characterises 
 more particularly his later romances, and the Second Part of 
 
 * To Eckermann, 1829. 1 
 
GOETHE. 361 
 
 Faust is thus in great measure to be accounted for. Herr Rosen- 
 kranz has expended an immense deal of industry and ingenuity 
 to present a consistent theory of these later works of Goethe, 
 but not with complete success or satisfaction to less enthusiastic 
 admirers of the poet. Rosenkranz indeed, with a naive uncon- 
 sciousness, finds that this element of mystery and self-disguise — a 
 reflection, indeed, of Goethe's personal efforts — pervades his social 
 romances, and particularly imparts piquant charm to the Court 
 scenes in the Second Part of Faust. He writes :— 
 
 " Very lively is the manner in which the company is represented. 
 No one really is what he seems to be ; each one has drawn over him- 
 self a mask or concealing garment ; w^at each does know of the 
 other is not what his appearance or his language indicates. This 
 effort to conceal his own being, to act a part, or even to dream him- 
 self into something different from himself— l^sA he may the better 
 behold himself from different angles in the eyes of others) — to make 
 himself, in a word, a riddle to others, in all frankness is the deepest 
 and most piquant charm of social interests here." * 
 
 Even the little attempts at mystery and mystification, of which 
 Goethe was so fond ahke in his life and in his writings, bear wit- 
 ness to this peculiarity — we had almost said to this defect— of his 
 nature. For defect it is. This may indeed be said chiefly to have 
 imparted that irresolute air, that lack of such grasp of character 
 as far less men intellectually — say Scott or Fielding — have shown 
 in high perfection, and that tone of cheat-you-if-I-can, which, 
 the longer he lived obtained the greater scope, and which does 
 now and then painfully suggest a doubt of his complete sincerity 
 as an artist, and insists somehow on being identified with a 
 certain lack of principle (of character, as he puts it in speaking 
 of Lessing)— a decided inconstancy and indeterminateness in the 
 moral side of his being. 
 
 To this source also, we think, must be traced that reserve and 
 mystification and desire to attract others under his influence, 
 while very carefully keeping his own feelings in the background, 
 which has been noticed and commented on by many. Schiller 
 at first was repelled from Goethe by this, and recorded his feel- 
 ings for us. 
 
 We find Schiller saying of Goethe in writing to Korner on 
 September 2, 1788 — 
 
 * Deutsche Literatur, p. 109. 
 
362 GOETHE. 
 
 " Upon the whole I must say that my great idea of him is not 
 lessened by having become personally acquainted with him, but I 
 doubt whether we shall ever become intimate. Much that to me is 
 of interest he has already lived through. Not so much in years as 
 in experience and self-culture ; he is so far beyond me that we can 
 never expect to meet on our way ; his whole being is radically op- 
 posed to mine ; his world is not my world ; our conceptions of things 
 are entirely different. Time will tell." 
 
 And on the 2d February, 1 789 — he wrote again : — 
 " To be much with Goethe would make me unhappy, for even to- 
 wards his best friends he has no moments of overflowingness (Ergies- 
 sung) ; one cannot get hold of him. In fact, I think him an egotist 
 of no common order. He has the talent of fascinating men, and of 
 making them feel themselves indebted to him by small as well as 
 great attentions, but he contrives always to keep himself free ; he 
 makes his existence benevolently felt, but only as a god, without 
 imparting himself {phne sick selbst zu geben). This seems to me a con- 
 sistent and well-contrived mode of action, calculated to ensure the 
 highest enjoyment of self-love. Men should not allow such a char- 
 acter to come much about them. This it is that makes him hate- 
 ful to me, although I love his genius with my whole heart, and think 
 highly of him. He has awakened in me a most peculiar mixture of 
 hate and love, a feeling not very unlike that which Brutus and Cassius 
 must have entertained for Caesar. I could kill his spirit, and yet love 
 him with all my heart." 
 
 XV. 
 
 This lack of spontaneity, this dependence on a kind of self- 
 survey and conscious stimulus, even in things of which spon- 
 taneity may be held to constitute the prime worth, imparts that 
 frigid fastidiousness, that coldness, which marks Goethe's works, 
 and which M. Doudan detected and spoke of. It is noticeable in 
 Goethe's life as well as in his works, giving an air of artificiality 
 and remoteness from ordinary interests, as if the most natural 
 impulses were all restrained to be made subject to rule for the 
 sake of some artistic result, and for direct effect. What could 
 be more characteristic of this temper than the following from the 
 " Wahrheit und Dichtung," of which we shall give the original in 
 a footnote : — 
 
 " I am by nature as little grateful as any man ; and on forgetting a 
 benefit done to me, I could very easily become ungrateful under the 
 sharp sense of a momentary misunderstanding. 
 
GOETHE. 363 
 
 " To obviate this, as far as may be, I first accustom myself with 
 everything that I possess, to remind myself with pleasure how I got it, 
 or who gave it me, whether by way of present, exchange, purchase, or 
 any other way. Then, I have accustomed myself in showing my col- 
 lection, to think of and to name the person through whom I obtained 
 each article ; yea, even to do justice to the occasion, the accident, 
 the remotest cause and coincidence, by which things that are valued 
 and are dear to me, have become mine. That which is about us thus 
 receives a life ; we see in it a combination, spiritual, full of love, sug- 
 gestive of its origin ; and through the making of past circumstances 
 present in this way, our passing existence is elevated and enriched, 
 the givers of the gifts rise repeatedly before the imagination ; one con- 
 nects with their image pleasing remembrances, ingratitude is made im- 
 possible, and an occasional return becomes easy and agreeable. One 
 is led, at the same time, to the consideration of that which is not 
 sensibly possessed, and one recapitulates with delight to whom higher 
 gifts are to be ascribed and dated." * 
 
 Fancy a man working a force-pump of gratitude (not unmixed 
 with something else) by periodically arranging before his eyes all 
 the presents he has received ! 
 
 A careful reperusal of Goethe's works has firmly convinced us 
 of one thing — that only the healthy, unprurient, and strictly unego- 
 tistic mind can be at once truly natural and truly delicate. Pure 
 taste will not obey the dictates of mere rale, any more than in- 
 stincts that have been lost through artificial indulgences will 
 return at the call of him who has lost them. Goethe shows pre- 
 cisely the same defects — a want of simple natural delicacy, even 
 where such is demanded by the subject. This is seen even in the 
 " Achilles " (notwithstanding the clear and beautiful classic-pictur- 
 esque of the opening), in the easy over-familiarity of such lines as — 
 
 * Ich bin von Natur so wenig dankbar als irgend ein Mensch, und beim Vergessen emp- 
 fangenes Guten konnte das heftige Gefiihl eines augenblicklichen Missverhaltnisses mich 
 sehr leicht zum Undank verleiten. 
 
 Deisem zu begegnen, gewohnte ich mich zuvGrderst, bei allem was ich besitze, mich gem 
 zu erinnern, wie ich dazu gelangt, von wem ich es erhalten, es sey durch geschenk, Tausch 
 Oder kauf, oder auf irgend eine ander Art. Ich habe mich gewohnt, beim Vorzeigen meiner 
 Sammlungen der Personen zu gedenken, durch deren Vermittelung ich das Einzelne erhielt, 
 ja der Gelegenheit, dem Zufall, der entferntesten Veranlassung, und Mitwirkung, wodurch 
 mir Dinge geworden, die mir lieb und werth sind, Gerechtigkeit wiederfahren zu lassen. Das 
 was uns umgiebt erhalt dadurch ein Leben, wir sehen es in geistiger, liebevoller, genetischer 
 Verkniipfung, und durch das Vergegenwartigen vergangener Zustande wird das augenblick- 
 liche Daseyn erhoht und bereichert, die Urheber der Gaben stiegen wiederholt vor der 
 Einbildungskraft hervor, man verkniipft mit ihrem Bilde eine angenehme|£rinnerung, macht 
 sich den Undank unmoglich und ein gelegentliches Erweidern leicht und wunscherswerth. 
 2ugleich wird man auf die Betrachtung desjenigen gefuhrt, was nicht sinnlicher Besitz ist, 
 und man recapitulirt gar gern, woher sich unsere hohern Giiter schreiben und datiren." — 
 Gotta Edition, 1837, p. 130, vol. iv. 
 
364 GOETHE. 
 
 " Pallas eilig schmuckte den Fuss mit dem goldenen Sohlen."* 
 " Gott und die Bayadere," as well as his " Roman Elegies,'' 
 are so fatally disfigured by the grossest realism and licence, 
 that it is no wonder both Herder and Wieland spoke of them as 
 repulsive.'' What could be more significant of this than that pas- 
 sage in the fifth " Elegy," where he tells how he first came to 
 realise the artist's feeling for marble by handling the soft form of 
 Christian e in bed, while he counted time to his hexameters by 
 beating gently with his fingers on her back as she lay sleeping. 
 These are his words : — 
 " Und belehr" ich mich nicht, indem ich das lieblichen Busens 
 
 Formen spahe, die Hand leite die Hiiften hinab ? 
 Dann versteh' ich den Marmor erst recht; ich denk'und vergleiche, 
 
 Sehe mit fiihlendem Aug", fiihle mit sehender Hand. 
 Raubt die Liebste denn gleich mir einige Stunden des Tages, 
 
 Giebt sie Stunden der Nacht mir zur Entschadigung hin. 
 Wird doch nicht immer gekiisst, es wird verniinftig gesprochen ; 
 
 Ueberfallt sie der Schlaf, lieg' ich und denke mir viel, 
 Oftmals hab' ich auch schon in ihren Armen gedichtet, 
 
 Und des Hexameters Mass leise mit fingernder Hand 
 Ihr auf dem RUcken gezahlt. Sie Athmet in lieblichen Schlummer, 
 
 Und es durchgliihet ihr Hauch mir bis ins Tieffste die Brust. 
 Amor schiiret die Lamp' indess und er denket der zeiten, 
 
 Da er den namlichen Dienst seinen Triumvirn gethan." 
 And what could be more gross and repulsive than his celebration 
 of the readiness with which Christiane Vulpius surrendered to his 
 desires ! Goethe, as we have said already, was deficient in 
 " mental chastity," and has made too many of his followers defi- 
 cient also. " There are some things which, though known to us 
 all, should yet be treated as secrets, because it is favourable to 
 modesty and good morals." This defect of taste and lack of eye 
 for the simple-homely are, however, only consistent with the feel- 
 ings of repulsion, which he owns were experienced by him to- 
 wards everything simple, homelike, and German, on his return 
 from Italy. He thus puts it : — 
 
 " From Italy, rich in noble forms, I was thrown back on formless 
 Germany, to exchange the clearest sky for a gloomy one. My friends 
 did not comfort and attract me to my home again, but drove me to 
 despair. My delight over distant objects, my sufferings, my regrets 
 at what had been lost to me, appeared greatly to offend them. Sym- 
 pathy was wholly wanting ; no one understood me or my words." 
 
 * This is no doubt the reason also why M. Scherer, after a careful examination, calls 
 Hermann und Dorothea " an utterly factitious work." 
 
GOETHE. 365 
 
 Compare this in passing with Winckelmann's longings for Ger- 
 many, and his kindly thoughts of old friends while in Rome. 
 
 And so Goethe, who had reared, as Carlyle says, a world for 
 himself, who had aspired to be independent of the common sym- 
 pathies and aims of those around him, now sets himself more and 
 more, as he plainly confesses, in opposition to them, mopes, 
 harps on what lies behind him, whimpers like a school-girl at 
 being misunderstood and opposed by everybody, and, neverthe- 
 less, goes his own way, to form what not we but his apologists 
 call indecent liaisons. What a spectacle of greatness and culture 
 and sweetness and light — all, however, quite consistent with .the 
 underlying narrowness and Philistinism that would not even, in 
 an antiquarian way, take a look at Assisi in passing ! 
 
 XVI. 
 
 That union in Goethe of peculiarly realistic aims with the ten- 
 dency to the mystical and symbolic, of which we have spoken, is 
 far more pervasive than some critics would be willing to admit, 
 and must be credited by some of his happy choices of subject, as 
 , they would say, as well as bear the blame of some of his failures, 
 as they would name them. M. Scherer rather misses this aspect 
 of the matter, when he writes thus : — 
 
 " Goethe had the good fortune early to come across a subject which, 
 while it did not lend itself to his faults, could not but call forth all the 
 powers of his genius. I speak of Faust ! Goethe had begun to 
 occupy himself with it as early as 1774, the year in which Werther 
 was published. Considerable portions of the first part appeared in 
 1790 : it was completed in 1808. We may congratulate ourselves 
 that the work was already, at the time of his travels in Italy, so far 
 advanced as it was, else there might have been danger of the author's 
 turning away from it as from a Gothic, perhaps unhealthy produc- 
 tion. What is certain is, that he could not put into Faust his pre- 
 occupation with the antique, or, at any rate, he was obliged to keep 
 this for the second part. The first ' Faust' remained, whether Goethe 
 would or no, an old story made young again, to serve as the poem of 
 thought, the poem of modern life. This kind of adaptation had evi- 
 dently great difficulties. It was impossible to give the story a satis- 
 factory end ; the compact between the doctor and the devil could not 
 be made good, consequently the original condition of the story was 
 gone, and the drama was left without an issue. We must, therefore, 
 take ' Faust' as a work which is not finished, and could not be finished. 
 
366 GOETHE. 
 
 But, in compensation, the choice of this subject had all sorts of ad- 
 vantages for Goethe. In place of the somewhat cold symbolism for 
 which his mind had a turn, the subject of Faust compelled him to 
 deal with popular beliefs. Instead of obhging himself to produce a 
 drama with beginning, middle, and end, it allowed him to proceed by 
 episodes and detached scenes. Finally, in a subject fantastic and 
 diabolic, there could hardly be found room for the imitation of models. 
 Let me add, that in bringing face to face human aspiration re- 
 presented by ' Faust,' and pitiless irony represented by Mephisto- 
 pheles, Goethe found the natural scope for his keen observations on 
 all things. It is unquestionable that 'Faust' stands as one of the 
 great works of poetry ; and, perhaps, the most wonderful work of 
 poetry in our century. The story, the subject, do not exist as a whole, 
 but each episode by itself is perfect, and the execution is nowhere de- 
 fective. ' Faust ' is a treasure-house of poetry, of pathos, of the 
 highest wisdom, of a spirit inexhaustible, and keen as steel. There is 
 not, from the first verse to the last, a false tone or a weak line." 
 
 Unfortunately, however, for one inference here drawn, as it 
 would appear from some facts connected with Goethe's residence 
 in Italy, Goethe wrote what is decidedly one of the most fantastic 
 and truly Gothic parts of the first part of Faust, during this very 
 Italian period, when M. Scherer thinks that he ought to have 
 been inclined to turn away from it — especially from such parts of 
 it as that of which we here speak. Mr Bayard Taylor, who has 
 done more to collect the facts connected with Goethe's works, 
 and show their critical bearings, than any other English-speaking 
 critic, thus forcibly presents one of the facts that rather prove 
 stumbling-blocks to M. Scherer's facile theory — to the effect that 
 there was danger in Goethe, during his Italian residence, turning 
 away from " Faust" as from a gothic, perhaps unhealthy produc- 
 tion — a circumstance, which, had it really existed, would have 
 proved Goethe to have been more morbid than he was, and with 
 less power of artistic volition than he really possessed. Mr 
 Bayard Taylor writes : — 
 
 "The scene of the 'Witches' Kitchen' was written towards the 
 close of March 1788, in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, out- 
 side the wall of Rome, at a time when Goethe's mind was thoroughly 
 possessed with the grace and beauty and irrecoverable symmetry of 
 ancient art. Perhaps, therefore, the very contrast between his strong 
 aesthetic passion and the character of his theme led him to give the 
 latter, the ugliest, coarsest, and absurdest expression. The scene has 
 been a puzzle to many commentators, because in the dialogues of 
 
GOETHE. 367 
 
 Mephistopheles, the Witch and the animals, some occult meaning is 
 often provokingly implied." * 
 
 On every construction of Goethe's genius and habits of 
 work, Mr Bayard Taylor's facts are more consistent than are 
 M. Scherer's somewhat over-facile inferences, Goethe, as we have 
 already seen, needing the stimulus of reactionary and reversed 
 activities. 
 
 It is therefore hardly consistent in M. Scherer to declare that 
 Goethe, as he grew older, was more overcome by devotion to the 
 antique, and yet to treat with complete ridicule the romantic, 
 almost Gothic, wildness of many of his conceptions in the second 
 part of Faust, and to wax especially merry over Euphorion found 
 under a cabbage leaf " Everything with Goethe," he adds, 
 " must be grave, solemn, sculptural. We see the influence of 
 Winckelmann, and of his views of Greek art.'' 
 
 M. Emile Montigny also attributes far too much to the Italian 
 Journey in confirming him in the love of classic form. 
 
 It is on the ground of this gradual tendency to science, to 
 reflection, to mere abstract symbolism that M. Scherer bases his 
 right to rank the second part of Faust as a far inferior work to 
 the first. Thus he puts it : — 
 
 " The two parts of Faust do not proceed from one and the same 
 conception. Goethe was like Defoe, like Milton, like so many others, 
 who, after producing a masterpiece, have been bent on giving it a 
 successor. Unhappily, while the first ' Faust ' is of Goethe's fairest 
 time, of his most vigorous manhood, the second is the last fruit of his 
 old age. Science, in the one, has not chilled poetic genius ; in the 
 other, reflection rules and produces all kinds of symbols and abstrac- 
 tions. The beauty of the first comes in some sort from its very im- 
 perfection ; I mean, from the incessant tendency of the sentiment of 
 reality, of the creative power, the poetry of passion and nature to pre- 
 vail over the philosophic intention and to make us forget it. Where 
 is the student of poetry who, as he reads the monologue of Faust, or 
 the sarcasms of Mephistopheles, as he witnesses the fall and the 
 remorse of Margaret, the most poignant history ever traced by pen, 
 any longer thinks of the ' Prologue in Heaven,' or of the terms of the 
 compact struck between Faust and the Tempter ! In the second part 
 it is just the contrary. The idea is everything. Allegory reigns there. 
 The poetry is devoid of that simple and natural realism without 
 which art cannot exist. One feels oneself in a sheer region of didac- 
 tics. Arfd this is of the weakest. What can be more burlesque than 
 
 * Bayard Taylor's " Faust," vol. i. p. 311. 
 
368 GOETHE. 
 
 this Euphorion, son of Faust and Helen, who is found at the critical 
 moment under a cabbage leaf ! — no, I am wrong, who descends from 
 the sky ' for all the world like a Phoebus,' with a little cloak and a 
 little harp, and ends by breaking his neck as he falls at the feet of his 
 parents. And all this to represent Lord Byron, and, in his person, 
 modem poetry, which is the offspring of romantic art ! What deca- 
 dence, good heavens ! and what a melancholy thing is old age, since 
 it can make the most plastic of modern poets sink down to these 
 fantasticalities worthy of Alexandria ! "' 
 
 Schiller's idea of Faust as perceiving in the very conception of 
 it a necessity to descend more and more on a plane of mere 
 ideas, which will assert for themselves a symbolic treatment, is, 
 to our thinking, closer to the soul of it, though the very element 
 in Goethe's character which determined him to the persevering 
 treatment of the subject, must not be overlooked. In 1829, we 
 find him saying to Eckermann : " As the conception is so old — 
 / have had it in my mind for fifty years — the materials have 
 gathered to such an extent, that the hard matter is to decide 
 what to accept and what to reject. The invention of the whole 
 second part is truly as old as I state; but it may be an advantage 
 that I have not ere now written it down, when my knowledge of 
 the world is so much more clear. I am like one who, in his 
 youth, had a great amount of small silver and copper money, 
 which during his life he has constantly changed for the better ; 
 so that at last the property of his youth stands before him in 
 pieces of pure gold." The matter of the chief scenes of the 
 fifth act he distinctly says, is above thirty years old ; " it was so 
 difficult to carry out that it frightened me," he adds. Schiller's 
 words will now be read with admiration for his critical incisive- 
 ness : — 
 
 " Faust — the piece itself — in spite of all its individuality, cannot 
 quite ward off the demand for a symbolical treatment. The duality 
 of human nature, and the unsuccessful endeavour to unite in man the 
 godlike and the physical, is never lost sight of; and as the story runs 
 and must run into what is fantastic and formless, people will not con- 
 sent to remain .by the subject, but will be led from it to ideas. In 
 short, the demands of Faust are both philosophical and poetical, and 
 you may turn it in whichever direction you please, the nature of the 
 subject will force you to treat it philosophically, and the imagination 
 will have to accommodate itself to serve a rational idea." 
 
 All the tendencies with which so much fault has been found 
 
GOETHE. 369 
 
 in the second Faust are present in the first, there is the love of 
 mystery, the desire to gain the more eifect of relief or emphasis 
 for scenes of real Ufe by the presentment of scenes that are 
 purely fantastic and symbolic ; and an indulgence in whimsical 
 satire of a merely temporary nature, often aiming at a pretence 
 of great depth and suggestiveness. This is seen, for example, in 
 the introduction of the Intermezzo of " Oberon and Titania's 
 Golden Wedding " — which was not written for the place assigned 
 to it in the First Faust ; but introduced with the acknowledged 
 object of forming a kind of quiz or puzzle ; seen also in the 
 " Walpurgisnacht," and in the " Proktophantist "• — a bit of satire 
 on the pretences and absurdities of Nicolai, the publisher, and 
 friend of Lessing. The charges which are raised against the 
 Second Faust, in order, as it would seem, to magnify the merits 
 of the First are thus, in strictness, neither critically nor his- 
 torically consistent. Either \h& first part is not so immaculate 
 as it is the fashion with critics like Mr Lewes and M. Scherer to 
 call it, or the Second is not so absolutely separated from the cha- 
 racter of the First by the infusion of qualities that have no pre- 
 sence in the former one. According to Goethe, they are parts of 
 one conception ; the plan of both having been sketched out in 
 the mind from the first, and, to a large extent, simultaneously 
 worked at through a long period of years. To say, then, that the 
 first part of Faust is the product of Goethe's prime, and the second 
 part the " icy product of enfeebled age ' — goes right in the teeth 
 of certain specific facts, and the great disparity which critics find 
 in the two parts, must be othenvise and more critically accounted 
 for. We believe we have the hint of the true solution in Schiller's 
 words, if we do not forget to include one of the chief tendencies 
 of Goethe's nature — hidden, parabolic, and yet self-conscious self- 
 expression. 
 
 Mr Bayard Taylor writes well on this point : — 
 
 " The allegory is carefully veiled, for long isolation, misrepresenta- 
 tion and abuse had taught him to be cautious ; but, he would not in 
 any case, have made it obvious to the running'' reader. The secret 
 was too intimate and precious to be easily betrayed, yet it has not 
 been hidden beyond the reach of that ' love and patience,' on which 
 he relied for a full and final recognition. He who discovers the sym- 
 bolism must first pass through one chapter after another of the poet's 
 nature, and when he has reached the inner sanctuary, he has breathed 
 
 2 A 
 
370 GOETHE. 
 
 the same atmosphere too long to see either vanity or arrogance, or 
 aught but a justified self-consciousness, in these fair and mysterious 
 forms." * 
 
 Herr Rozenkranz, in direct opposition to Mr Lewes, regards it 
 as characteristic of Goethe, that he began nothing if the whole of 
 the work did not hover before his mind ; that, though he could 
 put off execution for years, he still felt that his interest in the 
 subject could at any moment be reawakened ; and that, because 
 of this, he was able to maintain the unity which is observable in 
 Faust, as a complete work through the long series of years 
 that elapsed between its original conception as a whole, and its 
 execution. This unity he finds to be the aspiration of a solitary 
 spirit to subdue the world to itself. This it endeavours to accom- 
 plish, first, through the medium of desire, which is closed by the 
 death of Margaret ; and second, through the medium of work 
 strictly of a vicarious order, the process being presented to us in 
 the second Faust, which, as it is necessary to carrying the hero 
 to . some consistency with himself, must be regarded as a com- 
 ponent part of the original conception of the drama.* 
 
 "Both in ' Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'and in the first ' Faust,' 
 subjective conditions prevail, and these are gradually seen to purify 
 themselves to higher aims and insight. The betrothal to Natalia 
 closes the world of wild youthful desire for the one ; the death of 
 Margaret effects the same for the other. The one steps into the 
 manifold interest and activity of civil society, with the earnest desire 
 to comprehend it in its elements, to acquire property, and to preserve 
 and beautify it, and to aid in enlightening and ennobling social rela- 
 tions ; the other takes likewise a practical turn, but from the position 
 of society, from the point of view of the State. In the 'Apprenticeship' 
 and first part of Faust,' therefore, on account of the excess of subjec- 
 tive conditions, a closer connection of the character and a passionate 
 pathos are necessary ; while, in the Travels and second part of the 
 tragedy, on the contrary, there is evident a thoughtfulness which tones 
 dovm or moderates everything — as it were, a calm designing air ; 
 the particular elements are sharply characterised, but the personages 
 seem rather as supporters of universal aims, in the accomplishment 
 of which their own personality is absorbed ; the universal and its 
 proper language is their pathos, and the keenness of the interest in 
 their history, that before was so remarkably fascinating, is now 
 blunted 
 
 " The relation to Margaret — her death — had elevated Faust above 
 
 * Faust, ii. p. 480. t Deutsche Literatur. p. i-o. 
 
GOETHE. 371 
 
 everything subjective. In the continuation of his life, objective rela- 
 tions alone could constitute the motive of action. The living breath 
 of the First Part resulted simply from the fact, that everything objec- 
 tive and universal was regarded from the point of subjective interest ; 
 while, in the Second Part, the universal and objective stand out 
 prominently ; subjective interests appear only under the pre-supposi- 
 tion of the objective ; the form therefore becomes allegorical. 
 
 " Such an allegorical foundation could not, however, be developed 
 otherwise than in huge masses ; the division of each mass in itself, 
 so that all the elements of thought underlying it should appear, was 
 the proper object of the composition. The first part could also be 
 called allegorical ; but only in the sense in which every poem is alle- 
 gorical ; as, reflecting the universal essence of spirit in the individual ; 
 but in the Second Part everything passes into the truly allegorical, to 
 which it would seem that Goethe had the greater inclination the older 
 that he grew : the ' Xenien,' the ' Trilogie der Leidenschaft,' the ' Lieder 
 zur Loge,' the 'MaskenzUge' 'Epimenides Erwachen,' the cultivation of 
 the Eastern manners, all proceeded from a didactic turn which delighted 
 to express itself in gnomes, pictures, and symbolical forms. Goethe 
 has always been able very acutely to seize the characteristic tendencies, 
 and to unfold them in precise and living language ; it lies, however, 
 in the very nature of such poems that they shall exercise the reflective 
 faculty more than the heart, and it was easy to foresee that the Second 
 Part of Faust would not acquire such a popularity as the first one ; 
 that it would not charm the nation, hke the latter, and educate the 
 people to a consciousness of itself, but that it would always have a sort 
 of esoteric influence. Not a few will be repelled by the mythological 
 learning of the second and third acts ; and all the more that they do not 
 regard themselves as being compensated by the exhibition of action ; 
 and against this reproach we would not readily defend the poet ; for 
 a poem which has to embrace the inexhaustible material of the world, 
 cannot in this respect be limited and defined. . . . With difference 
 of plan, the style must also be different. Instead of dramatic pathos, 
 and because action is wanting, description, explanation, and hint 
 become essential : instead of lively dialogue, the lyrical element has 
 become more prominent, that the constituents of the powerful world- 
 7ife may be embodied with simphcity. The descriptions of j nature 
 here claim to be mentioned in particular. The gayest fancy, the 
 deepest feeling, the most correct knowledge, and the keenest insight 
 into the individual assert themselves in all these pictures with an 
 irresistible charm." 
 
 And certainly Rosenkranz's idea of the persistent return on old 
 plans by which Goethe attained a unity in his greater works, finds 
 much more countenance in facts than do Mr Lewes's endeavours 
 
372 GOETHE. 
 
 wholly to detach the second from the first Faust, so as to gain 
 confirmation to his theory. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 It has been our endeavour in these pages dealing critically 
 with Goethe to escape from the ordinary hackneyed eulogium as 
 far as was possible. That aspect of the matter has certainly been 
 sufficiently well-done already. Goethe's artistic greatness has 
 been well celebrated, and all recognise it. Our business has 
 rather been to show how it lies as a possibility in Goethe's 
 influence to be deleterious and weakening to the best elements 
 in German literature and life. The German staunchness, manli- 
 ness, and sweet domestic loyalty have nothing to gain from him. 
 But these things are better worth preserving and holding forth as 
 great national inheritances than are feverish sensibility, weak 
 indulgences even though justified by artistic aspiration and by 
 artistic product, however finished and effective. Goethe after all 
 was greatest when he was least ambitious artistically — in a word, 
 he was the truest artist when he was the truest German. These 
 songs which he composed while yet his heart thrilled to honest 
 emotions, while he mourned the separations that time and 
 change bring with them — the pathetic evanescence of all earthly 
 beauty and charm — or the buoyant gladness of the loving heart, 
 serene in the consciousness of a reciprocal influence — these are 
 his best gifts to his countrymen ; and they are dowered with the 
 might of immortals, because they can only gladden, purify, and 
 elevate. Theories of education, such as he would fain have 
 justified "Wilhelm Meister" by, are of comparatively small 
 account, when looked at alongside of a mighty educational force, 
 such as lies in these songs. We are at one with M. Scherer in 
 his deliverance on this point: — 
 
 " Goethe is truly original and thoroughly superior only in his lyrical 
 poems, and in the first part of ' Faust.' They are immortal works, and 
 why? Because they issue from a personal feeling. The spirit of 
 system has not petrified them. And yet, even his lyrical poems, 
 Goethe hastened to spoil. He went on correcting and correcting 
 them to the end ; and, in bringing them to that degree of perfection 
 in which we now find them, he has taken out of them their warmth." 
 
GOETHE. 373. 
 
 But we are also at one with the writer of these faithful and 
 pregnant words with which we shall pave the way for our final 
 leave of Goethe : — 
 
 " Truth is the ' King that can do no wrong,' as the grand old bio- 
 graphers of the Bible knew. If Solomon sins and Jacob errs, the 
 truth must be told of them ; for they cannot sin and err without 
 wronging others. And here biographers are too careless. If, for 
 instance, the hero happens to be one of those ' infanti perdutV of 
 genius who, like the young poet in the story, went scattering up and 
 down the village green ruddy roses, which turned to roses of blood 
 when touched by the fingers of her who had inspired Jiis songs — there 
 is much fine talk of ' roses ' and not a word of ' blood.' Yet the critic, 
 as a rule, is content — or else in his powerlessness, he is obliged — to 
 let this kind of thing go by unchallenged, unchecked, save by a few 
 weak words of protest against this modern genius-worship which, 
 under proper restrictions, is noble and good, but which is now-a-days 
 rapidly becoming a tyranny and a nuisance — supplanting an older, 
 better creed, whose articles were ' courage,' — ' tender touch of tender 
 woman,' — chivalry, self-repression, and ' all that makes a man.' Some- 
 times, however, it happens that the dead impeached by the apology 
 for the dead is not the mere village maiden whose heart-blood made 
 ' such beautiful roses blow,' but another genius. Then, the critic 
 becomes more powerful, he speaks with authority then ; for he too is 
 of the ' faithful,' — ^he, too, is of the orthodox creed ; he dares bring 
 before the Court the rights of this other dead genius — rights acknow- 
 ledged at once to be equal to the hero's own. And this is the one 
 drop of comfort in the cup of those who know what it is to be women 
 of genius, in times not ripe for such phenomena.'' 
 
 And a little further on, the writer makes a kind of historical 
 application, besides his more immediate subject, in these words: 
 
 " The two typical self-educators of Germany and England, Goethe 
 and Byron, had the good fortune to be brought always in contact with 
 weaker strugglers, and it was they who survived." * 
 
 We have sought to ally Goethe on one side with the sensual 
 school ; and yet we have in fairness to own that nowhere perhaps 
 in literature has the tendencies of the sensual school been more 
 powerfully rebuked than by Goethe in the Second Faust. The 
 rebuke is none the less efficient in that he spoke a word to him- 
 self against earlier tendencies, as he often did; the power thus 
 to behold himself and to reprove himself being in him almost a 
 special endowment. Who can forget that scene where, after Paris 
 
 » Alfred de Musset. By Theodore Watts. New Quarterly Magazine for April 1878, 
 pp. i6g and 173. 
 
374 GOETHE. 
 
 and Helen appear on the stage at the name of the All-powerful 
 Mothers, charmed out of the incense, Faust, seized with the 
 lower passion for her beauty, falls upon the stage helpless, the 
 ethereal forms having vanished from him. He confuses the 
 actual, the thing of sense, with the ideal ; and while he is in this 
 stage, the true ideal or absolutely beautiful, reveals itself but for a 
 moment and vanishes, leaving only the unsteadying and weaken- 
 ing sense of illusion. This is the mood and the moment proper 
 to the irony of the Heine type. For what can mean else the 
 speedily following story or dream of Leda, and the gradual 
 assumption more and more by Mephistopheles of an ironic form 
 of ugliness as Faust passes further and further on to shapes of 
 classic grace and suggestion in his determination to reach Helen 
 or the absolute ideal? 
 
 M. Scherer's theory is, that as Goethe grew older and colder, 
 the balance between these two elements of art, science and tem- 
 perament, was less and less preserved ; that, as he passed from 
 representing characters to representing the ideal, so now he 
 passed from the ideal to the symbol. He thinks that Goethe's 
 third period was characterised by three things : an ever-increas- 
 ing devotion to the antique as to the supreme revelation of the 
 beautiful, a disposition to take delight in aesthetic theories, and 
 finally, an irrepressible desire to give didactic intentions to art. 
 It is evident, he says, that this last tendency is too manifest in 
 the " Wanderjahre," and in the second " Faust ;" these two works 
 of art being dead of a hypertrophy of reflection — a mere mass of 
 symbols, heiroglyphics, sometimes even mystifications. 
 
 M. Scherer is good on Goethe's '' earnestnesses of servility '' to 
 the great ones of the earth, and makes a fine point over that 
 prostration before the King of Bavaria — the lover of Lola Montes 
 — declaring that he had a good deal of English " snobbishness." 
 
 To three of the most important lines of tendency at that time, 
 Goethe set himself distinctly in opposition. He had no sympathy 
 with the sentiment on which the true idea of Jewish emancipation 
 was based ; * he held himself aloof from the patriotic movements 
 of Germany ; with all his power and influence he opposed himself 
 
 * Goethe said — Das jiidische Volk sehe ich fiir einen wilden, unfruchtbaren Stamm an, der in 
 einem Kreise von wilden, unfruchtbaren Baumen stand ; auf den pflantze der ewige Gartner 
 das edle Keis Jesum Christum, damit es darauf bekleidend, des Stammes Natur veredle 
 und von dannen Propfrieser zur Befruchtung der iibrigen Baume geholt wurden. Goethe 
 in seinem " zur wichtigen, bisher unerortert gebliebenen biblischen Fragen." 
 
GOETHE. 375 
 
 to that individual, social and moral purification on which alone a 
 true cosmopolitanism can be based. His life is in his art ; but 
 alas ! too much to taint and defile it. 
 
 In spite of his aspect of self-restraint and dignified reserve, we 
 may say of him too truly what he said of another : — " Had he 
 only known how to impose upon himself moral restrictions ! It 
 was his ruin that he was unable to do this, and we are justified 
 in saying that this was the rock on which he spUt." 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Here then we are at the centre of the subject, as it concerns 
 Carlyle and Lewes in relation to Goethe. And the plain honest 
 truth must be spoken. Their high-flown eloquence and almost 
 " spooney" hero-worship, which seems to create a mist around 
 them within that circle, can only avail with those of certain 
 tendencies, and those who cannot independently study Goethe 
 for themselves. Returning to Carlyle and Lewes after a dozen 
 years spent in honest effort after Goethe study and endeavour to 
 understand German literature generally is a desillusionment. One 
 wonders how one could ever have been so satisfied with wine so 
 weak and thin, and with so much of spirit in it ; or surrendered 
 oneself for a moment to the heady influence of waters so ungeni- 
 ally mixed. Mr. Carlyle's proverb, so complimentary to the mass 
 of mankind, recurs to us ; and we turn for some sort of support 
 in assuming so rash a position, to the German to find a good 
 and worthy critic saying : — 
 
 " We hope that the cultured Englishman knows Goethe elsewhere 
 than in the well-known book of Lewes, which indeed presents us with 
 a pleasant superficial, feuilletonish lecture, but which does not at all 
 present him rightly as poet and artist, to say nothing of him as a 
 natural observer and investigator, which does not dissect properly 
 one single poetic work, nor aesthetically recompose it ; and in the 
 subject of " Faust" exhibits the crassest ignorance. We hope also 
 that the cultured Englishman in the same way knows our Schiller 
 otherwise than through Carlyle's hyperideal pen-and-ink sketch without 
 shadow and without colour ; and which omits trace of the most strik- 
 ing ideas of Schiller's great wrestle with Kant, and for which another 
 mentor is needful than the Apocalyptic Carlyle." — Karl Griin in 
 Allgemeine Zeitung. 
 
376 GOETHE. 
 
 The truth is that the modem man who above all others pro- 
 fessed to be guided by law, and who desired to live only in 
 accordance with its dictates, was the most lawless of modem 
 men — yielding himself most frequently and most helplessly to 
 these whims and caprices, which are the greatest enemies of will. 
 He was the slave of indefinite impulses, tossed hither and 
 thither helplessly— in nothing consistent save in his vanities, his 
 posturings and his studious desire after self-enjoyment. Even 
 the most arrant superstitions — such as magnetic attraction and 
 daemonic influence were potent to determine his actions at most 
 critical periods of his life ; and, if it be true, as he himself has 
 said, that life is woven of freewill and chance, much in the happy 
 texture of his life must certainly be assigned to the latter. That 
 he was able, as it were, from a reserved corner of his intellect to 
 observe himself so curiously, and to reproduce so faithfully his 
 experiences in such relation with those of others as to gain some 
 sense of dramatic truthfulness is testimony enough to his great 
 powers as an artist, though it does not require a great deal of 
 special critical insight to see, that he could not hide his own 
 weakness, which increased on him year by year, and in spite of 
 all his endeavours, discovers him to us more and more clearly, 
 in his works themselves, as loose, unconcentrated, easily moved 
 this way or that by impressions which should have been mastered 
 and thrust out. This is the secret of the wide chasm which 
 critics like Mr G. H. Lewes discern between the earlier and the 
 later "Faust," and the earlier and later "Wilhelm Meister," 
 though they are unfaithful to their hero in so decisively declining 
 to discover any trace of the same tendency in his earlier works, 
 which we hold, is quite perceptible in them also. As for Mr 
 Carlyle, his worship of Goethe is for this reason unintelligible — 
 not to be accounted for save on one consideration, which strictly 
 is not literary, and therefore cannot be dwelt upon here. This, 
 as well as some other points have been so deftly put by a writer 
 in a London weekly, that we must crave indulgence while we 
 make a quotation : — 
 
 " Goethe's reiterated protest that all his works were but fragments 
 of the grand confession of his life, has had the effect of driving 
 Goethe-students to seek in the events of his life for the key to each 
 of his works — a business which they have prosecuted to such ex- 
 tremes that the result is almost disgusting — or, if not quite that, 
 
GOETHE. 377 
 
 such as disposes one very much to make a suggestive quotation from 
 Herr Gutzkow ! As for Mr Carlyle, his worship of Goethe is unin- 
 telligible on any ground that can be made consistent with his general 
 declaration as to heroism, or his professed literary canons. 
 
 " Goethe, in spite of great artistic self-restraint, was deficient in 
 will. He was the slave of the most capricious impulses, and de- 
 ceived himself into the idea of self-mastery, when, because of his 
 artistic self-observation, he was able finally to turn the results to 
 literary uses. He fell facilely into love, hovered helplessly about the 
 objects of his passion, and actually ran hither and thither, as in the 
 Swiss and Itahan journeys, to experiment with himself as to the real 
 strength of the attraction in the respective cases, and to discover how 
 much he might lose in any effort of self-denial in the matter of mo- 
 mentary gratification. The excuse has often been put forward for 
 Goethe in his kaleidoscopic amours that he was an artist. The plea 
 would be more effective if Goethe had realised with more keenness, 
 that it is possible for the artist and the man to be in conflict. 
 Though his appropriative impulse and his self-enjoying impulse 
 were often in direct conflict, and keenly felt by him to be so, he 
 never realised that it was possible for moral defects to emerge 
 through the perpetual effort artificially to readjust them ; and it is 
 here that Goethe fails both as the man and as the artist. A self- 
 glorification that at last actually ran into a kind of conscious theatri- 
 cality which weakened the sense of healthy, honest discrimination 
 and distinction — and which made him content to pose, and to mystify 
 — more and more obtains. This was the phase which his great 
 genius finally assumed. That anecdote Eckermann tells of the man- 
 ner in which the Second Part of ' Wilhelm Meister' was strung 
 together is very illustrative of this, while the mode in which when in 
 Italy working on the second ' Faust,' he excited his jaded feelings by 
 adventures, and the style in which later he drew matter for the 
 Wahlverwandschaften ' from his experiences with Minna Herzlieb 
 and ' Bettina,' are all physiognomic. He was thus, especially in his 
 later life, debarred from access to these deepest moral experiences of 
 human hearts — sense of sin, remorse, and repentance. These he 
 never reahsed, and therefore could not picture, and never commanded 
 a truly tragic influence. His gallery of creations is limited to reflec- 
 tions of his own capabilities ; and polished, beautiful, and stately as 
 they were, they want at once moral warmth and moral depth. His 
 greatest works are, after all, his earliest — those produced while his 
 sympathies were as yet not completely stained by prurient expe- 
 riences, and while he was in healthy sympathy with the hfe which 
 was lived around him—' Goetz von Berlichingen' and the First Part 
 of ' Faust.' These Heine very incisively separates from his later ones 
 by saying that they are attractive by their substance rather than by 
 
378 GOETHE. 
 
 their forni — by their substance, which was directly drawn from the 
 German life and popular belief of the period. 
 
 " With Goethe's religion it was the same as with his art. His 
 religion was a Spinozistic worship of nature, out of which, however, 
 the properly moral element had been eliminated." 
 
 Great as he is, Goethe is thus one of the men who suffer from 
 closer acquaintance. He is egotistic, self-conscious, vain, and 
 affected ; one might also say he is self-indulgent, prurient, and 
 selfishly vicious. His great apparent calm and self-restraint only 
 tend, in this aspect, to make him the more repellent. He was 
 often kind, considerate, and could bear well with unpleasant ele- 
 ments in the idiosjmcrasies of those brought into relationship 
 with him; but this was mainly for reasons of mere policy and 
 comfort ; he hated to be disturbed and distracted ; and ignored, 
 or put aside, what he did not like. Sometimes one feels that it 
 would be a great relief, and ease the strain on the eye in contem- 
 plating his unchanging Apollo-like /i?j-«, if he would but get angry, 
 and show some little crinkles in his court-dress ; if he would for 
 once, shake some of the powder from his wig, and then laugh 
 outright at his own ridiculous position. He could never afford 
 to laugh at himself, this Goethe ; with the result that he could 
 never really laugh heartily and healthily at another. He is thus 
 very poor in that highest effluence of humour, with which all our 
 truly great modern dramatists have been endowed. It was, in- 
 deed, the most spontaneous part of their character, and penetrated 
 all that they did. 
 
 Though he had been a prince of the blood, or a reigning 
 monarch, uniting to his high position all the glory of the genius 
 that was his, still we should turn away from him with the 
 same sense of something inexplicably coarse, gross, and sensual, 
 deeply indelicate in the grain of him — something at once prurient 
 and callous, impervious to many of the loftier strains of senti- 
 ment and self-respect ; and we should have written precisely as 
 we now do, were he still alive to pit his patronage and his power 
 against us for such words. Not that he had strong passions, or 
 that he yielded to them ; but that he was shameless, cold, cal- 
 culating, and, in many ways, mean, a poet yet inclined knowingly 
 to snatch away from one, whom he had loved, the last and rarest 
 token of true womanhood ; a dramatist, yet without sympathy or 
 enthusiasm for the very loyalty towards his better-self implied in 
 
GOETHE. 379 
 
 that coldness and withdrawal from him. To us, it is simply de- 
 testable and disgusting; and, in the light of such an episode, 
 much in his writings becomes intelligible to us. And his 
 mother : ah, there she stands, cold, serene also, true to herself, 
 and faithful to him in his unfaithfulness ! He is the " spoiled 
 child " of his mother and of fortune still — and how much may 
 that mean in reference to the whole matter ! Goethe never knew 
 the stern adversities that crush and make truly tender, that lift up 
 to the heights, that sink down to the depths, discovering the heart 
 of the world in the sudden sweep and recoil. What he felt most 
 deeply were the sorrows and the trials of youth — sorrows, trials, 
 and adversities, which most readily yield themselves to artistic 
 beautification ; anything sterner he was well-nigh incapable of 
 feeling, and therefore he had little command of the truly tragic 
 elements of life ; and generally attempts to substitute vague mys- 
 tery, fantastic prefigurements and omens, and a Fate after all 
 only half realised. 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
Der wahre Schwarmer geht mit Leib und Seele in die Idea auf, die ihm ob- 
 jective Wahrheit ist ; der Romantiker dagegen weiss die eigne Willkuhr iiber 
 sie erhaben, er ist selber der Geist, aus dem die Idee entsprungen ist. Dennoch 
 tauscht er sich selbst, wenn er die concrete Entwickelung derselben als sein 
 Eigenthum in Anspruch nimmt ; die reine Subjectivitat hat kein Mass und 
 keine Erfiillung, sie entlehnt heimlich und Unbewusst ihrer speciellen Erfah- 
 rung und Wahrnemung, was ungefahr in den Kreis Ihrer Phantasien passt, und 
 lost, in dem sie beide an einander verandert die reine Form und die Wahrheit 
 beides auf. — Schmidt, Geschichte der Romantik, ii. p. 369. 
 
 Tieck's Phantasie ist ein holdseliger Ritterfraulein, das im Zauberwalde 
 nach fabelhaften Thieren jagt, vielleicht gar uach dem seltenen Einhorn, das 
 sich nur von einer reissen Jungfrau fangen lasst. — Heine, Romantische Schule, 
 p. 160. 
 
At the entrance to the Ross-strasse of Berlin, not far from the 
 Kolnische Council Chambers, in a very crowded and noisy part 
 of the town, thick with retail-dealers' shops and small ware- 
 houses, there stood, during the latter half of last century, a high, 
 dark house, that carried somewhat of a stately air in that neigh- 
 bourhood. In this house there dwelt then a very staid and 
 thoughtful man, by trade a master ropemaker, named Johann 
 Ludwig Tieck. He is represented as exhibiting in his life not a 
 little of the old-fashioned simpUcity of German life ; but he had 
 read a good deal, and had become touched by the " Enlighten- 
 ment" that was then so much in vogue, though his good sense, 
 uprightness, and keen eye to his duty in all relations, preserved 
 him from the narrownesses and the prejudices into which many of 
 the devotees of the Aufklarung were very apt to fall. Hard 
 labour and experience, says one of his son's biographers, were 
 the schools that he had studied in. He had married a woman 
 of refined taste and deeply religious feehngs, yet sprightly and 
 healthy-minded withal — one who was well fitted unconsciously 
 to modify any tendency to a too hard and rationalistic view of 
 matters in her husband. The first child of this union was the 
 famous Ludwig Tieck, and he was bom on the 31st May 1773. 
 On the 28th of February 1775 there followed a daughter, Anna 
 Sophie (who was destined to achieve an enviable fame as a 
 writer), and on the 14th August 1776, a son, Christian Frede- 
 rick, who became distinguished as a sculptor. Many and heavy 
 cares the good couple had in the rearing of their children ; but 
 no darker shadow fell on the peaceful burgher household. 
 
 And it was a very favourable atmosphere for a child to be 
 reared in. Busy as the father was, he could often spare an hour 
 
384 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 for a bout of gentle fun, and sometimes he would himself go 
 through the merriest antics and mimicries for the children's 
 diversion. The mother — who often had the Bible or the hymn- 
 book in her hand — loved to sit and read to the children her 
 favourite passages from the one, or to sing her much-loved 
 hymns from the other. But there was no austerity in her na- 
 ture ; and in the intervals stolen from her household cares she 
 would also sing the old German songs, or recite the old mahrchen 
 with great spirit. In the twilight the little ones would often 
 gather quietly round her lap to listen. Ludwig tells that some 
 of his most popular fairy stories were founded on remembrances 
 of these recitations of his mother's, or suggestions derived from 
 them. When between two and three, while his mother was 
 nursing his sister, he used to sit and listen to these songs in a 
 kind of half dream ; and he says that a little later, when he 
 heard one of them read, the rich pictorial language, which was 
 still so simple, and the harmony of the rhymes, penetrated 
 through and through his soul — impressions which were greatly 
 deepened and sustained by listening, as he did, to the hymns of 
 the Lutheran service on Sundays. 
 
 While the inside atmosphere was thus a busy and healthy one, 
 penetrated by the cheerful savour of Christian love and com- 
 plete trust, the world on which Ludwig Tieck's young eyes daily 
 looked was richly varied, quaint, and suggestive. There was the 
 incessant stir of the work-people going to and fro ; the shopping 
 of the housewives and the taking out and in of goods from all 
 quarters ; the crowds on fair-days and the frequently recurring 
 festivals ; and, though the boy early formed a passion for read- 
 ing, he was observant also, and liked to see what was going on 
 outside. His father, indeed, was more keen to encourage this 
 tendency than the other one, and would often walk out leading 
 the children by the hand, to see anything particular that was 
 going on. He was very faithful in his observance of all the 
 people's festivals ; and the children were encouraged to speak 
 about them, and to look forward to them. On such occasions 
 the ropemaker threw off all care and became like a little child. 
 The delights of Christmas-eve in especial were carefully pre- 
 pared for — remembered one-half the year, and looked forward 
 to the next. Then he went out with them to enjoy all the 
 sights — impressions which the son has treasured up with the 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 385 
 
 most delicate artistic care — in his " ^Weihnachtsaben dJ' in par- 
 ticular. There he gracefully images his own childhood : — 
 
 "In that part of the city," he says, '' where the trades predo- ? 
 minated, where merchants, mechanics, and citizens diffused a busy | 
 life, there was a street which led from the KoUn district to the 
 Castle, that a considerable time before saw the erection of the com- 
 mon booths, which were adorned with every kind of brilliant knick- 
 knack as the proper gift for the Christmas feast. Fourteen days be- 1 
 fore the feast the erection of these booths began. On New- Year's 
 Day the fair was closed ; and the week before Christmas Eve was 
 properly the time in which the city pressed itself into this narrow 
 space with the liveliest spirit, and the crowd was at its greatest. 
 Even rain and snow, bad and disagreeable weather, with the most 
 biting cold, did not suffice to banish altogether the old any more than 
 the young. But if at this time the winter days were fresh and plea- 
 sant, at all hours the rendezvous was gladdened by people of all ages, 
 who desired only to be gay and to enjoy things ; for nowhere else in 
 Germany or in Italy have I since found anything so bright and 
 hearty as was at that time the celebration of the Christmas festival 
 in Berlin. 
 
 " Most beautiful was it when snow had shortly before fallen, with 
 moderate frost, and clear weather had for a time prevailed. Then 
 through the ceaseless steps of innumerable wanderers the common 
 plaster of the streets and places had been transformed into a marble 
 pavement. About the mid-day hours the better classes came out and 
 walked up and down, examining and buying, followed by their ser- 
 vants, who were burdened with the gifts that had been bought ; or 
 they came together in groups, as though in a hall, to converse with 
 each other and interchange their news. 
 
 " But the place was at its brightest in the evening hours, when, at 
 both sides, the broad street was illuminated by the many thousands of 
 lanterns on the booths that spread around a light as clear as daylight, 
 which only here and there, owing to the dense crowd of people, 
 seemed darkened, and played in deep shadows. All classes then 
 mingled gaily, and vidth loud talk — in a word, surged through each 
 other. Here an aged burgher carried his child on his arm, and 
 showed and explained all the wonders to his loud-jubilating son. A 
 mother lifted up her little daughter that the child might be near 
 enough to see the waxen hands and faces of the brilliant dolls, which, 
 in their red and white, came so closely after nature. A courtier drew 
 along his gaily-dressed lady ; the man of business was compelled to 
 admit himself deafened by the din and confusion, aijd to leave his 
 accounts and join in it ; yea, even the beggars, old and young, openly 
 
 2b 
 
386 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 and publicly rejoiced in this masquerade accessible to everybody. 
 And they saw without envy the treasures of the season, and sym- 
 pathised with the joy and pleasure of the children, sharing the lively 
 hope that for each little one, something would be borne from this 
 great treasure-chamber into the little play-room. So the thousands 
 moved about, joking over their plans to buy, counting up their money, 
 laughing and crying after the sweet-scented manifold moulded con- 
 fections, in some of which were fruits in graceful imitations, figures 
 of all kinds, beasts and men, all shining in clear colours, smiling with 
 lustre. Here, truly, is a bewildering exhibition of fruits — apricots, 
 peaches, cherries, pears, and apples — all most artistically formed out 
 of wax. There, in a great booth, are thousands of playthings formed 
 in all shapes out of wood — men and women, labourers and priests, 
 kings and beggars, sledges and coaches, maidens, ladies, nuns, horses 
 with bells and shining harness, whole suites of furniture, or hunters 
 with hart and hounds ; whatever thought could suggest for play is 
 here represented ; and the children, servants, and parents, were all 
 excited about choosing and buying. Yonder glances a stall overflow- 
 ing with bright tin (for then it was still customary to make plates and 
 dishes of this metal), but next to it, polished and shining implements 
 glanced and shone in red and green, and gold and blue, an innumerable 
 multitude regularly ranged, and representing soldiers, Englishmen, 
 Prussians and Croats, Pandours and Turks, prettily clothed Pachas on 
 richly caparisoned chargers, also harnessed knights, and peasants, 
 and forests in spring glory, huntsmen, stags, and bears, and hounds 
 in the vidld. 
 
 " If one was not already absolutely deafened and bevidldered with 
 all this confusion of playthings, the lights, and the manifold surging 
 multitude, augmented by the loud shrill cries of the itinerant vendors 
 of wares, who would not attach themselves to one particular spot, 
 then one might have squeezed through the thickest press, with its 
 screaming, shouting, laughing, and whistling, into a part a little more 
 open, where the pressure was of a less oppressive kind, if still the 
 gold could easily be spent. Here are young students, who, incapable 
 of fatigue, ceaselessly swing about a big polygon of pasteboard, 
 which is fastened to a staff with horse-hair, a strange loud humming 
 being produced, and at which the rogues loudly shout and cry. 
 Now comes slowly forward a great coach with many servants. It 
 contains the young princes and princesses of the royal house, who 
 also will take part in the children's joy of the people. Now, the 
 citizens rejoice with a double pleasure at being so near to their 
 sovereigns; the children are overflowing, and all draw, with new 
 eagerness, round the now motionless carriage." 
 
 Koepke efficiently supplements Tieck's own more fanciful pic- 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 387 
 
 ture in the " Weihnachtsabend," by the following passage in the 
 memoir : — 
 
 " Thousand-fold sights it brought to see and wonder at ; many 
 opportunities, too, for little presents, were it only a piece of ginger- 
 bread or a monkey; and, finally, it was far from unattractive to stand 
 behind the booths in the mighty darkness, watching and listening. 
 With all the wanton humour, the whole had an indescribable magical, 
 mysterious, even touching expression. How brightly all glanced in 
 the light of the festive expectation ! For weeks before all the wishes 
 and hopes of the children's world had been awakened. With Mr 
 Tieck, also, the Christmas feast was a great domestic joy. He always 
 procured a gaily-decorated Christmas-tree, set full of burning candles, 
 and hung with flowers and sweetmeats ; and from it much through- 
 out the whole year derived a pardonable lustre. But among all the 
 presents, shone conspicuous the indispensable tin-soldier, as the most 
 attractive, which, under Ludwig's hand, soon became animatingly so 
 — an earnest plaything indeed, to which, in his later days, he would 
 often refer with the gayest humour." 
 
 The prematurely developed powers of the " little sister " had 
 almost a magical effect on the unfolding mind and fancy of Lud- 
 wig. We learn that she was in natural tendencies very like him, 
 with just that shade of contrast which gives full zest to com- 
 panionship in early years. She was cheerful and hvely, very 
 inquisitive, quick and sharp in comprehension, giving most ori- 
 ginal and striking answers, betokening an early ripening wit, and 
 an irresistible propensity to ridicule. She was always ready to 
 take her share in any little practical joke or trick on one or other 
 of her brothers ; but, with Ludwig, she shared a depth of passion 
 and capacity for thought, which drew them into the closest fellow- 
 ship as they grew older. Ludwig, when only five years old, was 
 sent to a French school in the Griinstrasse, not far from his home. 
 Here he got his first ordinary instruction, and learned French ; 
 imparting to his sister, as they sat together in their httle room, 
 snatches of what he himself had learned. The teacher here, 
 Herr Stilke, won great influence over the scholars, and on Tieck 
 in a special sense, by his pious earnestness and fatherly mildness. 
 When a scholar had done anything amiss, he would call up the 
 offender, take him on his knees, stroke his hair fondly, urging 
 him to better behaviour that he might not give his teacher 
 trouble and pain. 
 
 While still a mere child of six, Tieck saw his first play— the 
 
388 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 opera of " Die Neue Arsene ; " but, it is very remarkable that his 
 critical perceptions was already too keen for full enjoyment; 
 the music distracted and wearied him, and he said he did not 
 care to go back. But before long, he accidentally came upon 
 a fragment of Goethe's "Goetz," which acted like an inspi- 
 ration. His father, who was a warm partizan of Goethe, was 
 very glad to see his son exhibit such a precocious interest in 
 literature. He at once procured the whole play, and encouraged 
 the boy in the study of it. Shortly afterwards, Tieck saw his favou- 
 rite on the stage, and this experience opened up to him a new 
 world. His desire to visit the theatre became overruling ; his 
 spare pence that used to be treasured up for fair-time or Christ- 
 mas-tide, was broken in upon, and he actually went to the theatre 
 without the knowledge of his parents, which brought him severe 
 reproof, and also some bodily chastisement. At all events, when 
 in the fulness of his fame in 1825, he was appointed by the King 
 of Saxony official critic of the drama, with the title of Hofrath, 
 and a salary of 700 thalers per annum, he wrote to one of his 
 friends, thus playfully recalling these boyish surreptitious visits 
 to the theatre : — "So at last I am actually paid for taking jour- 
 neys and seeing plays ! To have been flogged for it in youth, 
 and to be made a privy councillor for it in age — such is life ! " 
 
 In the beginning of his ninth year, he was sent to the Gym- 
 nasium, then under the charge of Frederich Gedike, an ardent im- 
 petuous man, passionate and pedantic, though zealous in the 
 cause of school reform. He was harsh in his manners, and very 
 dictatorial ; and would not listen to explanations from a pupil, 
 however reasonable. On one occasion, Tieck was accused of 
 some fault which he had not committed, and in the most old- 
 fashioned manner, he compelled the Rector to listen to reason 
 and to truth, telling him that he would bear all the punishment 
 that might be deemed necessary afterwards. He felt repelled by 
 the Rector, and very probably would not have made such re- 
 markable progress as he did, had it not been that the conrector, 
 Weisser, was a man of a more attractive type, who drew forth his 
 sympathy. Through Weisser's influence and aid he came to lead 
 a more cheerful life in the school, and his progress was almost 
 unprecedentedly rapid. 
 
 And, while his ordinary school education thus proceeded, he 
 was advancing on a line of self-development with as decisive steps. 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 389 
 
 His appetite for books was insatiable — he read Fontenelle's writ- 
 ings in Bode's translation ; he sought out all of Goethe's works 
 that had been pubhshed ; but, except in the case of " Werther," 
 with hardly the same powerful impression as had accompanied 
 the first perusal of the " Goetz." A greater master was to touch 
 a yet deeper chord and carry forward the impulse communicated 
 by the first contact with Goethe. One day a school companion 
 showed him a volume containing " Hamlet" in the Eschenburg 
 translation. He glanced at it, begged his friend to lend it for a 
 night, which was agreed to. School-hours over, Tieck hurried 
 homewards with his treasure, expectant of a night's rare enjoy- 
 ment ; but, as he passed through an avenue of poplars bounding 
 the Lustgarten, he was tempted to take a peep. It was late in 
 autumn, misty weather, and rain was already falling slightly. A 
 few oil lamps hung here and there on the trees. Tieck stepped 
 under one and opened his volume, intending merely by the dim 
 light to acquaint himself with the " dramatis personse." But 
 having once begun, he could not stop. He read on and on in 
 a kind of trance ; the outward world was forgotten, — wind and 
 rain and all else. He did not recollect where he was, till he had 
 read to the very end ; then, cold and wet, he hurried home, pro- 
 bably to receive a severe rebuke. A new world had been opened 
 to him, or rather the inner temple, in whose vestibule he had 
 stood, was fully unfolded in general scheme with its wonderful 
 pillars, its sky-reaching dome, and dim, half-mysterious aisles and 
 recesses and side-chapels. That night he could hardly sleep, and 
 now his great desire was to find out more of the marvellous cre- 
 ations of this master of fancy, humour, passion and the human 
 heart, and before long he had read all of Shakespeare that was 
 then to be found in German. Tieck, through life, often fell back 
 on this world alike as relief and as corrective. 
 
 He soon perceived the immense value that his formal school- 
 tasks would be in putting into his hand an instrument to unlock 
 many more such treasures. This incited him to eifort more 
 than the tutorial aid he received at home. His father, half out 
 of pity for the straits of a certain poor theological candidate, 
 Herr Griefe, had engaged him to take the oversight of the boys 
 in their home-lessons ; and as part of his pay the candidate 
 enjoyed free table on certain days. Herr Griefe doubtless often 
 wished that his boys were not quite so quick-witted. His knowledge 
 
390 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 was so limited that he had hard work to keep pace with Ludwig; 
 and sometimes he found himself in awkward predicaments in 
 the course of the lesson. Once he was recounting to his scholars 
 how ^gisthus had murdered Orestes, and was therefore, after his 
 death, raised to godlike honours, when Ludwig cried out, 
 " Good Herr Griefe, that is impossible ! surely it was the re- 
 verse?" Herr Griefe persisted, but made a not quite happy- 
 attempt to defend his position ; while, at the other end of the 
 room, the father sat in his arm-chair, and laughed at his son's 
 quickness and Griefe's perplexity. 
 
 From this Griefe, Ludwig got his first lessons in Greek : and 
 so attracted was he by the study, and so confident of speedily 
 mastering the language, that though, on reading passages trans- 
 lated from Homer, he had been seized with a great desire to 
 read the whole, yet when his father presented him with a copy of 
 Damm's well-known translation, the boy said, " Dear father, I 
 beg you to take this book back and keep it in the meantime. 
 Within a very short time I shall be able to read the Odyssey 
 in Greek with Herr Griefe, and then I hope to know better how 
 to use this translation properly." And he was as good as his 
 word. Before the year was out he had twice translated the 
 Odyssey — once in prose and once in hexameters ; and the work 
 awakened in him a passion for verse, in which he now began to 
 exercise himself 
 
 His love of books increased ; he read everything that came 
 into the house. Already the boy of twelve had begun the 
 habit, which was maintained through life, of wandering in 
 the woods to considerable distances, reading as he went. 
 On one occasion he had exposed himself to damp, and fell 
 ill. But even in his bed he would not rest : he must sit 
 up and read. The doctors gave orders that he should not do 
 so ; and his father took the Shakespeare volumes away, and 
 began to keep watch over the bed. But the invalid had actually 
 risen stealthily, and got hold of Bertuch's translation of " Don 
 Quixote," and was found as deep in it as he had been in Shakes- 
 peare. He had intended to hide it under the bed-clothes ; but, 
 so absorbed was he, that he had not heard his father come up 
 the stairs and enter his room. " My son," said his father, " thou 
 art not doing as thou oughtest to do. Such reading will only 
 make thee worse. Give me the book, and remain quietly rest- 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 391 
 
 ing in thy bed." And with sorrow he saw the book vanish, and 
 the bed-clothes put straight over him ; but his love of Cervantes 
 was for life. 
 
 His quick observation and discrimination of character often 
 befriended him and aided his culture. In 1784, he was greatly 
 struck by the aspect of a soldier in a Berlin Grenadier regiment, 
 then quartered close by. The pale and expressive countenance 
 of the man assured Ludwig of something out of the ordinary. 
 After much hesitation he addressed the man, and soon became 
 very friendly with him. The man's name was Daschieri, he was 
 of a good family in Modena, and had, in evil moment, bound 
 himself to a seven years' service in the Prussian army. From 
 him Tieck learned many things. Daschieri, in the first place, 
 made him a fair fencer ; then he grounded him in ItaHan, and 
 pushed him on so far in a few months that he was able to read 
 Tasso. Daschieri also initiated him, even more successfully, 
 into the mysteries of flute-playing than he had already been 
 into those of violin-playing, in spite of the appearance of pro- 
 ficiency he had been able to make before his father. Poor 
 Daschieri, who had at first been very depressed in a strange 
 country, cut off from all friends and old ties, found himself 
 vastly cheered by his new acquaintance, who also interested 
 others in his case. 
 
 Along with this curiosity and boldness there went a vein of 
 peculiar sensitiveness. This was seen in a little difference with 
 a school-fellow Bothe, who, as Tieck conceived, had treated 
 him in an ungrateful manner. Tieck, on account of this slight, 
 retired to his room, hid himself under the bed-clothes, wept, 
 would not eat, and refused all comfort, until at last his father 
 had to threaten him with severe displeasure if he did not con- 
 quer his grief and control himself. " What is the good of vex- 
 ing thyself thus, about one who, as he plainly shows it, does not 
 care for thee ? " urged his father. 
 
 Tieck's advancement into the higher class of the Gymnasium 
 was an event charged with the greatest significance. Here he 
 met Wackenroder, with whom he formed a friendship that was 
 life-long, and through whom he found the entree into a circle that 
 did much to further his development. Wackenroder was of the 
 same age as Tieck, the son of a war-councillor. He was of a 
 still and dreamy nature, absorbed in his own thoughts, yet full of 
 
392 LUDWJG TIECK. 
 
 friendly feeling, but with little or no sense for the outer world, 
 neither to master it nor to mix in it. It has even been said that 
 his life was shortened by his endeavours to adapt himself to the 
 uncongenial atmosphere of official life, in order to meet his fa- 
 ther's views. Through Wackenroder Tieck came to know 
 Wilhelm von Burgsdorf and Wilhelm Hensler, the step-son of 
 the musician Reichart, who had come to finish his school train- 
 ing under Gedike, and later was Tieck's next neighbour at the 
 school desk. Then there was Kreise, the son of a country par- 
 son, the humorist of the party, who lived with the war minister 
 Miiller, and through whom Tieck was introduced to Miiller's 
 son. Frederich Toll was another friend, the son of a manager 
 in the EerUn Porcelain Manufactory. He was not only gifted, 
 of ardent and poetic nature, but he had a most commanding 
 appearance. Koepke says there was something knightly in his 
 aspect even as a youth. Very striking that group must have 
 been as they paraded the streets and pleasure-gardens, most 
 frequently discussing, not without some spirit, books or plays as 
 they went along. 
 
 Tieck's experience of the theatre early developed in him a 
 sense of power in the mimetic and dramatic art. He had seen 
 Dobbelin in 1783 playing such characters as Othello, Shylock, 
 Karl Moor, Otto von Wittlesbach, or Duke Albert in " Agnes 
 Bernauerin," and was not slow to exhibit his own capacity in the 
 circles open to him. Now, when he had such companions as 
 these, what more natural than that he should infect them with 
 his own enthusiasm. Already they read as critics and as players 
 with some practical aims in view. They had represented many 
 plays — Lessing's "Treasure"' and " Philotas," and several of 
 Shakspeare's. Tieck had taken humorous parts like that of 
 Falstaff, when Wackenroder appeared as the King, Hensler as 
 the Prince, and Toll as Percy. Sometimes they sought out a se- 
 cluded spot in the Zoological Gardens, well closed in by trees 
 and dark bushes, and there went through a very careful rehearsal 
 of some famous piece. Gerstenberg's " Ugolino" is remembered 
 as one piece thus acted amid rustling foliage and green grass for 
 scenery because of an incident. Naturally Tieck played Ugolino, 
 and the others did their best with the lesser characters, a school- 
 fellow friend, Biering, ably supporting Tieck. As they came to 
 the close, there stepped out from the side bushes a man who, 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 393 
 
 vinknown to them, had watched the play. "You have done 
 your part right bravely, young man," he said, addressing Tieck ; 
 " but how come you, young as you are, to have taken up this 
 ghastly piece?" Tieck's answer is, however, unrecorded. 
 
 Besides this kind of influence, the association with this group 
 was otherwise fruitful. Reichart's house, at which Tieck was now 
 almost a daily visitor, was a kind of art-school for him. Reich- 
 art himself was not only a skilful musician, but a man of wide 
 culture. He loved to surround himself with the most gifted and 
 attractive society. Tieck's taste was formed here, while his 
 great gifts in composition and • acting were appreciated and en • 
 couraged. He found out here that he had original powers. The 
 Reicharts were warm admirers of Goethe, and here it was that, 
 in 1790, Tieck found a fragment of the " Faust," which marked 
 another decisive point in his progress. He read it, came back to 
 it as if drawn by some fascination. He felt he must procure 
 the complete drama, and once again re-read all the poems of 
 Goethe. 
 
 A loss that tried him very severely at this time was the death 
 of his companion, Biering, very suddenly by fever. Much wan- 
 dering alone, and constant meditation on death and its mysteries, 
 took such a morbid hold on his mind, that he was in danger of 
 falling into chronic melancholy. He was even haunted by a dread 
 of madness; and his one desire was to escape into some solitude 
 — into a monastery, as men did in the middle ages, if not into the 
 desert, as did they of the Thebiad. On communicating these 
 feelings to a friend, whose bent was more towards common 
 sense and "enlightenment," he was met with the response, 
 " You deserve to be hung for a speech like that, Tieck ! Come, 
 you want company or amusement; you should go to the theatre." 
 We do not know whether Tieck just then made trial of this pre- 
 scription ; but we do know that, before long, he found in 
 Nature that consolation which she never denies to those who 
 love her. He wandered more and more in the woody seclusions, 
 listening to the whisper of the trees, the songs of the birds, or 
 the murmur of the half-hidden brooks, while he pored over the 
 volumes of old legend or song that he loved the best, or conned 
 the numbers of some modern poet. " Faust," we learn, that he 
 read at this time. His spirit was with Nature, and men he 
 would fain have shunned. He would leave his home and wan- 
 
394 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 der for days, through forests and over desolate heaths, seeing 
 nobody but the poor peasants of the villages, from whom he 
 obtained milk and black-bread sufficient to satisfy his wants. 
 Often he lay on the grass all night, looking at the stars, and 
 sleeping little, and rising wet with dew to resume his romantic 
 wanderings. This time, with its feverish ardour, its romantic 
 aspiration, its escape to nature for refreshment, its associa- 
 tion with night-images, and the weird impressions of woods and 
 desolate places, has left very deep impress on his creations. 
 The necessity to write now became imperious — the vague chaos 
 of thought and emotion demanded expression and gradually 
 took shape. The fantastic and weird tale of " Abdallah " was 
 begun. It was precisely after the spirit of the Sturm-und- 
 Drang period ; but one incident befell which probably saved it 
 from the last excess of weirdness, and terror, and mystery. 
 Tieck had met at Reichart's house, a sister-in-law of Reichart's, 
 Amelie Alberti, a pastor's daughter, whose gentle expression and 
 sweet gracefulness took his heart captive ; and recalled him to 
 the practical world. To her he was now betrothed, though he 
 was only nineteen, and she a year or so younger. 
 
 II. 
 
 The brilliant youthful company that had met at Reichart's 
 house was now broken up. Hensler had left to commence his 
 legal studies, and Toll had gone to Frankfort. Wackenroder 
 alone remained to Tieck, and their association grew closer and 
 closer the more they were thrown on each other's fellowship. 
 Others of his companions had been rather more expert than 
 Wackenroder in the amateur acting ; that interest lessened, the 
 kindredship in thought became more evident. " Abdallah," 
 which now assumed the proportions of a book, was no doubt 
 somewhat toned down under Wackenroder's suggestions, though 
 not a little in it would meet his sympathy then. "Lovell," 
 too, which would perhaps still further reflect them, had been 
 begun. 
 
 Though there was much in Tieck's temperament to make 
 systematic studies generally repugnant to him, he proceeded to 
 Halle in the beginning of 1772. There, however, he found 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 395 
 
 little to attract him. With the metaphysical turn of the teaching 
 he could find no point of sympathy. The studies he was most 
 inclined to were philology, archseology, and poetic art. Full of 
 feeling and passion, and delighting to live in the world of 
 phantasy, it seemed to him as if the work of philosophy was to 
 destroy the ground on which he delighted to wander. He fell 
 ill, was tormented with sleeplessness ; and though letters of in- 
 troduction had opened many friendly doors, he was solitary. 
 The great cheer of his life was a letter from Wackenroder, and 
 probably also a billet now and then from AmeHe Alberti. His 
 most pleasant hours were spent at his writing-desk, and at other 
 things than college exercises. In the hope of obtaining relief 
 from this depression, he set out in July for a ramble in the Harz 
 Mountains, which he had not yet seen. Field, wood, valley, 
 mountain, all refreshed and inspired him: he went on foot in free 
 student style, not failing, in the villages through which he passed, 
 to share the peasants' dance and song. 
 
 In September, he left Halle and went by Berlin to see his 
 parents and sisters, and then on through Saxony, Thuringia, and 
 Nordhausen to Gottingen, where he found much more to his 
 mind than in Halle. Though he was not much taken by the 
 classical studies, he was deeply interested by some of the 
 teachers. Through Heyne he became more deeply acquainted 
 with ancient art. Piitter interested him in law and the history 
 of law, and Buhle first attracted him to the history of philosophy. 
 Through Buhle he came to know Matthisson the poet ; and 
 later he gained the friendship of Lichtenberg and Biirger. 
 Through them, particularly through Biirger, he became attracted 
 to English literature, and began his translations from Shakes- 
 peare, Ben Jonson, and Marlowe. He earnestly studied Spanish 
 also, and made some translations from it. Here he finished 
 " Abdallah," making the last chapters reflect the impres- 
 sion produced on him by the materialistic philosophy ; and he 
 began to write the " Abschied," a play in two acts, perhaps the 
 most important of his early works. 
 
 Easter of 1793 opened up a clearer prospect for the future. 
 Wackenroder was to study at Erlangen, and Tieck resolved to go 
 there also. The two friends agreed, in the first instance, to spend 
 a little time on a summer tour, which was very memorable for 
 both. They first went to Jena, Weimar, and Erfurt, and then on 
 
396 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 to Gotha and Coburg, seeing whatever was of interest in these 
 places. At Drackendorf by Jena, they spent some delightful 
 days with the young preacher Schuderoff, a friend of Wacken- 
 roder's. The Erlangen life, though short, was not without per- 
 manent influence for Tieck. Erlangen had just recently become 
 a portion of Prussian territory ; and Hardenberg, bent on raising 
 it to a higher status than it had reached under the Ba)T:euth 
 Princes, was sparing no time or pains to effect his object. Har- 
 less and Meusel (who has been called " the learned Germany in 
 person "), were attractive teachers, and excited enthusiasm as 
 well as conveyed knowledge. But though Tieck profited by 
 listening to those men, his best education came from the beauties 
 of the surrounding scenery, and the interests of the old castles 
 and towns that lay not far off. Nuremberg, we are told, " was a 
 great storehouse for the two friends." There they often went, 
 conjuring up visions of the storied past, of which the whole town 
 was but the relic. They stood at the graves of Albert Durer and 
 Hans Sachs, and drank in the inspirations of the place, which 
 came forth subsequently, intermixed with weird or pleasing 
 fancies, in "Sternbald," and the "Klosterbruder." 
 
 Wackenroder more and more gave himself up to the study 
 of mediaeval German literature — the Minnelieder and the old 
 heroic poems, — and while he infected Tieck with his enthusiasm, 
 Tieck did him the same service by Shakespeare ; for to this sub- 
 ject Tieck had now returned, with all the zest of a true relief. 
 Already he discerned the need of a deeper and more human 
 criticism of Shakespeare than had yet been achieved in Germany; 
 and seriously began to lay the foundation of that knowledge, 
 which should later avail for this. He had thus early convinced 
 himself that for the efficient accomplishment of his purpose, a 
 very thorough study of Elizabethan literature was essential, as 
 well as extensive historical and psychological enquiry. His 
 aim was, in course of time, to produce a great work on this sub- 
 ject j and though he failed to achieve this formally, he sent forth 
 at intervals detailed criticisms which may be said to have done 
 much to determine the spirit of later philosophical criticism of 
 Shakespeare, whilst his translations of the plays hold a place of 
 their own. 
 
 In 1794, Tieck and Wackenroder returned to Berlin, their 
 academical life ended. The obtaining influence was that of 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 397 
 
 the "Enlightenment." Nicolai and his friends were supreme. 
 Goethe had, however, secured his position, and circles which 
 gave themselves up to study his works were incUned to fall so 
 far out of sympathy with the " Aufklarer," and to accept some 
 measure of mysticism. Such a circle was that of the Fraiilein Veit, 
 the wife of the then well known banker of that name, where the 
 famous Rahel Levin (later Rahel Varnhagen von Ense), Henrietta 
 Herz and others often met. Tieck and Wackenroder became 
 members of this circle, and doubtless conferred benefits as well 
 as received them. Meanwhile Tieck did not forget original pro- 
 duction — he worked assiduously on a new style of story, " Peter 
 Lebrecht — a tale without adventures," and he finished " Wilham 
 Lovell." He had also made some new friends, who were to in- 
 fluence him deeply. He had met Frederich Schlegel at the 
 house of the Veits, and through Schlegel he came to know 
 Schleiermacher. Both sympathised with much in his aims. At 
 Wackenroder's house he had met Ramler, and, through Ramler, 
 he was introduced to Nicolai. Portions of " Peter Lebrecht " 
 were submitted to Nicolai, who published the story in the end of 
 1795, never dreaming that some of its satire was covertly directed 
 against the Aufklarung. " William Lovell " soon followed, but 
 did not take the public taste as the livelier " Lebrecht " had 
 done. In it Tieck aimed at pourtraying his own feverish aspira- 
 tion, melancholy depression, and endeavour to gain help from 
 Nature, Art, and Poetry. It is high-strung, ideal, with fine sug- 
 gestions, but without body; it lacks wholly the simplicity of human 
 nature and reality. These two books indicate two lines on which 
 much of Tieck's creative activity was to run. With a certain touch 
 of irony, we learn that " Lebrecht " suggested to Nicolai the 
 idea of Tieck's finishing a collection of anecdotes and tales drawn 
 from old French sources which Mussus had left unfinished at 
 his death.* Tieck began the work with spirit, but soon tired of 
 compilation, feeling that original production would be easier to 
 him and perhaps better for his readers. Nicolai was struck with 
 the new material and its superiority to the old. The " Strauss- 
 fedem," or "Ostrich Feathers," as this collection was called, 
 pleased the public. Then, under the professed editorship of 
 Peter Lebrecht, Tieck speedily had ready a dramatized version of 
 
 * Tieck and Nicolai ! exclaipis Haym, the latest matador of the romantic in the service 
 of the "Enlightenment" ("Aufklarung") (p. 64.) 
 
398 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 the nursery tale of " Blue-beard," in which he adapted the cha- 
 racter and circumstances to old German life. The work produced 
 a sensation. Other legends followed similarly treated — " Der 
 Gestiefelte Kater," or " Puss-in-Boots," and "Der Werkehrte 
 Welt," or " The World Turned Upside Down." He had by this 
 time, however, allowed his satire on the " Enlightenment " too 
 free play for Nicolai, who felt he had been taken advantage of, 
 and now quarrelled with Tieck. Tieck took his wares'to another 
 publisher, and had the satisfaction of finding that the reading 
 public very largely were inclined to laugh with him. 
 
 Tieck's life was recurrently overshadowed by the losses of 
 friends who had become to him as a second self. With great 
 strength in certain directions, he belonged to the class of 
 dingers, supporting himself as if by a tendril, independent and 
 strong though some of his satire undoubtedly is. He was 
 never very robust in health, and a certain condition of body 
 predisposes to this. The death of Wackenroder in 1797 was a 
 severe blow to Tieck — the severest that had yet fallen upon him. 
 He had found so perfect an intellectual sympathy in his friend 
 that it seemed as if now his own life was shattered. It was well 
 that duty to the dead demanded work from him. Tieck found 
 consolation in iinishing and setting into form their combined 
 speculations as a kind of memorial of his friend. This work 
 had the effect of developing a tendency to mediaeval subjects, 
 such as had possessed the greatest attraction for Wackenroder. 
 Its immediate result was the appearance' of these three works in 
 quick succession, — "Franz Sternbold's Wanderungen," "Phanta- 
 sien iiber die Kunst," and the " Herzensergiessungen eines 
 Kunstleben Klosterbruders," a composition of Wackenroder's 
 which Tieck had finished. 
 
 He had now resumed his Shakespeare studies, and was much 
 encouraged in them by a visit which Frederich Schlegel paid to 
 Berlin in the beginning of 1798 ; and a little later he saw the 
 fulfilment of a long cherished hope — ^he was united to Amelie 
 Alberti. An acquaintance which he formed about this time with 
 Stefifens led him to a profound study of Boehme, particularly of 
 the " Morgenrothe." This deepened his views of life, and im- 
 parted a strong tinge of religious earnestness to his mysticism. 
 Some said, indeed, that if he had not joined the Roman Catholic 
 Church, he contemplated it ; but this is without the slightest justifi- 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 399 
 
 cation, because Tieck's relation to Catholicism was simply aesthetic, 
 and his desire was an ideal condition of art and life which may 
 have in some degree been realised in the Middle Ages, but was 
 certainly very far from being realised in the Roman church of his 
 day. He continued his studies of German mediaeval lore, and 
 spent a good deal of time over Spanish. One day, as he read, an 
 old version of the mediaeval legend of " Genoveva,'' suggested a 
 new rendering of it, as a happy symbol of the contest of natural 
 passion with all-enduring faith and its victory. " Genoveva" in 
 Tieck's hands became a dramatic romance, the first of his " Ro- 
 mantische Dichtungen,'' and also the first of his works studiously 
 constructed on what may be named the essential principles of 
 the romantic school as such. " Genoveva" from this circum- 
 stance brought Tieck into direct rivalry with Goethe. Goethe 
 had played with what might be regarded as accordant purposes 
 — -in " Goetz" and in " Faust" — but he had either thrown them 
 aside or had immediately combined them with, or relieved them 
 by, others that seemed alien. So, at all events, the Schlegels 
 viewed it. They would thus have justified their early enthusiasm 
 over Goethe, and their gradual repulsion from him — at length 
 issuing in open revolt — as he became more and more classical, 
 and aimed mainly at perfection of poetic expression. They 
 were hardly so consistent as they might have been, or as Novalis 
 was, when, in spite of materialism, realism, and " artistic athe- 
 ism," he acknowledged himself more fascinated by " Wilhelm 
 Meister" the more that he studied it. And yet his repulsion had 
 much to justify it, as we shall afterwards have an opportunity to 
 show when treating of the relation of the greater poets of that 
 day to the romantic movement. 
 
 The Schlegels were well-meaning, and they had also some 
 ground, from their own point of view, for their attempt to pit 
 Tieck against Goethe as the true successor in the line of German 
 poetry ; but it was unfortunate for Tieck — who was narrow in 
 dramatic range, and some of whose chief merits were, as we shall 
 see, closely allied with his sickliness and over-sensitive constitu- 
 tion — that he should have been so pitted. It had the effect of 
 lessening his appearance of height and of range. For Tieck, 
 though a romanticist, was hardly so fully such in theory as were 
 the Schlegels, and their effort to magnify him demanded a certain 
 effort in return, on his part, to reafise their demand in the most 
 
400 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 impossible way. He was to prove his greatness by narrowing 
 himself to a set and artificial principle of art ! So far Tieck's 
 relation to the Schlegels and the " Athenaeum " was unfortunate, 
 and its effects in various directions were permanent, hiding 
 Tieck's real and peculiar merits under the shadow of an un- 
 founded rivalship to Goethe. The story of Tieck's relationship 
 with the Schlegels is, however, full of picturesque episodes, which 
 well reward the curious reader for travelling with them in out-of- 
 the-way routes. 
 
 In the summer of 1799 Tieck went to Jena at William Schle- 
 gel's invitation. There he found himself in an atmosphere so 
 congenial that he was in every respect at home. Whilst Tieck 
 translated from the Spanish, Schlegel was busy with Shakespeare's 
 plays. Each halved the labour of the other, with the result that, 
 the pleasures were doubled to both. Then the reunions. Schlegel 
 brought Novalis from Weissenfels, where he then was, and be- 
 tween him and Tieck there revealed itself at the very first inter- 
 course the fullest community of soul. Novalis filled up, and 
 more than filled up, the void left in Tieck's life by Wackenroder's 
 death. And at that time there was no lack of life among the 
 professors at Jena, which on that account contested the point of 
 attractiveness with the neighbouring Weimar. If Weimar had the 
 poetry Jena had the thought. Griesbach in theology, Eichstadt 
 in philology, Woltmann in history, W. Schlegel in criticism, and 
 Schelling and Fichte in metaphysics, formed a brilUant cluster. 
 The latter two were generally of the party at Schlegel's. Here is 
 the account of the first of these gatherings : — 
 
 " It was a beautiful evening as the friends made their meal together. 
 Novalis had come from Weissenfels.* A. W. Schlegel had made all 
 arrangements. By frank and cordial words, they had soon opened 
 their hearts to each other, and were as though they had known each 
 other for years : the bonds of common-place life fell from them, and 
 with chnk of glasses they drank to brotherhood. Midnight came ; the 
 friends walked out into the summer night. Again peacefully shone 
 the full moon, — the poet's friend from the days of childhood, — magi- 
 cal and full of lustre, on the heights around Jena. They chmbed 
 the Hausberg, and sat upon the hill. At last they accompanied 
 
 * Mr Carlyle (" Miscellaneous Essays," vol. ii., p. 70) gives the date of Tieck's first meet- 
 ing With Novalis as "in the summer of 1800," which would allow them only a few months of 
 acquaintance, as Novalis died in March iSoi; but in this Mr Carlyle is clearly wrong: it was 
 in the summer of 1799 that Tieck first saw Novalis, and the meeting "in the summer of 1800" 
 refers to a third reunion. Our edition of Carlyle is that of 1857. 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 401 
 
 Novalis to the house : the morning was not far off. As they separated, 
 Tieck said, ' Now, I will go and finish the Trusty Eckart.' ' If thou 
 canst do that after this evening, and after this walk," said Schlegel, 
 ' then will I hold thee high in honour.' Tieck kept his word. In the 
 morning hours he finished his story, and on the same day read it to 
 the friends."* 
 
 Tieck, on his return journey, paid a visit to Novalis, who had 
 at this time gone home to attend the marriage of a sister. The 
 style of life in this pious household so deeply impressed Tieck, 
 that his record of the visit must be read with a singular interest. 
 Koepke thus epitomises it ; — 
 
 ■ "The introduction to this family made a very deep impression. An 
 earnest and quiet life : an unostentatious but true piety ruled it. The 
 family was of the Moravian persuasion, and lived and worked in this 
 spirit. The old Hardenberg, who had earlier been a rough soldier, 
 was of a high and honourable nature ; and he stood as a patriarch in 
 
 the midst of his highly-gifted sons and lovely daughters 
 
 The new friend was very warmly welcomed by the father, who soon 
 found in him more than an acquaintance. Novelty and rationalism 
 in every form were hateful to the old man : he loved and praised the 
 old times ; and when the opportunity presented itself, he could 
 smartly and unreservedly express his opinions, and would occasionally 
 break out in sudden anger. 
 
 " Once Tieck heard the old man in the next room, in no mildwise 
 scolding angrily. ' What has happened .' ' asked Tieck, in concern, 
 of a servant who had entered. ' Nothing, nothing,' answered the ser- 
 vant drily : ' The master is holding the religious hour.' The old man 
 was very faithful in conducting hisi family devotions, after which the 
 young children were examined in Bible history and matters of faith, 
 and by their answers he was occasionally moved to stormy re- 
 proofs." 
 
 When Tieck left Jena, he had given a promise that he would 
 come back for a more lengthened stay in October, which he did, 
 bringing his wife and their lately-born daughter with him. At 
 this time he made the acquaintance of Fichte and Schelling, and 
 Novalis frequently came from Wiessenfels. Brentano, who was 
 then studying in Jena, was often of the party, and Gries, and the 
 artists Burk and Genelli also joined it. It was a time of great 
 activity and enthusiastic conference. All derived the greatest 
 benefit from it. Their evening meetings were unique. Tieck 
 
 * Koepke, I. p. 248. 
 2 C 
 
402 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 would read s6me of his verses — the " Waldeinsamkeit," for in- 
 stance, from the " Fairhaired Eckhart," which, as Koepke says, 
 contains the quintessence of his poetry, and the true purport of 
 his existence. Schlegel would read such poems of his as that on 
 the player Bethmann, and Novalis a chapter from his new 
 romance or a song. Brentano brought his " Natural History of 
 the Philistine," on one occasion ; and after he had finished read- 
 ing, said with mock gravity, " Now, I will convince you out of 
 this history that Brentano is himself the first and most arrant of 
 all the Philistines ! " Whereon there followed some very hard- 
 hitting criticism. But all was taken in good part. The remem- 
 brance of this life suggested to Brentano some lines at the close 
 of his wild romance " Godwi," which he wrote directly under this 
 influence. 
 
 At another time, Tieck and Fichte discussed the merits of 
 Boehme, whom Tieck was then much inclined to celebrate. 
 Fichte was not altogether disposed to follow Tieck in his enthu- 
 siastic admiration, and would fain qualify it. " Dear friend," he 
 said to Tieck on one occasion, after some argument, " you are a 
 poet, and if you give me the assurance that Jacob Boehme is a 
 great poet, I will take your word for it ; but, on the other hand, 
 you must believe me when I say, that he is no philosopher, but a 
 great fool." " Then," answered Tieck acutely, " you make me 
 first understand how a man could at the same time be a great 
 fool and a great poet." Fichte thought a moment, and then said 
 that this would require too many demonstrations, and broke away 
 from the subject. 
 
 Goethe paid a visit to Jena in November, and was introduced 
 to Tieck, who had by this time finished his " Prince Zerbino," 
 which had just been published. Goethe accorded him the utmost 
 consideration, highly praising the earnest characters and the 
 finish of " Zerbino." Goethe's genius, in some of its aspects, 
 Tieck much admired, though always discriminatingly, and with 
 deductions, perhaps, in some degree, because of his disappoint- 
 ment with him as a man. Tieck often described his feelings on 
 this first interview. " Here," he said, " you have a very great, a 
 perfect man ; you may well fall down and admire him." But then 
 there came the coldly-qualifying suggestion : " Could you make 
 him your friend, your confidant ? ah, no ; that thou could'st not 
 do." 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 403 
 
 Before parting, Goethe very cordially invited Tieck to visit 
 Weimar, which he did ; sitting by Goethe's side on the first pro 
 duction of Schiller's " Mary Stuart." It hardly needs to be said 
 that he was introduced to the celebrities of the place. With 
 Wieland he was soon on the most friendly terms. Wieland, in- 
 deed, had already, in his contributions to the " Teutsche Mer- 
 kur," proclaimed him the " new German Aristophanes." It would 
 appear, however, that Herder was then sulky and uncompanion- 
 able, perhaps weary and out of health, as he often was about that 
 time. At all events, he did not draw to Tieck. It is not impos- 
 sible that a little display of Tieck's satirical faculty may have been 
 to blame for this. He had introduced some reference to the 
 Metakritik in his " Zerbino." Koepke says that Tieck, in good- 
 natured joke, had dealt with the allegory of Hugo and Hagesa, 
 which the Metakritik contained, and, in the course of the epi- 
 logue, satirically treated it as a German national pleasure-piece. 
 
 When Tieck returned to Berlin it was to find himself welcomed 
 as the head of a new school. The position brought its penalties 
 as well as its pleasures ; and probably to Tieck the one far out- 
 weighed the other. An opposition party soon made itself heard. 
 " Who is this," they said, " that is to be forced upon us by 
 the Schlegels and their coterie, as the great poet of the day, to 
 the detriment even of Goethe ? " They were active to find 
 points against Tieck; and these, of course, were soon found. 
 He was credited with offensive sarcasms where he never meant 
 them ; and with evident spitefulness a certain section, led by 
 Kotzebue it is said, endeavoured to screw political references out 
 of his later works, especially out of " Prince Zerbino," so as to 
 excite animosity against him at high-quarters. In this way Kot- 
 zebue had his revenge. Stefifens tells us that Tieck, over and 
 above his written satires of Kotzebue, would often find there a 
 subject for the exercise of his mimetic faculty, in entertaining his 
 friends. He would extemporise and perform a little farce, em- 
 bracing half-a-dozen characters, among them an ourang-outang. 
 This last was represented as a sentimental and consistent admirer 
 of Kotzebue's dramas. Tieck, who never relished notoriety, was 
 greatly grieved at these manifestations. More grievous trials 
 were near at hand. 
 
 Tieck left Weimar and went to Hamburg at the end of the 
 month of July, devoting himself, during a short stay there, more 
 
404 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 especially to a study of the mystics and the poetry of the middle- 
 ages. This it appears he undertook in order that he might find 
 a new approach to Boehme. In Tauler, particularly, he found 
 much that answered to his need. 
 
 The year 1802 was a very dark one to Tieck. In addition to 
 his own iU-health, his mother died, and the loss so affected his 
 father, that very soon he was helpless and unable to attend to his 
 business. All this worked on Tieck's susceptible and sympathe- 
 tic mind, and rendered him worse in health. It was with an 
 idea of benefit from change of scene and air that, in 1803, he 
 undertook a journey through Germany with his friend Burgs- 
 dorf. 
 
 He returned no better than when he had set out. For the next 
 two years he moved from place to place, visiting various medical 
 baths, and residing now at Munich, now at Ziebingen, near 
 Frankfort. In 1805 he went to Italy. From his journeyings 
 there he would have profited richly — especially from a residence 
 in Rome— had it not been for the wretched state of his health. 
 
 When he came home in 1806, it was to find Germany disor- 
 ganised under the invasion of Napoleon. It was a dreary time 
 for literature, as well as for German life generally. Tieck's 
 sympathies were with his country ; but he was unequal to the 
 burden of any active effort. He lived in complete retirement. 
 He renewed his studies of Shakespeare and the old German 
 poets and mystics, varying these labours by arranging a number 
 of stories — published and unpublished, and fitting them into a 
 general framework. This was the famous " Phantasus," which 
 was published iii 1811 — a work on which, to a great extent, 
 Tieck's fame as a popular writer will rest ; for some of the tales 
 are imbued with that legendary atmosphere which he was so 
 successful in treating in such forms. 
 
 In the autumn and the winter of 1808 he was in Munich, 
 where he enjoyed the congenial companionship of Baader, and 
 Rumohr, and Jacobi. In the house of the latter he read many 
 of his poems — adding greatly to his reputation as a finished dra- 
 matic reader. 
 
 In 1 8 14, when he returned to Berlin, the city was all agog 
 about the new-fangled mysteries of animal magnetism and mes- 
 merism. It is very noticeable that towards all these questions 
 Tieck's position was precisely the same as that of Nathaniel 
 
LUDWIG TIECK: 405 
 
 Hawthorne — complete contempt for the creduHty of such as gave 
 themselves up to these things being paramount ; and this, not- 
 withstanding that both were, by temperament and tendency, 
 inclined to sympathy with the weird, mysterious, and mystical in 
 human nature. 
 
 In 1816, Tieck published his legendary prose romance of 
 " Fortunatus," which, though in some respects inferior to those 
 which had preceded it, was well-received and added to his repu- 
 tation. Shortly after the appearance of " Fortunatus," there was 
 issued a Fortzetzung, or continuation of the Spanish Theatre, 
 which he had written in conjunction with his friend Otto von 
 Mahlsburg. 
 
 In the beginning of May 181 7, he started, in company with his 
 friend and school-fellow Burgsdorf, for a tour in England. 
 They took their way through North Germany to the Rhine and 
 the Netherlands, where they saw and studied works of art, not for- 
 getting to turn aside to see the Chapel of Genoveva, near 
 Andemach. Then they went on by Brussels, Mechlin, Antwerp, 
 Ghent, and Bruges ; Tieck nlaking those art observations which, 
 twenty years laters, he utilised by putting them in the .mouth of 
 his Sternbald. 
 
 On the morning of the 29th of May they sighted the coast of 
 England. It was stormy weather, and the first glance was not 
 cheerful. Two special points of interest there were for Tieck in 
 London — the British Museum and the theatre. In the first he 
 made closer acquaintance with the old treasures of dramatic lore, 
 patiently copying out many pieces in manuscript. He saw 
 Kemble and Kean — the former in his great roles of Brutus, 
 Percy, Wolsey, Hamlet, and Coriolanus. He saw Kemble take 
 farewell of the stage amid a tumult of tears and excitement. 
 He does not seem to have been quite so enamoured with Kean, 
 whom he saw in Hamlet and Richard III., as well as some 
 other characters. " Kean was," says Tieck, " the complete com- 
 plement of Kemble, and a great deal more of a mannerist. His 
 tone was sharp and piercing ; not readily yielding itself to 
 humorous feeling. He cut and tore the speeches j he was in con- 
 stant unrest, and moved nervously on the stage from the one side 
 to the other." Tieck had been so deeply affected by some of 
 the pieces he had seen, the Shakespearian ones especially, that 
 it was with great regret he bade good-bye to the London stage. 
 
4o6 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 He visited Coleridge, and had many interesting conversations 
 with "the old man eloquent." He had seen him ten years 
 earlier in Rome, and already stood in friendly relations with 
 him. Shakespeare was one of the main topics of their talk, but 
 they sometimes touched on other things — German poetry, 
 Kantian speculation, Scottish ballads, and so on. 
 
 Indeed, to Tieck must be accorded the honour of being per- 
 haps the only man whose monologue was so acceptable to Cole- 
 ridge as to make him forego for one whole evening the exercise of 
 his own gift and remain an attentive listener. Tieck had given 
 Coleridge many suggestions of his views about Shakespeare ; and, 
 on one occasion, Coleridge asked him to express himself more 
 fully on that subject. Tieck said he was ready and willing to do 
 so, only it would need some time. Coleridge agreed. It was, 
 says Koepke, ten o'clock in the evening when Tieck began, mid- 
 night was past before he had finished. Silently had Coleridge 
 listened; and without a word of answer, he said "good-night" 
 to Tieck. On the next evening when they had come together 
 again, Coleridge said : — "I have been thinking over your 
 opinions the whole night, and have learned much that is new. 
 I find you are in many points right.'' Tieck had hardly hoped 
 for such an acknowledgment, and expressed his pleasure at re- 
 ceiving it. " Nevertheless," Coleridge went on, " I cannot 
 accept your views." "And why not ?" asked Tieck, surprised. 
 " Because I will not accept them, for they contradict all that has, 
 till now, been thought and written about Shakespeare in Eng- 
 land." Tieck could not help thinking that such a national judg- 
 ment in the critic was very weak and indefensible. But still, 
 Koepke adds, Coleridge continued to show himself friendly and 
 helpful ; and through his introduction, Tieck came into con- 
 tact with Southey, and the novelist, William Godwin. 
 
 On leaving London, Tieck visited Oxford, Stratford-on-Avon, 
 the scene of the great battle of the Roses in Gloucestershire, Bath 
 and Bristol, where he might have rubbed shoulders with De 
 Quincey, who was at that very time wandering about there in a 
 listless fashion, and writing curious and funny notes to his sister, 
 and touching and beautiful letters to the Wordsworths to console 
 them for the loss of one of their children. 
 
 In July, Tieck took ship for Paris, where Alexander von Hum- 
 boldt, CElsner and other friends were waiting for him. While in 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 407 
 
 Paris, he made many visits to the Royal Library, and was sur- 
 prised and disconcerted, when knots of people would gather near 
 him, look at him curiously, exchange glances, and whisper to 
 each other. After a while he found out the cause — a likeness to 
 the great Napoleon. 
 
 He returned by Stuttgart and Wurzburg, visited Weissenfels, 
 and then went on to Leipzig, and from that to Berlin. One of the 
 most memorable things of that time, as he himself tells, was 
 hearing Schleiermacher preach. " With wonder," he says, " I 
 listened to the great orator. His preaching was simple, clear, 
 direct from the heart, full of humanity and pathos." In the 
 middle of the day, he further tells us, he was standing speaking 
 to Schleiermacher's publisher, Reimer. Amid their eager conver- 
 sation, he felt a light touch on the shoulder. It was Schleier- 
 macher, who, in the morning, from the pulpit, had recognised 
 him. Very original was the salute : How the devil, Tieck, came 
 you to be in my church ? * 
 
 Oehlenschlager and many other men of note^he also saw in 
 Berlin at this time ; and now it was that the Romantic School 
 first began to be spoken of as such. 
 
 in. 
 
 A short time after his return to Germany, he decided to settle 
 at Dresden. But scarcely had he reaUsed a rest there, when the 
 friend who had been most to him since the death of Novalis, 
 passed away. This was Solger the metaphysician, a man of remark- 
 able gifts, and as remarkable attractiveness of character. Tieck, 
 together with another friend, engaged in collecting Solger's re- 
 mains, and writing a memoir. 
 
 It was a singular ill fate that followed Tieck in the losses of 
 friends who had become part of himself. Solger's death so 
 affected him, that for a short time after his settlement in Dres- 
 den he was so ill that he could neither read nor write. 
 
 Tieck was six-and-forty years of age when he reached Dresden. 
 He was at the height of life, says Koepke, the midday sun was 
 over his head. The last quarter of a century had marvellously 
 
 * Originell rief er ihm zu ; " Wie Teufel, Tieck, kommen sie denn in meine Kirche," 
 i. p. 380. 
 
4o8 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 transformed Germany. Thrones and states had been, overturned, 
 the map completely reconstructed; and the mental revolution had 
 been as marked as the political one. The Aufklarung, so mighty 
 and authoritative once, was dead ; its powerful and persistent 
 voices were all silenced. Schiller had been dead for some years ; 
 Goethe remained at Weimar, still vigilantly observant, but more 
 and more self-withdrawn, engaged with oriental poetry, his bio- 
 graphy and natural science studies. Frederick Schegel had passed 
 deeper and deeper into mysticism, and had joined the Church of 
 Rome. William had developed into a cosmopolitan. Tieck had 
 lost sympathy with them, though they still stood on a footing of 
 friendship with him. The stream had, in a sense, run past and 
 left him stranded. The romanticism which he had done so much 
 to found had passed into a kind of narrow, ^/anatical mediaevalism, 
 with whose extremes of alternate pedantry and affected supersti- 
 tion he could not sympathise. Whereas, in his young days, it 
 had been the fashion to be " rational," sensible, and unbelieving 
 — a tendency against which he had used all his influence, it was 
 now deemed proper to set faith above morality, to prate about 
 experience as worthless in the face of a belief that might at any 
 moment justify itself by miracle. Romanticism had, in fact, lost 
 its true raison d'etre- as a revival of interest in a genuine medi- 
 aevalism, and, yielding to the pressure of the present, become a 
 mere adjunct to political ecclesiasticism, and, to a very great ex- 
 tent, a helpmate to the diplomacy of the Church of Rome. It 
 is remarkable that, whilst those phenomena were exhibiting them- 
 selves in Germany, romanticism, through a healthier genius, was 
 justifying itself in England. Sir Walter Scott was writing the 
 romances which have been, and will be, the pure and wholesome 
 delight of generations. 
 
 Tieck's observant and critical spirit soon found a field for 
 activity in relation to these new manifestations. He now began 
 to write his " Novellen " — short stories, dealing with some par- 
 ticular development of character or opinion, and submitting it to 
 the test of philosophic satire. The first of these was the " Ge- 
 malde," in which the art-fanaticism of the new medievalists was 
 held up to ridicule,* the next was " Die Verlobung," in which he 
 exposed the pretensions of the evangelicals of his day ; in the 
 
 * In " Die Gemalde." . . . wurde die Ansight der Malerei, welche Genie und Beruf aus 
 der Frommigkeit und andachtigen Verehrung der alten Kunst verleiten wollte, von der un- 
 zweideutigsten Ironie getroffen. — Koepke. 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 409 
 
 " Musicalische Leiden," he exposed the absurd musical exagger- 
 ations of a school of amateurs ; in another the demand for ghost 
 stories, and in yet another, the craze for animal magnetism. 
 
 One of the great comforts of his life, and at the same time 
 one of his great cares, was his eldest daughter, who manifested 
 a rare genius, but also great weakness of body and predisposi- 
 tion to gloomy religious views. She was an expert English, 
 Spanish, and Italian scholar, and rendered her father very effi- 
 cient help in his translations of Shakespeare. 
 
 Meanwhile Tieck was actively engaged in what was perhaps 
 the greatest service that he did to Dresden — he revived the 
 Shakespearian drama at the theatre ; and by dint of great care 
 and labour, made it appreciated and acceptable. 
 
 In Dresden he had soon drawn around him an appreciative 
 and friendly circle, and we learn that his dramatic readings were 
 never more spirited or better attended. He had been appointed 
 dramatic critic to the ''Abend Zeitung,'' which secured him a 
 small steady income. Dresden, in a word, ere long learned 
 to be proud of Tieck ; his birthdays were observed with public 
 honours, and not a few persons of note visited the Saxon capital 
 solely on his account, among these being Barante and Montal- 
 embert; while he kept up correspondence with distinguished 
 critics and scholars in many countries — Coleridge, Dyce, Hay- 
 ward, and Collier in England, and Robinson and Ticknor in 
 America. Jean Paul paid him a memorable visit in 1820, and, 
 in spite of Tieck's illness, made the short period of his stay days 
 of sunshine; and in the autumn of 1824 F. Schlegel came to 
 Dresden. It was now several years since the friends had met, 
 not indeed since Tieck's return from England. Schlegel now 
 bore the marks of age, of study and trials. He had become 
 corpulent, and had passed further and further into a vague pro- 
 phetic mysticism ! But in spite of this element, with which 
 Tieck had.no sympathy, it was a pleasant reunion. 
 
 Tieck's friends were interesting themselves to procure for him 
 a professorship, to which he was not himself greatly incUned, 
 when light broke from another quarter. Prince John of Saxony, 
 who by his fine appreciation of art and literature, and his wise 
 and liberal patronage of them, did so much to promote the in- 
 telligence and refinement of his capital, gave satisfactory and 
 substantial expression to the high estimate he had learned to form 
 
410 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 of Tieck by appointing him in 1825 official critic of the drama, 
 with the title of Hofrath, and a salary of 700 thalers. " So now 
 at last," wrote Tieck to one of his friends, " I actually get paid 
 for going journeys and seeing plays ! To have been flogged for 
 it in youth, and made a privy-councillor for it in age, such is the 
 course of life !" * 
 
 Prince John, as it will be remembered, was himself a writer 
 and an enthusiast for Italian poetry. He had formed a society 
 called the " Dante Gesellschaft," a body of men of letters who 
 met to discuss a subject, in which he himself was an adept. At 
 these meetings his own translations and comments were read 
 aloud — most frequently by Tieck — and the freest criticisms were 
 encouraged, the Prince himself listening to the debates or join- 
 ing in them with the greatest interest and enjoyment. Often, 
 too, he was present at the evening receptions when Tieck read 
 either a play of Shakespeare or one of his own pieces, in that 
 style which is said to have been simply unapproached. 
 
 Tieck's celebration of his appointment as official critic of the 
 drama was an art journey. He went to Vienna, Munich, Teplitz, 
 and Prague; then to Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Darmstadt, and 
 Frankfort. In this journey, as in all his journeys as we shall 
 see, he gathered materials for his fictions, and he also was 
 cheered by the faces of many friends. At Karlsruhe he met 
 Hebel, and at Mannheim that same Bothe who in school days 
 had caused him his first sorrow, but was now only concerned 
 for the comfort and the honour of his old school-fellow. In 
 spare hours Tieck was now also engaged in preparing a collected 
 edition of the " Novellen," the first of which had been pubKshed 
 in " Wendt's Taschenbuche " some years before. Probably the 
 most characteristic of the whole was the " Verlobung," which 
 had appeared in the "Berliner Taschenkalendar " for 1825. 
 This tale had for its object to expose the excesses, the exclusive- 
 ness, and doubtful tendency of the new fashioned Christianity. 
 The purpose of the," Novellen" on the whole, indeed, maybe 
 said to have been the exposure of intolerance and presumption, 
 of pretension and excess on all sides. As he did not fail to deal 
 with some of the abuses of Catholicism, so he opposed the 
 
 * " Nun werde ich doch endlich einmal dafur bezahit, dass icli reise und Komodie sehe I 
 Es ist meine verdammte Schuldigkeit, dass ich mich amiisire und Dienst. Prugel dafiir in 
 der Jugend bekommen, im alter Hofratli Geworden ; so gebuhrt es sich ! " — Koepke, ii, p. 53. 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 411 
 
 stream of strait-laced puritanism which had set in as a re-action ; 
 and if before he had dealt severely by the conceit of the Auf- 
 kldrer, so now he dealt with what he conceived to be a false form 
 of evangehcalism. He had so far passed beyond the limits 
 which had been set by the school calling itself " Romantic," that 
 he might now and then be regarded as directing his satire to 
 points on which it had wandered furthest from simplicity — in its 
 endeavour to relate art to common life, and to ape sentimentally 
 a mediseval Catholicism. 
 
 In 1828 he visited Goethe at Weimar. Goethe has left on 
 record how much Tieck's society was enjoyed at this time ; and 
 Eckermann has set down the impressions produced on the bril- 
 liant parties that gathered to listen to his dramatic readings. 
 Eckermann says, under date October 9, 1828 : — 
 
 " We had hoped that Tieck would read something aloud, and he 
 did so. The party retired into a more remote room, and after all had 
 comfortably seated themselves in a wide circle on chairs and sofas 
 he read ' Clavigo.' 
 
 " I had often read and felt this drama ; but now it appeared to me 
 quite new, and produced an effect such as I had scarcely experienced 
 before. It seemed as if I heard it from the stage, only better ; every 
 character and situation was more perfectly felt ; it produced the im- 
 pression of a theatrical representation in which each part is well per- 
 formed. 
 
 " It would be hard to say what parts Tieck read best ; whether 
 those in which the powers and passions of the male characters are 
 developed ; or the quiet, clear scenes addressed to the understanding ; 
 or the moments of tortured love. For giving expression to passages 
 of this last sort he had special qualifications. The scene between 
 Marie and Clavigo is still ringing in my ears : the oppressed bosom 
 — the faltering and trembling of the voice — the broken, half-stifled 
 words and sound — the panting and sighing of a hot breath, accom- 
 panied with tears — all this is still present with me, and will never be 
 forgotten. Every one was absorbed in listening and wholly carried 
 away. The lights burned dim ; nobody thought of that, or ventured 
 to snuff them, for fear of the slightest interruption. Tears constantly 
 dropping from the eyes of the ladies showed the deep effect of the 
 piece, and were the most hearty tribute that could be paid to the 
 reader or the poet. 
 
 " Tieck had finished, and rose wiping the perspiration from his 
 forehead, but the hearers seemed still fettered to their chairs. Each 
 man appeared too deeply engaged with what had just been passing 
 through his soul, to have ready the suitable words of gratitude for him 
 
412 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 who had produced so wonderful an effect upon us all. Gradually, 
 however, we recovered ourselves. The company arose and talked 
 cheerfully with one another. Then we partook of a supper, which 
 stood ready on little tables in the adjoining rooms." 
 
 If the first ten years of Tieck's stay in Dresden may be re- 
 garded as, on the whole, the most peaceful and productive period 
 of his life, the second ten years, between 1830 and 1840, were the 
 darkest — shadowed and broken in on by misfortune, illness, and 
 death. The outbreak of the Revolution of 1830 in Paris deeply 
 affected Tieck ; and as it shook the whole fabric of society on 
 the continent, it may be said to have brought to the birth a new 
 literature. Existing institutions were dealt with in the most 
 exacting spirit. They were merely modes of restraining free ex- 
 pression and of cramping the powers of the people, in whom 
 sovereign authority should be vested. Democracy was in the 
 air. All things should be questioned, and trial made of new 
 methods. Heine, inconsistently enough, was at the head of this 
 movement, and " young Germany " was largely with him. Tieck 
 would have said that he used the music of Goethe and the old 
 ballads to overturn whatever they had consecrated. He had 
 no sympathy with these manifestations ; for as he had advanced 
 in life, he had become more and more attached to settled order, 
 averse to changes, and in favour of pronounced monarchical 
 institutions. His enemies — the advanced liberals — who wished 
 to carry the new ideas to practical realization, fell foul of Tieck. 
 He shared the fate of all those who have exercised influence in 
 the past, but who refuse to swim with the stream. He was 
 termed a turn-coat, reproached as the enemy of his country and 
 of progress, nicknamed and taunted even about his bodily infir- 
 mities, by the very men whose ways he had prepared for them. 
 Though he went on his own way writing his Novellen, and 
 sometimes directing a flash of satire at the high pretensions of 
 these young reformers, there can be no doubt that he suffered 
 deeply under the condition into which society and literature had 
 then too largely fallen. 
 
 Relief came from that trouble in time : the democratic move- 
 ment of " Young Germany " did not prevail, and the voices 
 began to fall flat, as such voices after a time will do. But before 
 this had come about, Tieck was involved in other and yet keener 
 troubles. His wife fell into ill-health ; and for a lengthened 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. , 413 
 
 period suffered much. She passed away in 1837 j leaving Tieck 
 and his daughter Dorothea, as " though the half of life were 
 gone." Dorothea, who had all along manifested a strong ten- 
 dency to religious melancholy and depression, now passed into a 
 stage of self-tormenting scrupulosity. Tieck tried to engage her 
 interests more and more in literary schemes, in which her fine 
 taste and sensibility had fitted her aforetime to take an import- 
 ant share ; but she sank more and more under gloom and de- 
 pression, became a Roman Catholic, and turned life into a round 
 of torments. We can easily conceive how a sensitive and impres- 
 sible nature like Tieck' s— only too prone naturally to depres- 
 sion — would suffer under daily association with a mind like this. 
 He needed sunshine, cheerful light, health, bracing breezes ; for 
 the tendency to melancholy yet remained strong in him, and we 
 know that nothing is more infectious than melancholy. An 
 intimate and much-loved friend of the family — Adelheid Rein- 
 hold — died in 1838 ; in 1840, his friend Immerman passed away; 
 and in 1841, his daughter Dorothea took seriously ill and, after a 
 few weeks, died also. In spite of the many friends who tried to 
 bring solace to him by their society, Tieck was lonely. He gave 
 himself up to hopeless sorrow. At length he refused to see 
 anybody, and fell into serious ill-health. The physicians said he 
 must quit Dresden and go to Baden-Baden, which he did. To 
 this change is no doubt mainly due the twelve years more of Ufe 
 which he was to enjoy at Berlia. 
 
 Whilst he was at Baden-Baden, that high-minded and enlight- 
 ened sovereign. King Frederick WilUam the fourth of Prussia, 
 having heard of his condition, wrote, inviting him to come to 
 Sans-Souci and reside there for a time. Though Dresden had 
 become a desolation to Tieck, changes had become equally re- 
 pugnant to him. The question now was, therefore, whether 
 Tieck, owing to his ill-health, would care to relinquish the rest 
 and quiet of his Dresden life for the residence at Sans-Souci, and 
 the manifold new relationships into which this would necessarily 
 bring him. He would, no doubt, have shrunk from the proposal, 
 if the king had not managed the affair in the most deHcate way. 
 But he was not only a king, but a lover of poetry, and felt a 
 genuine interest in the poet. So, in 1841, Tieck came to Berlin. 
 His house was before the Brandenburg gate, close to the park 
 of Sans-Souci, and not far from the castle. 
 
414 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 The transference to Berlin could not possibly prove a great 
 personal gain to Tieck. He was now old and frail, and needed 
 friends. He might well fear that Berlin would prove even more 
 of a desert to him than Dresden had been. Besides, the exist- 
 ing tendency of things, to which he had stood in opposition, was 
 even stronger in Berlin than in Dresden. The happy result of 
 this change was due mainly to the personal attention and con- 
 sideration of the sovereign. Before very long, he felt himself 
 strong enough to enter on a new life. A relationship speedily 
 developed itself in the highest sense honouring to both sides, and 
 of the truest service to art. King and poet went cordially on 
 the way together, with mutual aid. In free interchange of 
 thoughts and plans, and alike concerned only for the highest 
 interests, the give-and-take of life was scarce ever better exhibited. 
 Very soon Tieck recommenced his readings, and for a long time 
 regularly continued them, making in this way a more profound 
 impression than he had yet done. He read the " Antigone," then 
 tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare, or, by request, some of 
 his own works. 
 
 In September 1842, Tieck returned to Dresden for the last 
 time, to remove his library to Sans-Souci ; the king having fitted 
 up for his special use a neat summer residence there. Tieck's 
 old interests gradually revived. Among other works, he devoted 
 himself to the adaptation of classical and Shakespearean plays for 
 the theatre — a reform which the king was very anxious should be 
 carried out. On the 17th August 1843, the "Medea" of Euri- 
 pides was given, on the ist November 1845 the " Antigone," and 
 in the following year the " (Edipus in Colonna ; " Shakespeare's 
 "Midsummer Night's Dream" was presented in October 1843, 
 and Tieck's own " Blue-beard " in February 1846. And he still 
 kept up some of his old habits. In earlier times, in Dresden, he 
 delighted to visit the book-stalls, and was very glad when he 
 could pick up an edition of an old play, which he would read 
 with great eagerness and enjoyment. Even the reading of the 
 auction catalogues afforded him pleasure. When in Halle and 
 Leipzig he had been wont to follow the book auctioneer, catalogue 
 in hand, till he had secured the volume, or the dramatic fragment 
 that he had fixed upon. So now, the old man would seek out the 
 book stalls of Berlin. " Every man," he would say, "has his 
 hobby, if not his folly, and I am an unimprovable old book-fool" 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 415 
 
 Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Calderon and Lopes, Tasso and 
 Goethe he read regularly ; but it is suggestive and touching also 
 to learn that in these last years up to his death, he read daily a 
 portion of the Bible, recalling often to Von Raumer and other 
 friends who then visited him, traits and sayings of his mother 
 as she read the same passages as he now repondered. 
 
 Thus he lived active and cheerful till the end of 1845, when 
 he underwent a serious surgical operation, from the effects of 
 which he never entirely recovered. The Revolution of 1848, 
 the sounds of which came up to the poet's windows, under 
 which men were fighting, was another trouble to him. He could 
 find no point of sympathy with revolutionists, and mourned 
 over their excesses. It indicates the peculiarly beneficial effects 
 of the circumstances, and the companionships amid which he 
 lived in Berlin, that even now he remained calmly cheerful and 
 industrious. Though his activity of this closing period partakes 
 more of a sifting and collecting character than a productive one, 
 yet it must not be passed over as wholly unimportant. In 1850 
 he dictated a translation of Sheridan's " Rivals ;'' then he care- 
 fully revised the Novellen, and planned out a selection from his 
 letters. The last thing that he wrote for the press in the late 
 autumn of 1852 was the short preface to the Mahrchen von 
 Wahl. " So fahre denn wohl du liebes Biichelchen !" were his 
 parting words to literature. The last piece of literature that he 
 read was Goethe's little opera, " Scherz, List und Rache." 
 
 At length it became clear that Tieck was nigh unto death. 
 The king sent his own physician, who did all that skill could do. 
 His old friend Von Raumer and others visited him daily, read to 
 him, and cheered him. On one occasion when Von Raumer 
 had expressed some regret at his suffering, Tieck said, " All is 
 beneficent and undeserved grace." * 
 
 " I feel," he said once to another friend, " what the Scriptures say 
 when they called the patriarchs old and satisfied of life. One has at last, 
 like them, enough of fife. What moments come in lonely and sleepless 
 nights, when all sweet experience and pleasure are for us passed by ! I 
 have lost all my nearest relatives and friends ! All that I passed through 
 with them— all that was delightful — is to me as yesterday. One can per- 
 haps at times be cheerful, but often one cannot help feeling pained." 
 
 When in his last days he spoke in a similar exalted tone, 
 
 * " Alles ist Wohlthat und unverdienste Gnade. 
 
4i6 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 there appeared to rest on him a high and holy rapture : he had 
 done with earth. " This deep rest penetrated him powerfully ; 
 and those who sat by his bed felt as if raised to some spiritual 
 height, where the confused cries of the commoner life could no 
 more reach them." So says Koepke, who was an eye-witness. 
 
 On the morning of the 26th of April 1853 he died, passing 
 away so gently in slumber that Koepke says the exact moment 
 of his death could not be told. There he lay, the " founder and 
 chief of the Romantic School, the last of the poets of a great 
 time," the deep eyes and the eloquent lips now closed, but on 
 the countenance rested a softened glory. It was once more the 
 well-known features, mild and great, the pure high brow. It was 
 the noblest head ! 
 
 He was buried in the churchyard of the Dreifaltigkeit's 
 Kirche, next to the grave of Schleiermacher, and not far from 
 that of his friend Steffens. 
 
 After a long wintry storm the sun shone for the first time clear 
 and warm. It brought the spring and the blue sky, and to him 
 perfect rest. As the coffin sank and the earth fell on the rich 
 flowers that decked it, the larks sang high up in the blue sky, 
 and the notes of the nightingale broke sweet from the fresh green 
 thickets near. Nature remained true to her poet. The spring 
 had received him on the threshold of life : it gave him at the 
 outgoing a last escort. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Tieck's literary activity may be divided into four periods, as 
 his works, varied and extensive as they are, will fall into four 
 great classes — (i.) There is, first, the period of fantastic subjec- 
 tivity, while yet the fancy and the imagination are concerned to 
 project over all things a colossal shadow of the individual expe- 
 rience, dreamful, exceptional, and excitable as it has been. To 
 this period belong the romances " William Lovell," " Abdallah," 
 and " Almansur," together with some smaller pieces of verse and 
 prose fiction. During this period it is evident that Tieck came 
 to some extent under the influence of Rousseau, which finds 
 specific expression in some passages of the " Almansur." Tieck 
 himself called this piece an idyll ; and in so far as spirit is con- 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 417 
 
 cerned the claim may be justified ; but it is, like many others of 
 the author's works, deficient in that complete repose of style 
 and unaffected distinction of form which would wholly justify 
 the term.* As for Lovell, it is the portrait of a highly sensitive, 
 light, enthusiastic, and excitable nature, which would be high- 
 strung and wholly without due relief, were it not that Lovell's 
 friend, young Burton, is presented to us here and there with a 
 naive touch of reality. But the works of this first period are 
 certainly not likely to claim the close attention, not to say the 
 admiration, of English readers, unless curious students of litera- 
 ture. We read them for the valuable side-lights they throw on 
 Tieck's temperament and early development rather than for the 
 interest they have in themselves. If Tieck had not lived to 
 write the Romantische Dichtungen, we should have passed them 
 by as the over-bubblings of a fine but essentially a weak, dreamy, 
 and even somewhat sickly nature. 
 
 (2.) But Tieck's second period shows him advanced to a view 
 of things in so far sobered that nature can be consistently peopled 
 with ideal creatures, whose presence suffices in great measure to 
 enlighten and relieve its gloomy recesses of forest and mountain. 
 The romance-spirit has at the same time attained to such matu- 
 rity as to assert the right to banish from nature whatever is re- 
 pugnant to it, obedient to the claims of what is conceived as a 
 higher unity ; and certainly when we speak of the " Fair Eck- 
 bert," and the " Runenberg," — both of which have been trans- 
 lated by Mr Carlyle in his " German Romance," — ^we may to 
 some extent be understood ; though we shall only be fully un- 
 derstood here when we add that to this period belongs the drama 
 " Der Abschied," (the Separation), which Haym has declared, 
 and not without reason, to be without question the best of this 
 class of Tieck's works, t Here passion is pourtrayed with skill ; 
 and the fire is not meteor-like and unreal, but sustained and 
 true. The fatalistic atmosphere which surrounds the melan- 
 choly figure of the hypochondriac is in keeping with the whole, 
 and has its foundation in blood and temperament. His genius 
 was active too, in transmuting, after its own fashion, legend to 
 history ; and we have to rank here the twin-dramas " Genoveva " 
 
 * Haym says, " Es ist in Wahrheit nur der Ausdruck der Sehnsucht, die sein unnihig 
 erregter und auskunstloser Geist nach idyllischen Frieden empfinden mochte. — Romantische 
 Schnle, p. 31. 
 t Romantische Schule, p. 40. 
 
 2 D 
 
4i8 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 and the " Emperor Octavian," in which his genius took its 
 highest flight in the glorification and moralisation of old legend. 
 It needs to be said, however, that we shall do wrong to Tieck if 
 we regard these pieces too strictly as dramas ; they are rather 
 dramatic romances, and as such Tieck intended them ; thus jus- 
 tif3dng what else might be criticised as lacking in unity and too 
 readily admitting certain extravagances of treatment. The mo- 
 tive is not dramatic representation strictly ; that is here subser- 
 vient wholly to the expression of the author's conception of the 
 influence of a certain lofty and chivalrous ideal which he identi- 
 fies with certain aspects of the life of the Middle Ages. In 
 these two dramas the principles of the German Romantic School 
 (so called), first find full and conscious expression : and for this 
 reason they have a certain historical place in literature. Tieck 
 himself says of the " Genoveva" : — " I wrote it with the fullest 
 inspiration : the old folk's conceptions penetrated me through 
 and through. In addition, it fell out that I had just been pur- 
 suing the study of Jacob Boehme with great eagerness ; and this 
 had a very special influence on the development of this poem." 
 
 (3.) Tieck's third period represents him pre-eminently as the 
 satirist, as the Aristophanes of Germany, as Wieland called him. 
 " Peter Lebrecht " shows the first tendency in this direction; but 
 it remains only the promise of a more perfectly adjusted world. 
 From " Blaubart " to " Prinz Zerbino " is a long step, and the 
 whole distance between is marked by contributions of varying 
 weight and influence, which had more or less directly in view the 
 satiric exposure of excesses in opinion, taste, or sentiment. This 
 imparts to them a certain temporary element, which is not in all 
 cases completely atoned for by the cleverness of treatment, or by 
 the amazing ingenuity which is occasionally shown in their con- 
 struction. From animal magnetism to ultra-puritanism, from 
 Kotzebue excesses to art-manias, from the pretences of musical 
 amateurship to the new knight-and-robber fashion in drama and 
 romance, from burgher prejudices to Iffland enthusiasm, on 
 to the Aufklarung or enlightenment ; all were themes for Tieck's 
 satire. "Blaubart," "Der Gestiefelte Kater," Die Verkehrte Welt," 
 and " Prinz Zerbino," were, perhaps, the most characteristic, the 
 latter two bearing particularly on the ambitious claims of the 
 Aufklarung or Enlightenment. The study of Goethe is visible in 
 Tieck's third manner : and after Goethe, it is Cervantes that 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 419 
 
 Tieck most imitates. The irony which takes direct utterance in 
 " Gestiefelte Kater" (or " Puss in Boots"), rises to still higher and 
 efficient expression in " Blue Beard," and though somewhat dif- 
 ferent in " Fortunatus," is still the leading element. Tieck traced 
 the rise of this properly ironic vein from the date of his more 
 intimate association with Solger, the metaphysician, showing how 
 full of influence Solger was. 
 
 (4.) Tieck's fourth period shows him, still partially under the 
 influence of Goethe's works, turning from properly romantic 
 themes to deal directly with real life, still, however, in the roman- 
 tic spirit. But Tieck, unlike Goethe, had always a high social 
 and moral aim. We put aside here such a playful pastime (for 
 in no other light can we view it) as the " Dichterleben," in which, 
 returning on the stores of information he had amassed during his 
 visit to England in 18 17, and his extensive reading in Elizabethan 
 dramatic literature and biography, he attempted, in a fiction, to 
 restore the times of Shakespeare and Marlowe, and Greene and 
 Ben Jonson ; but with indifferent success, catching too often at 
 the merely odd and exceptional in the manners of the times, and 
 carrying to the point of parody the style of expression character- 
 istic of that era. Much more worthy of Tieck, and far more ex- 
 pressive of his genius, are such works as the " Jungen Tischler- 
 meister" (The Young Joiner), in which he pictures the early 
 life of the German craftsmen with the idea of bettering their 
 condition. In " Vittoria Accorombona," he anticipated some- 
 thing of what has been said in later times about the emancipation 
 of women. In " Der Aufruhr in den Cevennen " (or the Revolt 
 in the Cevennes), Tieck dealt with the religious life of the 
 Camisard peasants. He is powerful in his descriptions of scenery, 
 and commands some good situations, as in the case of the spy, 
 who, disguised, attends service with the peasants, and is overcome 
 partly by the wildness and lonesomeness of the scenery, and the 
 devotions in which he has joined; but the story is in many parts 
 unreal, and over-sentimental and untrue. It was left unfinished 
 at his death. 
 
 When Tieck aimed at realistic portraiture, his fancy would steal 
 in with its tale-telling touches, like the painter in the story who 
 brooded over the face of the lady he had loved and lost till he 
 gave to every face he painted something of its expression. In 
 his romances, again, he is too prone to draw a semblance of 
 
420 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 reality from a moral world that is, at root, conventional ; and, in 
 in both cases, it may, without injustice be said that he injured 
 his art by his unwillingness to admit, in any form, that art is suf- 
 ficient to itself. He was from first to last a teacher : a man with 
 a mission, who would have shrunk with horror from the idea that 
 morality and religion could be divorced from a high ideal that 
 sought actively to realise itself in the world. It was because of 
 this that he regarded himself as called on directly to fight against 
 the Philistines of the Enlightenment, whose unreverent prostration 
 before the brazen idol Reason, seemed to him the most degrading 
 of worships ; that he became a satirist ; that he moralised more 
 than, from considerations of art, he should have done, in these 
 eariier romances ; and that he failed in his lateir pictures of real 
 life, because he would too directly associate them with some 
 special purpose, social, moral, or religious. Here we find the 
 unity of Tieck's life and work : he opposed the Philistines, and 
 he also opposed the artists in their favourite prejudices, telling 
 them that there are greater things than art, apart from which art 
 could only become an unhealthy and artificially-sustained excres- 
 cence on life. His ideas were those of an earnest man, and 
 though the great bulk of his writings were too loosely framed to 
 attain the rank of classics, he has a historical place mainly be- 
 cause of the persistency with which, in forms so varied, he deli- 
 vered his message, thus maintaining an individual attitude, and 
 deeply influencing others. He was certainly no imitator ; and 
 what he gave was probably the best he could have given. 
 
 After all, it was in the field of pure romance or spiritualised 
 legend that Tieck's genius was supreme. When his satirical 
 fictions, in spite of their " Aristophanic comedy," have lost their 
 point, and his later stories have been forgotten, the choicest of 
 his tales in " Phantasus," and a few of those in the Novellen will 
 be read. He is distinctively a romancer ; he loves the old-world 
 moonshine of myth and legend : and it is in this aspect that he 
 must be regarded as conveying something new, piquant, and indi- 
 vidual, into German literature. In this aspect it is our duty to 
 view him more particularly for a little before proceeding to gather 
 up into a few paragraphs our impressions of him as a man and 
 as a poet. 
 
 We learn from scientific men that the friction produced by the 
 extreme tenuity of the higher region of the atmosphere is suffi- 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 421 
 
 cient to develop all the light and heat that meteors are capable 
 of showing, and that the smaller ones are quite consumed and 
 dissipated by the heat thus generated, and never reach the sur- 
 face of the earth in a solid form. There is a whole class of 
 writers who are thus meteoric. They take light in a tenuated 
 atmosphere, and there exhaust themselves. Tieck was, to a great 
 extent, one of these. He lived in his own atmosphere, and shrunk 
 from the task of " representation " in the sense that Goethe held 
 it to include the highest art. His strength failed him when he 
 approached to earth. In these romances of Tieck, the phantasy, 
 freed from the control of the every-day judgment, has full play, 
 throwing up, as it were, a delightful spray, in which the outlines 
 of the original thought seem hidden, or only glance and glimmer 
 through it. A great ideal, indeed, seems to lie beneath a wavering 
 veil of gauze, but the form remains vague, and is never completely 
 caught or presented; and now and then a half-grim, Gothic 
 suggestion throws itself athwart it, with a sense of gently wilful 
 grotesquerie. We often recall Mrs Browning's fine lines as we read 
 Tieck's romances : 
 
 " A fountain 
 Which, with silver waters thin. 
 Clips a little water naiad sitting smilingly within." 
 
 All the grace, the shimmering uncertainty, the mystic charm and 
 surprise, the sylvan dreaminess and phantasy as of "sleeping 
 woods " in moonlight, mingled with an undefined artificiality and 
 feeling as of nature, after all viewed rather from a shelter, and 
 with a sense as of some undefined danger in closer communion 
 — all this is characteristic of Tieck, and of the Zauberei, in which 
 he is so great a master. Often, indeed, there is a weird sugges- 
 tion of the fatefulness and mystery of the real world, which is 
 hardly in keeping with the general tone. 
 
 V. 
 
 One of the most notable things about Tieck was his humour, 
 which is of a lightly satirical and cynical quality. Such humour is 
 seldom found combined with the mystic or dreamy temperament. 
 He had a keen sense of discrepancy in outward things, and was 
 
422 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 even prone to exercise his wit upon passing topics and on his 
 contemporaries, but he lacked the largeness of sympathy for the 
 highest humour. In this respect, indeed, he may almost be said 
 to have himself laid a light to the long train which was finally 
 to involve the romantic German school in ruin. Brentano and 
 Arnim followed him in this respect, and, in a sense, are the links 
 that related him to Heine. The attitude of active protest in 
 which the Romantic School placed themselves towards the 
 Philistinism of their day disturbed their purely creative im- 
 pulses, and in none of them is this more evident than in 
 Tieck. 
 
 Humour of an elevated and serious kind may well enough consist 
 with the romantic spirit; and indeed form a justification, else want- 
 ing, for the disregard of the laws of severe form, which was one of 
 the declared doctrines of the Romantic School, as indeed we find 
 it in Jean Paul Richter ; but satire, particularly in the form of 
 irony, insistently demands the utmost polish, grace, delicacy 
 of expression, and does not well permit any self-conscious vagary 
 of form. French is, for this reason, above all other tongues, the 
 language of simple irony. Tieck, unfortunately for his own chances 
 of attaining a place as a classic, yielded to the temptation of satiric 
 writing, and sometimes even essayed to introduce it as a kind 
 of amalgam in his Mdhrchen, but the effect was occasionally 
 disastrous. 
 
 But one peculiar quality was ever in Tieck's nature, which 
 restrained him always from becoming the mere dreamer. We 
 see some trace of it in the discernment that led him to recognise 
 in the Italian soldier, Daschieri, something out of the ordinary. 
 He had a very fine feeling for distinctions of human nature, 
 though it seemed something like a fatality in his artistic process 
 that he could never continuously interpret this with any clear- 
 ness, or closeness, or sharpness of delineation. Fancy speedily 
 intruded, in most cases translating, or rather narrowing his 
 humour into definite and purposeful irony, or evaporating in 
 overearnestness of moral aim. Perhaps, in some of his works, 
 the feeling of irritation is exaggerated by the very promise of 
 human nature, " pure and undefiled," which the opening portions 
 present. Notably is this the case in " Zerbino " and in " Geno- 
 veva." Herr Honegger, in his laborious and valuable book, 
 " Grundsteine einer allgemeinen Culturgeschichte der neusten 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 423 
 
 Zeit," * seems to us somewhat over-anxious to discredit Tieck's 
 knowledge of human nature, and absolutely denies him any real- 
 istic possibility. He calls his characters mere " shadows on the 
 wall," — " Puppet figures," he says again, " which subsist only in 
 the subjective atmosphere of the writer's phantasy." He smiles 
 at Golo in " Genoveva," laughs a little at the presentation of St 
 Boniface on the stage, and laughs a good deal at the thin and 
 marrowless allegorical figures in the Prelude to " Octavian." He 
 says that one-half these pieces are childish lyrics ; that natural 
 philosophy speculations and middle-age mysticism so obtain in 
 the later works, that the romantic charm {Zauberei) itself is lost 
 — swallowed up. 
 
 Koepke, on the other hand, makes a strong effort to reclaim 
 some credit for Tieck as a realist within certain limits ; and, if he 
 does not wholly succeed in that end, he presents us, during the 
 process, with a great deal of material which is of the utmost 
 interest to any one who would study and try to understand Tieck's 
 genius and methods. Koepke goes over the main events of his 
 biography, and shows how the roots of his conceptions may be 
 traced to the changes and the events of his life. So much did 
 he draw of suggestion from these, that his ill-health, which caused 
 him to move so much from place to place, may be said to have 
 been fortunate. When we have carefully read Koepke's chapter, 
 in which he draws out his list, we are compelled to acknowledge 
 that Tieck was certainly no phantastical dreamer, or in any sense 
 independent or disregardful of reality ; that, in fact, he was pecu- 
 liarly dependent on contact with life and with human character 
 — exhibiting a remarkable appreciation of whatever was odd, 
 individual, and exceptional. In the " Jungen Tischlermeister," 
 he gave in delicate form recollections of his childhood and youth ; 
 '' Peter Lebrecht," we learn, was a direct suggestion from a 
 friend Pickler ; the " Zauber Schloss," again, was founded on a 
 reminiscence of another companion named Schweiger. So with 
 his travels, he has treasured all that was characteristic of them in 
 his stories, whether he wandered with Walkenroder in the quaint 
 byeways of Nuremberg, or loitered in the Black Forest. His 
 memories of the visit to Stratford-on-Avon are treasured up in 
 one of the letters of the nephew to the uncle in " Der Mond- 
 siichtige," and those of the visit to Paris in another tale of that 
 
 * Pp. 294-299. 
 
424 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 time. His journey through Germany with his friend Burgsdorf 
 he recorded in " Der Sommerreise " and in the " Jungen Tis- 
 chler;" the musical hfe he had observed in the family of 
 Count Finkenstein, has its place in the " Musikalischen Leiden 
 und Freuden ;" the scenes of the society in the " Phantasus " are 
 drawn from his life in Ziebingen ; the weak-minded Theophilus 
 is a figure which he had met. 
 
 This peculiar necessity for return upon real incidents, com- 
 bined with a constant and inevitable exaltation, enabling him to 
 touch some generalised or rarified element round which should play 
 a characteristic vein of satire, is the distinguishing mark of 
 Tieck's work which has most chance of remaining. Such tales 
 as the " Love-Charm" and the " Faithful Eckhart "—which Mr 
 Carlyle translated — are, as we think, not nearly so expressive of 
 his genius as are such creations as "Gemalde" — of which 
 "Eulenbock's Trinkrede" is a most striking portion. We are not 
 aware that this work, or any part of it, has ever been translated 
 into English. Amid its vagaries and wild Gothic fancies, there 
 are some bits of description which strike us as almost perfect in 
 their own way, and have a value as exhibiting, in a very direct 
 and forcible style, what we have just said. We shall here give 
 one of these, though we fear our translation will but faintly reflect 
 the original : — n 
 
 eulenbock's drink-speech. 
 
 " Eulenbock arranged how the wines ought to follow each other. 
 ' To-day is ours !' he cried out, ' the battle must be won and the victors 
 must show the besieged no grace. Look in my warlike countenance, 
 ye young heroes, for here have I hung out the threatening red-blood 
 banners as a sign that no mercy shall find place : nothing in the world 
 is so misunderstood, friends, as the apparently simple act which men 
 so superficially name, drinking, and no gift is so mistaken, or little 
 esteemed, as wine. Did I wish the world to become useful, I would 
 propose to set up an enlightened kingdom, to estabhsh therein a 
 special chair of learning, from which I might enlighten ignorant man- 
 hood upon the excellent quaUties of wine. Who drinks not willingly ? 
 There are only a few unhappy souls who can be satisfied with the 
 truth. But it is a pity to see how they drink without application, 
 without style, without light and shade ; so that the trace of a school 
 scarcely shows itself ; even though with the highest colouring the 
 wanton or merry hang themselves out to the world by the nose for a 
 show.' 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 425 
 
 " ' And how must one, strictly speaking, begin ? ' asked Dietrich. 
 
 "'In the beginning,' answered the old man, 'one must lay the 
 foundation by quiet humility and simple faith, as in all the arts. 
 In no premature criticism, in no silly saucy snuffling, but in a noble 
 self-dedication, full of confidence. If the scholar proceeds further, he 
 must discriminate ; and, if the wine meets only studiousness of dis- 
 position, and simplicity of manners, it instructs also the spirit from 
 within outward, and at once awakens the understanding with enthu- 
 siasm. Only not the practice, but the principle postponed, no empty 
 riotousness ; for only the deed makes the master.' 
 
 " ' O, how true ! ' sighed the book-keeper, while he allowed his tears 
 free outflow. ' Words,' said the pietist, ' that would call the common 
 heap golden. 
 
 " ' Were drinking,' continued Eulenbock, ' no art and no science, 
 then there ought to be only one drink on earth, as the innocent water 
 already plays this part well. But the spirit of nature bestows itself 
 in a sweetly pleasant manner, changing and playing here and there 
 in the vine branches, twisting and sparkling in wonderful circles, in 
 order, through its magical courses, to inspire the tongue of our Soul, and 
 then to awaken all the brilliant energies out of old chaos, and charm 
 them from deafness and slumber. " There goes the drunkard ! " Oh, 
 my friends ! so those abused and mocked them who had not received 
 the inspiration. With this gold and purple flood a sea of sweet sound 
 flows into and spreads itself in us, and old Memnon's statue, which, 
 until then, had stood dumb in dark night resounds to the rising 
 dawn. Through blood and brains runs and hastens rejoicingly the 
 happy cry — ^here is the spring ! Then all the little spirits feel the 
 sweet waves, and creep forth with laughing eyes from their dark 
 corners ; with crystal limbs extended, they plunge themselves for a 
 bath into the wine-flood, and splash and wrestle, and then mount 
 hoveringly out again, and shake their many coloured spirit-wings, so 
 that with murmurings, the clear drops fall from the little feathers. 
 They run about and meet each other, and kiss joyful life from each 
 other's lips. Ever denser, ever more brilliant becomes the multitude, 
 and ever sweeter their voices. Then wreathed and highly triumphant 
 they drive past the guardian-angel, who with dark eyes, from the 
 labyrinths of flowers can scarcely look forth. Now man feels eternity, 
 immortality ; he sees and feels the millions of spirits in himself, and 
 in himself enjoys their play. What then shall one say to the common 
 souls who call after one : see ! the fellow is fuddled. What meanest 
 thou, honest crocodile ? ' 
 
 " The pale weeper reached out the hand to him, and said : ' Oh, 
 beloved, the people are right, and you are right, and the whole world 
 is right. What you have hence prophetically ensphered goes beyond 
 my comprehension ; but I am happy in my deep emotion. When 
 
426 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 people go to the comedy to weep for the money it seems quite dis- 
 tasteful to me ; may it be granted to others to elevate themselves to 
 high sentiments and deeds, and to become effusive over them ; but I 
 understand it not ; still, when such good wine goes into me, it works 
 so wonderfully, that everything, let one say what he will, or keep 
 silent, or laugh, ascends in me in the finest emotion. See my heart 
 might break for joy, I could know, I could be anything ; be to you 
 even as a lame poodle, clasped in your arms. But my eyes suffer 
 thereby, and the doctor has, on that account, forbidden me to drink. 
 But this thought is to me the most affecting of all remonstrances, 
 whereupon I could weep all day long, and on that account he has been 
 obliged to withdraw that order again.' 
 
 " ' The more I drink,' said the- pietist, ' the more I hate what you, 
 Eulenbock, have talked so much about, the more unreasonable it 
 seems to me. Falsehood and deceit ! It is just as stupid as to sing 
 with drink the songs that are made to it. Every word therein is false. 
 If a man compares only the one object with the other, he already lies 
 " The dawn strews roses." Is there anything stupid 1 " The sunbathes 
 itself in the sea." Silly ! " The wine glows purple." Foolery ! " The 
 morning awakes." There is no morning ; how can it sleep ? It is 
 indeed nothing but the hour when the sun rises. Cursed ! The sun 
 does not really go up ; that is but madness and poetry. O had I but 
 the power over speech, then would I cleanse and sweep it. O, curse it ! 
 Sweep it out ! In this lying world, one cannot permit madness to be 
 spoken like truth ! ' 
 
 " ' Do not mistake yourself, honourable man,' said Eulenbock, ' your 
 virtue means well, and if you look at the thing otherwise than I do, 
 you will drink at least the same wine, and take in as much as I do . 
 The deed unites us, if systems drive us asunder. Who understands 
 himself now-a-days .'' That is not at all spoken of now. I only wished 
 to remark further, that if it does by no means agree with the past, 
 nature seems to me in the highest degree silly, as men and physicians 
 look upon the process of food and the so-called assimilation. The 
 oak tree from its seed becomes an oak, and the fig brings forth the 
 fig tree ; and if they require air, earth, and water, these elements out 
 of which they grow are certainly not peculiar. So food awakens in us 
 only strength and growth, but it does not bring forth ; there is the 
 possibility, but not the thing ; and man springs forth out of himself 
 like a plant. It is preposterous to believe that the wine directly of 
 itself brings forth all the effects which we ascribe to it. No, no ; as 
 I said, its fragrance and breath awaken only the qualities which 
 move within us. Then the energies, emotions, and raptures rush 
 forth when they have well drunk of this stream. Does one suppose, 
 then, that it is otherwise in all arts and knowledge ? Raphael, and 
 Correggio, and Titian stir up only my own self that slumbers in for- 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 427 
 
 getfulness, and the greatest genius, the finest talent for art, cannot by 
 all the forces of imagination originate the structures which are pointed 
 out to them by the greatest masters ; these works only awaken the 
 old remembrances. Hence also the inordinate desire after new 
 spiritual enjoyments, which otherwise would not be praiseworthy ; 
 hence the wish to find out the unknown, to bring forth the original, 
 which else were madness. Then we anticipate the eternity of know- 
 ledge in ourselves, this prophesying mirror of eternity, and all that it 
 can become to us, an incessantly new power of perception, which 
 gathers itself up into a centre-point of heavenly rest, and from this 
 extends itself outwards to new regions. And therefore, my dear drink- 
 brethren, there must be many and various wines.' 
 
 " ' And what do you draw from this ?' asked Dietrich. ' Is there 
 not here also the classical and finished, the modern and trivial, affec- 
 tation and solicitation, pleasant old age and pious trick, the agreeable 
 and empty bullying.' " 
 
 " ' Young one,' said the old man, ' this question is too complicated, 
 and sets forth an eternal experience, a historical survey, a remote 
 prejudice, and a cultivated taste in all directions, which could only 
 be grasped and unfolded by many years of continuous work and un- 
 tiring study, as the means thereto (and these are not in everybody's 
 hands). Any encyclopjedia will suffice for you. Almost every wine 
 has its goodness, almost all deserve to be known. There is in our 
 fatherland the Neckar, hardly enough to quench the thirst ; then 
 rises the noble Wurzburg, and the various high kinds of Rhine wine, 
 which you cannot characterise in haste. You have them standing 
 here before you, and have enjoyed them. These excellent drinks, 
 from the light Laubenheimer to the strong Niersteiner, the powerful 
 Riidesheim and the penetrating Hochheinier, with all their allied 
 streams, are worthy of higher praise than could be given by the 
 tongue of an orator, who, even in Tuscan dithyrambs, could only in- 
 differently comprehend it. These spirits are clean and clear, cooling 
 and pleasant to the taste. If I should venture a comparison, it is the 
 tranquil purity of an excellent author, mind and fulness without 
 phantasticality or high-flown allegory. And what, let me ask now, 
 is the hot Burgundy to those who can stand it .? As a direct inspira- 
 tion it falls down into us heavily, muddily, violently, and excites our 
 spirits. The wine of Bordeaux, on the contrary, is clear, talkative, and 
 inciting, but it does not inspire. Then comes the wonderful verse- 
 making Provence and the poetical Languedoc. Then come the hot 
 Spanish wines of Xeres, the genuine Malaga and the sparkling wines 
 of Valencia. Here the wine-stream changes, while we enjoy it in our 
 mouths as if in a spherical shape, which extends far and wide, and 
 appears to us in Tokayer and St Georgen-Ausbruch far more hearty 
 and sensible. How the whole mouth and palate are satisfied with 
 
428 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 the entrance of only a single drop of the noble Cap-wein ! (Con- 
 stantia wine). Of this wine the connoisseur must not drink as of our 
 Rhine wine, but sip and lick. What say I of you, dear growth of 
 Italy ; of Tuscany; of thee, spirity Monte-Fiascone; of thee, truly- 
 stirring Monte-Pulciano ? Taste, then, friends, and understand me ! 
 But come I not to praise thee, thou king of all wines, rose-red 
 Aleatico, flower and paragon of all wines, milk and wine, flower and 
 sweetness, fire and mildness together ? Of this rare wine one does 
 not drink, only taste, sip, and lick ; but to the blessed a new organ 
 is thus disclosed, which does not permit itself to be described to 
 the ignorant and empty.' Here he broke off excitedly, and dried 
 his eyes." 
 
 Perhaps a specimen equally good might be found in " Die 
 Vogelscheuche,'' one of the most airy and playful of his satires, 
 where he has allowed himself more of freedom — his fancy pass- 
 ing pla)ffully, capriciously, and yet not without some sense of 
 faithful association, from one subject to another. The main in- 
 tention is to ridicule the efforts then being made to popularise 
 art, and around it are grouped throngs of the most fantastic 
 ideas. It is a very favourable specimen of Tieck's humour and 
 J> I ii most efficient satire. Here is a specimen : — 
 
 \/o<S-Et.SCH£UCH£ " Peterling continued : 'From a Catholic chapel which had fallen 
 to decay he had procured a stone image of God the Father. He 
 himself (for he had dabbled in all the arts) had transformed this by 
 hammer, chisel, and other tools, into a Neptune, and had put into the 
 hand of the figure an iron trident. So the image stands on the top of 
 the public well, and the young wives say that, when they go to fetch 
 water, they are afraid to pass by the horrible figure.' 
 
 " ' Do you laugh .'" said Ambrosius. ' I have sent him to the town 
 with a good intention, and I know that the (constant) sight of him 
 will gradually mould the public taste, and make men susceptible 
 of art.' 
 
 " ' The peasants,' says Peterling, ' on account of the thing with 
 three prongs, look upon this Neptune as a clown who will load 
 dung, because they take the trident for a grape or dung fork.' 
 
 " ' In the same way,' cried Ambrosius, in his animated voice, ' I 
 have brought this offering to my fatherland, and will not tire in laying, 
 several more such on the altar. And just as the Greeks ever strove 
 to establish art, so shall I strive in my feeble way ; and I am con- 
 vinced that, in a few years, all I wish for will follow It is well 
 
 known how the Greeks everywhere erected statues ; where these died 
 out, they set up at least a landmark to point out the place. Hermes, 
 the unseemly figure of the god of the gardens, whose indecency we 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 429 
 
 dare not, under any circumstances, imitate, guarded their fruit ; and 
 in whatever direction one turned the eye, there were forms of gods 
 and heroes of art and history, as well as portrait-figures that adorned 
 street and market. Often have I spoken with my fellow-citizens to 
 this effect. Is it not a shame, said I to them, that these abominable 
 dirty rags and tatters, so blown about by the wind in your fields, 
 should put us to shame in the eyes of the enlightened traveller ? 
 These images, scarecrows or frighteners, as they are commonly 
 called, are the greatest disgrace to our national taste ; they frighten 
 away refinement, good manners, and art far more than they do those 
 sparrows and crows on whose account they are set up. As has been 
 said, " I wiU not recommend old Priapus the unchaste, for in many 
 respects these times, though eminent, were too regardless, too un- 
 friendly to morals, and fine feeling was to them as a snap of the 
 finger. But the guardianship of our fields, the institution of scaring 
 away birds from the newly sown fields of corn, from the peas and 
 beans, and other fruits, is an enviable pretext in order to create room 
 and pathway for genuine German art, though now the institution 
 offends the eye too much to prove that art owes anything to it. But 
 let us invent rough images for these gardens, let each one bring to 
 light according to his own fancy some figure which shall be a brilliant 
 model to imitators. It is not necessary that Ceres or Demeter should 
 preside over these new technical scare-crows ; but these bird-scarers, 
 if we may so call them, need not all present the same character. 
 Some may be heroes who perhaps have freed their country, some 
 may be distinguished as authors who have chased away the darkness 
 of superstition ; others, men like Adam Smith and Thaer, and some 
 again like those who have improved agriculture and sought to remove 
 defects, some also as pedagogues who have figured with rod in hand. 
 As said, the circle is without end, for ingenious allegories might also 
 be found out. The hand must be put to the thing, and soon our 
 fields will shine forth with beautiful images." 
 
 " ' Everybody grants that those common scare-crows deserve no 
 place in the art-world, and that, in this branch as in many others, 
 men understand how to correct many a thing ; but it is easier to talk 
 and to find fault with them than to act, and I would also strive to let 
 my ideal, as is said, step into life. I promised it. The whole winter 
 I worked in quietness in retired fields, and on the first day of Easter 
 I brought my finished work of art to my garden.' 
 " ' And,' asked Peteriing, ' what effect did it produce ?' 
 " ' Terrible,' answered Ambrosius, ' more than I ever could dream 
 of, indeed I may well say, our whole village was like drunk ; the 
 senators praised me, the citizens pressed my hands ; the young 
 people, in procession with flambeaux, gave me an animated vivat 
 which echoed through all the streets. The travellers were astonished, 
 
430 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 foreign artists marked the friendly garden-friend, or rather the elegant 
 scare-crow, for it is as Uttle as Achilles, a true ' Monster of the gar- 
 dens.' " 
 
 " ' And how does the fellow hold out ? ' asked Heinzemann. 
 
 •' ' I will describe him to you,' answered Ambrosius, somewhat out 
 of tune ; ' and I hope that, in a short time you yourself will take a 
 view of him. I have formed him very artistically out of brown 
 leather, for he must, according to his destiny, be able to stand wind 
 and weather. His face itself is brown, with the least tinge of red ; 
 the mein and expression imposing, for if he wish to look amiable then 
 he shall terrify the good-for-nothing rabble ; therefore I have covered 
 his forehead with strong and very bushy eyebrows. The eyes them- 
 selves are moveable — ^black coral upon a white ground of mother-of- 
 pearl. If by a strong wind the head turns, then the eyes sparkle and 
 glisten as if in rage. A three-cornered hat of leather covers his head, 
 and a white feather lies over this, which sets him off. The clothes 
 are also of leather, the coat green; nearly like an old Dutchman; but 
 in a golden belt he carries a dagger. On his legs he has gaiters with 
 golden buttons, on his shoes are buckles ; his arms and legs are en- 
 tirely of brown leather and incorruptible. In his arms, which natu- 
 rally must be moveable, he holds a firearm, no modern one, but an 
 instrument something between an arquebuse and a crossbow. It is 
 a pleasure to see him when the wind puts the fine graceful form 
 in motion, when he turns his weapon in all directions ; and the 
 birds, which destroy our plantations, have so much terror and dread 
 of this figure, that it awakens enthusiasm in those who see them. 
 One can now easily hit upon the character, and see in my handiwork 
 the guardian Amor or Cupid ; if he look at the fancy sidewards, he 
 may take him for a modern ApoUo in the character of a warrior ; in 
 other respects he seems so to me, too, if one thinks of the old English- 
 men, the romantic freebooter, that Robin Hood, who in Sherwood, 
 deep in green forests, led his jolly life as hunter, robber, and lover 
 with his Mary Ann, and his many-coloured companions. If a prosaic 
 huntsman sees such in my figure I have no objection. This proves 
 it to be the genuine symbol, that it reminds of as much as the fancy 
 allows.' 
 
 " ' So, then, you are happy,' said Heinzemann, ' that your model 
 works upon the citizens, and that they place copies of your artistic 
 scarecrow in their gardens.' 
 
 "'Another,' says Peterling, 'may next be fabricated as a modern 
 Diana, with crossbow and quiver, which at the same time may stand 
 for Judith. Nebuchadnezzar would be a royal type for a scarecrow, 
 as he grazes in humility, and then rises up suddenly to frighten away 
 the crows which eat up the fodder before his nose.' 
 
 " ' Come only and see, ye unbeUevers,' Ambrosius cried out. ' Let 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 431 
 
 my daughter, Ophelia, set before you all the beauties of my image. 
 I am right glad that my child fully shares in my ideas ; she is in love 
 with Adonis, as she calls the brown huntsman. Early in the morning 
 she wanders out in order to enjoy his beauty, and she is not seldom 
 found in the dusk of evening still in the field. One may say she lives 
 only with and in this work of art ; her whole soul is directed to the 
 ideal, and earthly toil has become foreign to her.' 
 
 " ' But how then ?' began Peterling, ' you desire indeed, friend, that 
 we withdraw from this empty ideal, and everything that pertain 
 to thought and enthusiasm shall flow into and work in the actual life. 
 And if your own daughter is enamoured, then she contradicts your 
 doctrine, and we come back to the old place.' 
 
 "'Oh you impatient and uncontrollable men!' Ambrosius cried 
 out, ' has not nature put a great and most lasting difference in the 
 destination of women and men? By prepossession in favour of 
 Hamlet this child in baptism received the name of Opheha ; and the 
 misgiving which the name suggests to you is not yet fully realised, 
 for she takes ever more and more to this beautiful paragon. Her 
 whole being has gone out in love, and she knows no earthly wants. 
 Her ardent desire turns only to art and things above earth, and thus 
 is she true, with undying inspiration, to this my work of art, Robin 
 Hood, or according to your interpretation, she is in love with 
 Adonis.' 
 
 " The windows of the room in which the friends took their food 
 commanded a view of the whole country. These the attentive host 
 opened, in order that they might see the clear, cloudless sky. While 
 they were absorbed in contemplation, there fell towards the horizon 
 something like a star, fiery and shining, and they saw, behind the 
 sinking flame, a clear trace of dark blue. 
 
 "'Heavens!' cried Heinzemann, 'did you notice that wonder, 
 friends, that phenomenon?' 
 
 " ' Oh, yes,' said Peterling, ' it was only a shooting star.' 
 "'They are quite common,' remarked Ambrosius, 'it shone so 
 brightly that it might be compared to a ball of fire ; one sees plenty 
 of these in warm summer evenings, but there is nothing very wonder- 
 ful about that.' 
 
 "'How you speak!' cried the astronomer, Heinzemann. 'What 
 is a shooting star ? is this fire-wonder nothing more than some vapour 
 which has electrically caught fire, as our natural philosophers assert? 
 You, Peterling, battle against the greatest truths, which natural philo- 
 sophers have discovered, whenever they do not agree with your 
 whims. You, Ambrose, strive to be popular, to make aU the world 
 comprehensible and accessible to art representation, and think no 
 theory worth while which does not occur to your own mind ; but if I 
 make anything known from the secret workshop of nature, no one 
 
432 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 has an ear for it, and everyone comes to me with his frivolous objec- 
 tions, with which you would not profane your lips if you wished to 
 stand higher. Shooting star ! Yes, yes, so likewise says the boor. 
 I can understand these as red, but not as stars or spheres which may 
 perhaps fall somewhere in a stream. But with this negative there is 
 less than nothing said. We spoke formerly of the comets and of 
 astrology and knowledge of the heavens, and were ablfc to apply the 
 explanation of what these shooting stars exactly were. It is a foolish 
 opinion to hold, as some young and inexperienced people have 
 thought, that these stars become future worlds. Merely vapour? 
 What then is vapour itself? What then is this electricity ? Surely 
 our taste is dull if we do not regard with solemn astonishment and 
 joyous awe the appearances and workings of nature. Cast your eye 
 across these widespread starry heavens, and notice far and near the 
 small and great lights, how many move, how others stand still, how 
 our earth turns and with the moon makes sympathetic circles, and 
 suddenly a large bright spark breaks off and sinks down, you do not 
 know whither, you do not see where it originates, and if you were of 
 poetical feeling you would be able to indulge in many suppositions 
 on the shooting of a star, which could easily awaken your so-called 
 conviction.' 
 
 " Peterling bit his lips, by which act, when he had nothing to say, he 
 always wished to express a satirical thought ; but Ambrosius said 
 quite honestly : ' Now what can such a shooting-star be or mean 
 according to your view V 
 
 " And Heinzemann began, in his own characteristic way, to exhibit 
 the full bearings of the whole matter, but the time to return to town 
 had arrived and they separated to meet again before long." 
 
 We have already referred to " Zerbino." Here the satire runs 
 over into mazy and merely artificial refinements, which would 
 have made it altogether unreadable had it not been for recurrent 
 touches of grace and reality. Here, as in other cases of the 
 same sort, it is with the common-place that Tieck fails. 
 
 Some of the speeches in the mouth of Doris and Kleon are 
 exceedingly poetic and elevated, but those of the commoner 
 characters are scarcely so successful. A good judge has said of 
 " Zerbino " :— 
 
 " The whole poetry in Zerbino has a sort of marching clink, and 
 seems a concert in which by turns the roses and tulips, the singing of 
 birds and the heavenly blue, and the different musical instruments, 
 the springs, the stream, the storm, and the spirits of the mountains 
 make themselves heard and seen in characteristic manner. Tieck 
 had confessed to his friend Solger that he had written Zerbino in a 
 
LVD WIG riECK. 433 
 
 , spirit of resentment rather than in the fulness of an overflowing 
 heart. We feel the truth of these words as we read ; the positive 
 poetry in the piece is not enough to fill the soul and to expand the 
 bosom. And the polemical satirizing of parties does not inspire us so 
 much by its formal worth as by its critical value." 
 
 This is trae ; for consistent artistic conception, for controlled 
 and graceful outline, for weird grandeur and strength, we confess 
 that " Die schone Magelone" is our favourite. 
 
 Tieck remains to the end — and even when he essays to treat 
 the realest themes— the distant, wistful, self-critical observer. 
 His humour is closely bound up with his self-critical quality. It 
 is delicate, refined, full of side-play, but lacks freedom and 
 abandon. It never, so to say, shakes him out of his intent and 
 over-serious pre-occupations with his own thoughts and fantastic 
 creations. The world is tributary to his shadow-land of the 
 phantasy, and not the reverse, as it ought to be, where reality is 
 touched, or even suggested. This tendency unhealthily infects 
 the whole romantic school, with the exception of Novalis, whose 
 religious experiences, mystic and strange as they are, yet as em- 
 bodied with simple beauty in his hymns, appeal powerfully to the 
 ordinary human heart and longing. 
 
 The great error of the Romantic School was, that it did not 
 content itself with production, as the efficient representation of 
 its doctrines and aims. It was declaredly militant. It thus pro- 
 perly began that war against the art of the Philistines which 
 Heine most decisively carried forward. It involved itself in feuds 
 to which there was and could be no satisfactory issue, because the 
 combatants differed, as we say, on first principles, that is, on the 
 very aims and objects, the material and the province of art. 
 This was particularly unfortunate, because it infected works of 
 theirs that claimed to be purely ideal with an atmosphere of con- 
 troversy. So far as Goethe may be reckoned as a romanticist, 
 he exhibits in an emphasised form all the errors of the school in 
 this respect. Both the First and Second Faust — but more par- 
 ticularly the latter, which, strangely enough, was partly finished 
 when he was in Italy, and under influences purely classic — 
 abound in it. A crusade against the Philistines is carried on 
 under cover of a bastard symbolism and the play of free phan- 
 tasy : Nicolai, the publisher, as well as Hennings was ridiculed 
 there in a way that was unmistakeable, and no small part 
 
 2 E 
 
434 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 of the non-coherency, which seems owing to the mingling of 
 mysticism with shrewd practical wisdom, and which has proved so 
 provoking to minds like that of Mr Lewes, is distinctly due to 
 this cause. When, according to M. Scherer, Goethe was becom- 
 ing more and more classical, facts would seem to show that he 
 was becoming more and more romantic, and that in its most 
 doubtful form of open attack on the " Philisterie."* 
 
 Tieck was at once a fine critic and a true poet ; but in most 
 of the romances of his later period the critic was too assertive, 
 and injured the freedom and harmony of the work. His friend. 
 Councillor Lachell, notes it as a unique combination in Tieck 
 that the poet and critic should each have so thoroughly main- 
 tained themselves alongside of that strong mimetic power, which 
 did so much to make him a great dramatic reader, and would 
 have made him a powerful actor. " Tieck," continues Lachell, 
 " was a thoroughly dialogish nature, and had a remarkable power 
 of presenting both sides of any subject in which he was inte- 
 rested." He himself wrote at one place : — 
 
 " The opposition of fun and earnest is a necessity of my nature. 
 Owing to the deep melancholy, the dejection which has so often 
 fallen on me, this has been a happy circumstance. The sense of fun 
 has often recalled me and preserved me from complete prostration. 
 Even in my youth many could not properly comprehend this double 
 nature, and therefore wrongly held me for foolish." 
 
 This peculiar interplay was the animating and individualizing 
 element in Tieck's work. He looked clearly, and with the eye 
 of a humorist, at the world of men, but his contemplative spirit 
 mastered him in the study. In his representations he too pass- 
 ively yielded himself to his natural tendency, projecting over his 
 characters the shimmering, many-coloured veils of subjective im- 
 pression. " He lived in the world of phantasy and contempla- 
 tion," says Koepke. " He was poetical in his most active mo- 
 ments, and produced inwardly when outwardly he appeared to do 
 nothing. . . . He could not agree," Koepke goes on, " if one 
 spoke of him as romanticist, that is, as belonging to a particular 
 school of poetry. Though he may rightly claim to rank as the 
 second poetical genius of Germany in his time, he nevertheless 
 remained isolated. It could not be otherwise. Like all great 
 individual natures he was at once too peculiarly conformed and 
 
 * Marggraff, p. 53. 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 435 
 
 too manysided to be pinned down to any of the common views 
 of the day."* 
 
 Tieck's life, as we have seen, fully bears this out, in his pecu- 
 liar retreats from the extreme phases of temporary developments, 
 and even from the last extravagances of romanticism itself. His 
 tastes were catholic by virtue of his fine and delicate instincts. 
 His references to other literature show how catholic he was in 
 this respect — the little story "Des Lebens Ueberfluss," being 
 worthy of a word in this relation. It almost demands a reference 
 also for a very humorous illustration of the principle that the 
 " difference between civilized and uncivilized men is not specific." 
 Tieck there humorously inquires what of the many encumbrances 
 of civilization man can do without. He finds, first, that this and 
 the other thing can be well done without table-napkins, and, at 
 last, reaches the conclusion that many men still eat without a 
 table, with a glance at civilized Eastern life ! 
 
 Tieck, in his writings, truly expressed himself in the weaknesses 
 of his character as well as in its strength. He was, above most 
 men, faithful to his high perceptions, and followed where they 
 led, little influenced by any thought of worldly result. Looked 
 at fi-om this point of view, his biographer's words are quite expres- 
 sive of the fact : — 
 
 " He had lived what he wrote. His poems were the pure expres- 
 sions of his inner life ; they were something personal, alike in their 
 depth of thought, their power, their vivacity, and their clearness of 
 representation." t 
 
 The only two EngUsh authors of the present era whose genius 
 might serve to illustrate Tieck's to readers who do not know Ger- 
 man are Nathaniel Hawthorne and George MacDonald. Like 
 the former, Tieck is incessantly seeking for starting-points or sug- 
 gestions of symbol in the scenes and characters with which he 
 has through life come closely in contact, sometimes slipping very 
 cunningly away from the firm ground of fact and reality into the 
 thinnest atmosphere of phantasy after delighting us with the 
 daintiest and most reaUstic pictures ; and he has a pecuhar pen- 
 chant for that kind of speculative irony, which demands remote- 
 ness of observation in a sense, and which consists so well with 
 a tendency to allegory. As in Hawthorne, there is a certain dim- 
 ness in the light; as if we were in moonshine rather than in sun- 
 
 ♦ Koepk.:, ii. p. 14- + Koepke, ii. p. 150. 
 
436 LUDWIG TIECK. 
 
 light ; with the waving of forests and piny odours around us ; but 
 Tieck is more diffuse than Hawthorne, who uniformly makes all 
 impressions bend obediently to the one great motive he has in 
 hand. Tieck often lessens his effect by expansion, as is particu- 
 larly seen in " Die Vogelscheuche." If the reader could glance 
 at the latter, and then take up the " Minister's Veil" or "Mother 
 Rigby's Pipe " (which is to be found in the Memoir of Hawthorne, 
 with Tales first published in this country),* not to speak of " The 
 Scarlet Letter," our meaning would, perhaps, be apparent. Like 
 Hawthorne too, Tieck had a very fine feeling for child-nature, 
 often managing in quite a unique manner to convey, through the 
 most childlike pictures, the most subtle satire. The "Weih- 
 nachtsabend" (or "Christmas Eve") of Tieck might, in this 
 point of view, be compared with Hawthorne's " Little Annie's 
 Ramble" or "A Rill from the Town Pump." Both, too, had a 
 vein of wistful self-criticism, steeped in a satiric humour of a 
 subdued character, and with both it sometimes came to definite 
 expression. Both, too, sought to revive the spirit of an old life 
 under new forms — the puritan conception under which the real 
 world was refined away through an over-intense spiritual appre- 
 hension, lay at the base of all Hawthorne's weird and often 
 ghostly symbolisms ; so Tieck sought to recall the self-abnega- 
 tion, the worship, the reverence, the ideal chivalry of the middle 
 ages, with its as yet too-frostily mythicised religion — Catholicism, 
 without a Pope, but opposed in essentials to reason, and to a 
 distinctly recognised secular element. Both, too, are occasion- 
 ally inclined to suggest by averting the face of the character from 
 us as if in a side-way retreat, and by a certain obliqueness of 
 treatment, which is intensified by the prevailing clearness and 
 directness of the picture elsewhere. 
 
 George MacDonald sometimes reminds one of Tieck, not only 
 in his " Phantastes " and fairy stories, which are steeped in much 
 of the same sentiment, and offer the same dim presentment of 
 human meanings under veils of fairy fable, but in his more serious 
 efforts to pourtray real life in the almost inevitable dominance of 
 ideal and properly phantastical elements, which not seldom break 
 in so as to empty, in great measure, of their earthly and human 
 traits, the very characters which have recommended themselves 
 to us as real and true in the outset. This is more particularly 
 
 * Henry S. King & Co. 
 
LUDWIG TIECK. 437 
 
 true of Tieck's earlier works — such as " Lovell " and " Abdallah," 
 but it is, with some qualifications, true even of his latest efforts 
 at realistic fiction; and few careful readers will fail to follow 
 the comparison as respects Mr MacDonald's more ambitious 
 works, such as "David Elginbrod" and "Robert Falconer" 
 — all of which are cut in two by some alien element — the first 
 named by the introduction of spiritualism, the second by the 
 introduction of that ethereal English lady, whose influence is 
 powerful, but whose presence is never properly justified. As on 
 Tieck, so on George MacDonald, old folk-lore has exercised a 
 powerful influence, and, as it is seen in its most spiritual aspects, 
 transmuted and transfigured in such a work as "The Portent" 
 of Mr MacDonald, so it is seen in such creations as the Fair- 
 haired Eckbert of Tieck. Both, too, carry on a war against an 
 order of Philistinic opinions, which is des«?iptive in its final 
 effects both on works of pure fancy and more realistic narra- 
 tive. 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG 
 (NOVALIS). 
 
Die Muse des Novalis war ein Schlankes, weisses Madchen mit emsthaft 
 blauen Augen, goldnen hyacinthenlochen, lachendeo Lippen, und einera 
 Meinen rothen Muttermahl an der linken Seite des Kinns. — Heinis Roman- 
 tische Schule, p. 198. 
 
 Es ware eine artige Frage — ob denn das lyrische Gedicht ei^entlich Gedicht, 
 pluspoesie, oder Prosa minuspoesie ware ? Wie man den Roman fur Prosa 
 gehalten hat, so hat man das lyrische Gedicht fiir Poesie gehalten— beides 
 mit unrecht, die hochste eigentlichste Prosa ist das lyrische Gedicht. — 
 Novalis — Fragments. 
 
 Der Kilnstler steht auf dem Menschen wie die Statue auf dem Piedestal. — 
 Novalis. 
 
 Der Mysticismus ist die Scholastik der Herzens, die Dialectiss des Gefuhls. 
 
 Die Idee ist ewig und einzig ; dass wir auch den plural brauchen, 1st nicht 
 wohlgethan. AUes was wir gewahr werden und woven, sind mir Manifesta- 
 tionen der Idee ; Begriffe sprechen wir aus, und insofern ist die Idee selbst 
 ein Begriff. — Goetkis Ethisches. 
 
It has been in some degree unfortunate for Novalis that his bio- 
 graphy was first presented to the German pubUc by Tieck, who 
 was somewhat too intent on finding in the writings of his friend 
 the tokens of his own influence, and, more particularly, that of 
 his friends, the Schlegels. He magnified the romantic and mys- 
 tical element, and left others wholly out of view. It was so far 
 unfortunate for us in England also, in view of a faithful appre- 
 ciation of Novalis, that he was at first, and so effectively, intro- 
 duced to us by Mr Carlyle, who so far followed Tieck and made 
 Novalis the text for a general defence ^f that mysticism from 
 which the English mind so determinedly turns away, however 
 much it may admire such a characteristic and eloquent analysis 
 and description of it as Mr Carlyle gave us in his essay. Looked 
 at from the standpoint that Mr Carlyle took, his article was so 
 powerful that it was deemed exhaustive ; and most readers, even 
 cultured ones, rested content with the ideas derived from it, and 
 were not impelled to a study of Novalis's writings for themselves. 
 It is one of the penalties of writings like those of Carlyle, and, 
 from another cause, of those of Macaulay, that though they 
 stimulate and do much to develop enthusiasm for literatiure, 
 they tend, at the same time, to encourage an idea of complete 
 revelation when they are, in fact, intensely one-sided, and when 
 all the interests of the subject or the man have not been even 
 glanced at. Novalis was seized and put before us in only one 
 attitude, which enabled Mr Carlyle to attain more symmetry than 
 he has sometimes done ; but, the fate of Hardenberg in England 
 recalls very forcibly an anecdote told by Herr Edward von Billow 
 in the Preface to the Fifth Edition of Novalis's " Sammtliche 
 Schriften." " The father of Novalis," he writes, " was a man of 
 firm character, upright, practical, pious ; a true German ; but not 
 
442 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 inclined to appreciate his son's poetical aspirations, or his produc- 
 tions. He dearly loved Friedrich, but he had never dis- 
 cerned the genius in him. He had taken no notice of his 
 son's writings, nor had he ever read any of them. Novalis died, 
 and his old father went one day to the church of the Herrnhut 
 Communion. In the church, they sang a wonderfully beautiful 
 spiritual song ( Wunderschones geistliches Lied) which he had 
 never heard before, but by which he was deeply touched. The 
 service came to an end ; he left the church, and with deep emo- 
 tion, asked a friend what was the ' song they had sung, and who 
 was the author of it.' ' My God ! ' was the answer, ' do you not 
 know that your own son composed that song ! '" * 
 
 The impression derived from both Tieck and Carlyle so em- 
 phatically discountenances the idea that plain practical people 
 could get any help whatever from Novalis, that the anecdote 
 will perhaps not be regarded as wholly out of place here. 
 
 Novalis was, in truth, a pietist in a new guise. Every pietist 
 is a mystic ; but every mystic is not a pietist. Therein lies the 
 distinction between Novalis and those who have so persistently 
 claimed him as a disciple or as a partizan. It is true, that like F. 
 Schlegel, he came to regard the Roman Catholic Church as that 
 which might under certain circumstances most efficiently repre- 
 sent the religious life of Europe, and ally it with everyday activity, 
 art, science, and industry, thus finding the unity of which the 
 brotherhood of German mystics were especially in search ; but 
 Novalis to the end remained a Lutheran, too wise to yield his 
 ideal to the keeping of a very degenerate form of Catholicism. 
 His interest for us will be found to lie in the impulse he has 
 given to the religious life, by the infusion of deeper veins of 
 sentiment, and the poetic atmosphere which he has thrown 
 around the common dogmas of Christianity. 
 
 II. 
 
 The Hardenbergs were a noble family, but not rich; and 
 through some generations had been as noted for their deep reli- 
 gious feeling, as for genuine German firmness and uprightness of 
 character. Friedrich's father was a man of great piety, practical 
 
 * Mein Gott! wissen sie denn nicht, dass Ihr eigner Sohn das Lied gedichtet hat! 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 443 
 
 talent, and force of character. He was born in January 1738, 
 had visited Schulpforta and Gottingen, and learned the practical 
 work of mining. At the urgent wish of his uncles and guardians 
 he gave this up, and became a clerk in the Chancery Court in 
 Hanover. This profession, however, did not suit his vivacious 
 spirit ; and he therefore took service in the Hanoverian Legion 
 during the Seven Years' War. His experiences of a soldier's life 
 were such that to the last he cherished, as Tieck tells us, a lively 
 interest in that profession and a great affection for all belonging 
 to It. After the peace, he claimed his discharge, and some years 
 later he became director of the Salt Mines in Saxony, which office 
 he held for the rest of his life. In 1769, like his more famous 
 son, he lost a betrothed one, deeply beloved. Her death, we 
 are told, shook the young man to the very depths of his being.* 
 In 1780, however, he found in Auguste Benhardine von Bolzig 
 such attractions as prevailed over his sorrow, and they were 
 wedded in July of that year. She was, like her husband, a 
 Moravian, pious and submissive, as indeed was fortunate, for 
 Hardenberg was inclined to rule his household with a strong will. 
 In spite of a certain hard and practical air, a love of industry and 
 strict discipline, the director was really a man of great tenderness 
 of heart as well as of deep religious sentiment. Tieck tells us that 
 " the soft repose, the beautiful refined feeling of his mother, no 
 less than the pious frame of mind of both parents, which so 
 naturally penetrated the whole house, made upon Novalis's heart 
 the deepest impression, which he felt through his whole life, and 
 often acknowledged." 
 
 Novalis- was the first son and second child — a sister having 
 been bom about a year before him. He saw the light on the 2d 
 May 1772, at his father's country house in the Grafschaft of 
 Mansfeld in Saxony. Other nine children followed, and all of 
 them were sickly. The little Friedrich was by no means prema- 
 ture as a child, rather slow and dull indeed, so that one hardly 
 finds an illustrative corroboration of the Wordsworthian axiom — 
 "the child is father of the man" — in reading that his sister had 
 to learn her lessons beside him with the sisterly intent of helping 
 him to get them into his head. The family hfe was remarkably 
 quite and secluded. His mother, his eldest sister, and his two 
 
 * Friedrich von Hardenberg Cgenannt Novalis). Eine Nachlese, Herausgegeben von 
 einem Mitglied der familie. — Gotha, 1873. 
 
444 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 brothers next to him in age, were the only companions he had 
 as a child, and they seem to have been knit together in the 
 bonds of a love as deep as it was enduring. Through the dream- 
 like stillness and sweetness of his character, the extraordinary 
 love Novalis bore for his mother would appear to have shone as 
 with steady star-like lustre. He was only happy when he was by 
 her side, and did not care for the company of the children or for 
 any of the sports which usually attract the young. 
 
 In his ninth year he fell into a severe illness, which it was at 
 one time feared would prove fatal ; but he struggled through it, 
 and when he arose his mental faculties seemed to have awakened 
 into proper activity. He was now a very quick and eager learner, 
 and no more needed his eldest sister to aid him. In his twelfth 
 year Tieck says he had gained an extensive knowledge of Latin 
 and also of Greek, and to learn poetry hour by hour was now 
 his great delight. He loved, above all, the Mahrchen or Folks' 
 tales, and even at this time he invented and wrote out little stories 
 wherewith to entertain his younger brothers, who looked up to 
 him as to an oracle. His religious education, meanwhile, had 
 been mainly conducted by the nearest Moravian minister, who in 
 the attempt to inculcate a due regard for dogma, came very near 
 to undoing all the good that had been done by the pious tone 
 of his home. Indeed it is hardly too much to say that, if the 
 impression produced by the pervading atmosphere of his father's 
 house had not been so genuine, he might very easily have become 
 a sceptic. At any rate, when afterwards recalling this time, he 
 speaks of the faith of such persons as his teacher as not showing 
 so much the ''childlike" as the "old-woman" spirit. For a 
 time, it is clear, that he had some tendency to the vague Deism 
 which was then very common especially among the students of 
 Germany. 
 
 After a short period of study at a gymnasium, he went to Jena 
 as a student in the memorable year 1789. There he had Fichte 
 for a teacher, and found a life-long friend in Friedrich Schlegel. 
 The Wissenshaftslehre of the former, it is clear, exercised on him 
 a powerful influence. He studied it with unwearied zeal, and 
 received from it suggestions which became the foundation of 
 many of his future speculations in philosophy. These meta- 
 physical studies alternated with mathematics and the physical 
 sciences, both of which had great attraction for him. About the 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 445 
 
 same time he came under the influence of Schiller, whose lofty- 
 character and elevated ideaUsm created a genuine enthusiasm in 
 Novalis. In the autumn of 1792 he left Jena for Leipzig, and a 
 little time before this we find him writing : — 
 
 " I shall go to Leipzig in three weeks. Jurisprudence, mathematics, 
 and philosophy shall be the three sciences which during this winter I 
 must study with heart and soul, and with the sharpest sense. I must 
 seek to attain more firmness, more precision, more plan, more pur- 
 pose, and this I can attain in the easiest way by a thorough study of 
 these sciences. ' Learn to know thyself shall be my memento mori, 
 and 'live obscure' the motto of my practical hfe. Schiller has 
 incited me to higher, more intent purpose in the study of Belles 
 Lettres, for which every man of enquiring head and sound heart must 
 feel a very lively interest. He teaches me to listen to the whisper of 
 my fate and to be obedient. He shows me that one can do what one 
 wills, and that true greatness of spirit and genuine moral beauty of 
 character is not incompatible with narrow purposes, if one holds 
 faithfully by the higher ideal." 
 
 His father had decided that his brother, Erasmus, should 
 accompany him to Leipzig. From childhood Erasmus had been 
 weakly in health ; and it was deemed advisable that he should 
 make his start in university life under the care of his elder 
 brother. Erasmus was very highly gifted, had great powers of 
 thought and wit, was also facile in poetry, and he had a very 
 warm and loving heart. 
 
 In 'Leipzig Novalis appears as no moping recluse anymore 
 than in Jena. He was very constant in his studies, and was 
 inclined to adventure on paths about which the bulk of his fellow 
 students knew or cared little. He read portions of Boehme, and 
 was deeply interested in the story of Boehme's life. Both he and 
 Erasmus, we are told, entered into the academical pastimes and the 
 joyous, free student ways with thorough zest. They were drawn 
 into great sociality. NovaUs's personality here developed quickly. 
 Quite unconsciously, and without aiming at it, he played a 
 brilliant role in the best society ; and here, for the first time, he 
 was seized with a passionate inclination towards a young lady, 
 who did not, however, return his regard. This event in some 
 degree, and the outbreaking of the French war in a greater 
 degree, caused a sudden interruption of his studies. He was 
 seized with a strong desire to become a soldier, and wrote 
 importuning his parents to consent to his joining the army. He 
 
446 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 says in the course of a long letter to his father in which he states 
 his views : — 
 
 " Thou knowest already what I want, how that a warm desire to 
 become a soldier is now the outmost limit of the horizon of my 
 desires. The fulfilment of this hope would still the feverish unrest, 
 that now troubles my whole soul. Thou, dearest father, art the greatest 
 and indeed the only obstacle with which I have to contend." 
 
 And he goes on to appeal to his father's own early experiences, 
 and the great love he bears for the profession ; and thus assures 
 him of the earnestness of his purpose. 
 
 " I hope that thou already perceivest that it is not any childish idea 
 of the soldier-life that is my chief inducement. I know well what I 
 shall sacrifice and what I shall obtain ; for what I am striving and 
 what I shall lose. I know that the soldier's life is no rose-garden, but , 
 I feel that I could not shirk any call to a work which, as I believe, 
 would have a more wholesome influence for my whole development and 
 character than aught else. ... It will be a great satisfaction to ine 
 to feel that this determination is not in opposition to thy own way of 
 thinking of the matter. Thou knowest well how long it is before the 
 way of one's destiny becomes clear, and will not therefore reproach me 
 that I did not ere this time make thee aware of it." * 
 
 But to these representations his parents could not be brought 
 to listen ; his mother especially, who regarded him as the future 
 support of the house, was seized with great depression at the 
 thought of it. On this being urged on Novalis, as well as the 
 necessity that lay upon him as the eldest son of the family, 
 quickly to establish himself in life in such a way as he could be of 
 service to his brothers and sisters, he relinquished all ideas of a 
 military life, though, like his father, he never ceased to look upon 
 it with the utmost respect and honour. In June 1793, we find 
 him writing to his mother, who had evidently made some refer- 
 ence to this point : — 
 
 " To build up and strengthen the sense [for practical life and duty], 
 as fully as possible in the dark web of my fate, shall be my chief aim, 
 and only the most forbidding lot, the unloosing of all that binds me 
 to life, shall move me from that purpose. This sense I derive from 
 you, and it is already passionately strong in me. . . . The family is to 
 me still nearer than the state. Freely, I must be a strong citizen in 
 order that I may bind the family the more to me. But to me the last 
 is a nearer object than the first. One is only a complete citizen of 
 the state when he has first done all his duty by his family; Out of 
 
 * Eine Nachlese, p. 30 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIi,). 447 
 
 the well-being of the family properly springs the prosperity of states. 
 Only through my family am I directly bound to my Fatherland, which 
 to me is wholly different from any other state. Oh, I feel so power- 
 fully the sweetness of my vocation, to be the prop of my family, and 
 therefore it often plays over my passionate temperament with bliss- 
 ful soothing, in midst of my deepest weariness. It is the source of 
 an inexhaustible strength and latent power of spirit, power of sense, 
 and fulness of heart, and an inexpressible, inimitable precision of 
 character." * 
 
 The life in Leipzig was remarkable not only for progress in 
 knowledge, but for development of character. Erasmus had 
 elements which were greatly fitted to attract Frederick to 
 interests which else might have lain for a time unregarded. It is 
 clear that Erasmus was the wag of the family : in spite of his deli- 
 cacy of health he was full of fun and bright humorous banter, 
 which comes out in many of his letters. This, for example, is 
 from a letter directed from Hubertsburg to Frederick on the i8th 
 October 1794, and may be taken as characteristic in several 
 ways : — 
 
 " The medical science concerns me just thus far, that it has already 
 made a doctor of me, and indeed a water-doctor ; for Karl has sent 
 me only one letter, upon which his tears have flown like an ocean- 
 tide : and from that I have, as it were, seen and judged the whole 
 sickness, which I take it was the residuum of a very hot love-fever : 
 and this, as thou well knowest, is the new fashionable falling-sickness. 
 I sent him medicine, and in three days he was quite well again ; for 
 I had given a strong dose, and doubt not it must have been some- 
 what painful ; for the tear-stream had so intermixed with the ink, 
 that I was led to regard the case as far more serious than it really 
 was. . . . My medicine (to the honour of the gardener Roggenthen, be 
 it said) I had procured from the botanical garden at Griiningen, and 
 out of the hands of the four herb-wives Karoline, Sophie, Fritchen, and 
 Mutter, who were properly the heads there, because they possess the 
 best practical knowledge of herbs ! " t 
 
 After a further period at Wittenberg to finish his studies, of 
 which we have but little record, Frederick removed to Amstadt, 
 in Thuringia, where, as had been arranged, he was to prepare 
 himself for his father's profession under Kreis-Amtmann Just.| 
 Kreis-Amtmann Just, in whom Novalis found a kind friend, and 
 one well able to give him the necessary instruction, bears testi- 
 
 ♦ Eine Nachlese, p. 45. t Nachlese, pp. 95-6. 
 
 X Kreis-Amtmann literally means " Manager of a Circle," or District Manager. 
 
448 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 mony to the faithfulness with which Novalis applied himself to 
 his duties, and describes how he would re-write a dull business 
 letter over and over again till he had made it to his own mind 
 perfect, and how he would go into the salt mines and get the 
 foreman of each department to explain to him what was special 
 to the work or the machinery in his mine. Whatever he did he 
 did thoroughly, throwing his whole mind into it. Herr Just thus 
 writes : — 
 
 " From all Frederick Hardenberg sought to learn. In accordance 
 with his father's will, he patiently studied the merest trifles and pecul- 
 iarities which present themselves for observation in each particular salt- 
 mine, and devoted to this matter the utmost pains. . . . He was not 
 unfitted for the salt-mine by his great powers of thought and poetic as- 
 pirations, but the reverse. Many hours he spent in the mine with the 
 air of one confused, who dwells in another region, but still in his 
 inmost spirit he worked constantly with the possibility of practical 
 improvement always before him. Amongst other things that I re- 
 member, I may mention that he carefully collected meteorological 
 observations, with a view to the most practical results, and that he 
 studied the manufacture of the various salts in their technical, 
 chemical, and financial aspects. One does not ask what he had 
 particularly attained in this department. Of one who has died in 
 his apprenticeship, and has already shown such powers of observa- 
 tion and forecast, it is hard to say how much he might have accom- 
 plished in his years of mastership. Deeply was he mourned by the 
 Bergrath Henn, who, shortly after his death, said to me — ' Oh, you 
 know not what we have lost in him.' " 
 
 Novalis had already written some poems and songs which had 
 attracted attention and admiration in the circles to which his 
 friends, the Schlegels, had introduced them. It was very pro- 
 bably under the idea that literature and philosophy had little 
 chance ever to be aught else than a pleasant relief in the spare 
 hours of an elder son in so large a family, that he was led to 
 assume the pseudonym of Novalis, which is now so familiar to 
 all lovers of literature,' reserving his own as a grave official name 
 in connection with salt-mines. Be this as it may, the appoint- 
 ment at Amstadt led to the most decisive influence of his life. 
 
 " Shortly after his arrival in Amstadt," says Tieck, " when he was 
 at a country house nearbye, he met for the first time with Sophie von 
 Kuhn. The first glance of this beautiful and lovely form was de- 
 cisive for his whole hfe ; we may say, indeed, that the feeling with 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 449 
 
 which it penetrated and inspired him became the very essence of his 
 life. Sometimes in the face of a child we see an expression which 
 we are forced to call unearthly or celestial, it is so gracious (holdselig) 
 and spiritually beautiful ; and generally at the sight of these glorified 
 (verklarten) and semi-transparent countenances, a fear falls on us 
 that they are too tender and finely fashioned for this life ; that it is 
 Death or Immortality that shines forth with such expression from 
 these glancing eyes ; and too often a quick decay turns our fear into 
 a truth. And still more affecting are such figures when childhood 
 has been passed, and they have reached the bloom of maidenhood. 
 Every one that knew the beloved of our friend agree that no descrip- 
 tipn could surpass the grace and heavenly harmony in which she 
 moved, the beauty that shone in her, and the softness (Ruhrung) and 
 majesty that seemed to encircle her. Novalis became a poet as often 
 as he spoke of her. She had just closed her thirteenth year when 
 he came to know her. The spring and summer of 1795 was the 
 blooming-time of her life ; every hour that he could snatch from 
 business brought him to Griiningen ; and in the late autumn of that 
 same year he obtained the much-wished promise from Sophie's 
 parents." 
 
 It is somewhat odd to meet with proofs under Novalis's own 
 hand that the maiden, with all " her softness and majesty and 
 heavenly harmony," was in many respects a common-place little 
 German girl, with faults and defects that would naturally enough 
 only render her dearer to a lover, but could scarcely have been 
 hidden from strangers. Novalis noted down characteristics and 
 little anecdotes concerning her from time to time ; and these 
 notes his later editors have seen right to publish. She was 
 deeply attached to her mother, he tells us, and as proving that 
 too much admiration, as well as too much neglect, was painful 
 to her, states that his affection often seemed to be oppressive to 
 her ; that she delighted in all sorts of womanly work, as a Ger- 
 man maiden should ; that she did not seem to have the power 
 of original reflection (which, however, he is fain to think may 
 come to her in time, as it had come to him) ; and that she did 
 not like to be called " Du," thinking more of others than of 
 herself. But clearly, like Elaine, she was " sweet and service- 
 able," not thinking it beneath her to fill and re-fill the pipes of 
 her friends ; and when on her birth-day, she gave her betrothed 
 a present, it was not a ring, or an album, or a love-knot, but a little 
 German cake of her own baking, with a national flag and a 
 cockade stuck on the top, as he is careful to make record. 
 
 2 F 
 
4SO . FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 Novalis at this time — the spring and summer of 1795-r-was 
 not only happy, but active. He was very eager to learn every- 
 thing that he could, so that he might be able to fulfil with perfect 
 satisfaction the duties of the post that he expected would open 
 for him soon near to his father's house ; and if some shadow of 
 regret would arise in his mind at the thought of leaving Sophie 
 and Griiningen, it was speedily dispelled by the reflection that in a 
 short time she would rejoin him there. " The Disciples of Sais " 
 was almost written then, and the notes for " Heinrich von Ofter- 
 dingen " were made ; and, in the full flush of hope, he was just 
 about to leave Griiningen when Sophie was suddenly taken ill of 
 fever. The November days that he spent beside her, waiting 
 and watching for the appearance of favourable symptoms, first 
 brought him really acquainted with sorrow. But at length there 
 came a respite. Sophie was declared to have got a favourable 
 turn, and he left for Weissenfels, where he was to become auditor 
 in the department of which his father was director. During that 
 period he went and came between Griiningen and Weissenfels 
 constantly. 
 
 Already he had composed a number of spiritual songs, which 
 he proposed should form a portion of a Christian hymn-book, 
 which he intended to publish along with a collection of his 
 sermons — a species of composition to which he had paid some 
 attention. We can easily believe, however, that these were very 
 different from anything after the conventional order of pulpit 
 discourses. None of them, so far as we are aware, found pre- 
 servation in print, and very probably they were destroyed ; for 
 not even in the Nachlese, recently published from family papers, do 
 we find any reference to them. But we cannot doubt, from our 
 knowledge of Novalis's character, that they were practical in 
 their drift, if mystical sentiment may have stolen in ; and we 
 confess to some curiosity to see and to study these sermons of a 
 mystic. This plan of publication was not carried out. 
 
 But though Sophie's fever had been subdued, insidious effects 
 would seem to have remained — a pain in her side persistently 
 distressed her. When Novalis visited Griiningen in the spring 
 of 1796 he thought her quite well, and the doctors there did not 
 regard her pains as serious ; but when, in the summer, the skilled 
 surgeons of Jena saw her, they declared that a very dangerous 
 operation was the one chance that she now had of life. It is 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 451 
 
 very characteristic of her that she desired Novalis should know 
 nothing of it till it was over ; but the operation did not prove so 
 successful as had been hoped, and he was suddenly summoned 
 to Jena to see her, when a second operation had been decided 
 on. Though still but a child of fifteen, she bore all her pain 
 with such sweetness and Christian courage, that there can be 
 little doubt that Novalis, in some degree through her influence, 
 was now drawn back to reliance on the simple truths of Chris- 
 tianity, which for some time past he had been inclined to set 
 aside. He himself began the study of medicine in the hope of 
 finding some means of assuaging her pain, if not of curing her ; 
 but at length all hope of relief from human aid was given up, and 
 Sophie, with her parents, returned to Griiningen, where she died 
 on the 19th of March 1797, her birthday having fallen on the 17th 
 of the month. Novalis now passed through the pangs of such 
 sorrow as only such as he can know. We find record of it in 
 his letters and other writings ; it became, indeed, the one fact of 
 his life. 
 
 " Three weeks ago," he writes, " I saw that this was coming. It is 
 evening with me while yet I looked into the dawn. My sorrow is 
 unbounded like my love. For three years she has been my hourly 
 thought ; she alone has bound me to life, to the country, to my work. 
 With her I am cut off from everything. I hardly know where I am. 
 But it is evening, and it seems to me as if 1 also should soon pass 
 away ; and therefore I may well be calm, and willingly see cheerful and 
 kindly faces about me. I would live in the spirit in which she lived, 
 and be gentle and kindly like her. 
 
 "March 29. — How have your peaceful words refreshed the life- 
 weary ! Until now I have indeed been so. Only yesterday evening, 
 as I ended my letter to Carolinchen, a higher impulse for the first 
 time thrilled through me. Certainly I have devoted myself too much 
 TO this life, and for that a powerful corrective is indeed needful. For 
 Sophie I cannot mourn ; God has indeed dealt fatherly by her, and 
 has He not done according to my often-repeated prayer? Now 
 Sophie knows that the wish for her possession was the second in my 
 prayers for her ; for her consummation, she herself was the nearest 
 to my heart. If I mourn, it is because my fate bewilders me. But 
 can that be well .' A sudden change is always painful. It is certain 
 that I must forget my whole previous existence. I loved the earth so 
 much, I rejoiced in the lovely scenes that surrounded me. This is truly 
 hard to overcome. But should not this call to the invisible world— 
 this loving attraction to God, and to the best which humanity pos- 
 
452 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 sesses — should not this compensate for it ? Compensate ! It sounds 
 unfeeling. Sophie knows how I use the word. Yet all is still done 
 for her sake. Do you think God would be angry if I were to say to 
 him, ' Father, I will murmur no more — I will do all willingly. I love 
 Thee with my whole heart. But wilt Thou not give me Sophie 
 again.' She is certainly one of thy darling children, and so it must 
 be acceptable to Thee if I live wholly in her, and for ever long 
 after her.' 
 
 "You would have pity on me if I could tell you of the terrible 
 struggles of the past hours ; something of it is in Carolinchen's letter. 
 I do not deny that I am afraid of this terrible ossification of the heart 
 — this consumption of the soul. The predisposition to it is among 
 the tendencies of my constitution. Born weak, my reason has grown 
 disproportionately, and has, unmarked, driven the heart from its 
 rightful possessions. Sophie gave back to the heart its lost throne. 
 How easily could her death give back the crown to the usurper, who 
 then, in vengeance, would surely destroy the heart. Its indifferent 
 coldness I have often felt, but perhaps the invisible world, and its 
 power, which hitherto has slumbered in me, will yet save me. The 
 idea of God becomes dearer to me every day. How would a man 
 be enraptured and calmed if he had never heard of God, and he 
 were very unhappy, and some one made him acquainted with this 
 idea ! Thus I hope it will be with me. For this stage of existence 
 my love for the affairs of men is over. Cold duty steps into the 
 place of love. My business becomes simply official business only. 
 Everywhere, too, I find it too noisy. I shall draw back from it more 
 and more. So will the step into the grave become ever easier, and 
 the distance which divides me from it ever smaller. The sciences, 
 gain a higher interest for me ; for I study them with higher aims and 
 from a higher standpoint. In them, in contemplation of the unseen 
 world, in a few friends, and in my work, I will live until my last 
 breath, which, as it seems to me, is not so far off as I often fear.'' 
 
 The words with which he closes the first part oi Heinrich von. 
 Ofterdingen might be taken as the consecration of this sor- 
 row : — 
 
 " Founded in the kingdom of eternal life. 
 In love and peace is ended all the strife ; 
 For ever gone the dreary dream and smart, 
 Sophie lives ever, priestess of the heart ! " * 
 
 His famous " Hymns of the Night," with which most readers 
 
 * *' Gegriindet ist das Reich der Ewigkeit ; 
 In Lieb' und Frieden endigt sich der Streit, ; 
 Voriiber ging der lange Traum der Schmerzen ; 
 Sophie is ewig Priesterin der Herzen." 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG (NOVALIS). 453 
 
 may be assumed to be in some degree familiar, were, indeed, 
 the expression of the deepest experience : they were written, as 
 it were, by the side of an open 'grave, and only escape from the 
 taint of morbidity by the delicate fancy and imagination which are 
 enlisted in the service of the thought. But it cannot be said that 
 NovaUs thus cleansed his " bosom of the perilous stuff." He 
 nursed his sorrow, and doated on it ; and his letters of this time, 
 which have been so often translated and quoted, do not show him 
 in his healthiest mood. They are all in one strain, set to one 
 key. 
 
 He firmly believed at this time that he should follow Sophie 
 within the year; and surrendered himself to helpless brooding 
 melancholy. One of Sophie's sisters, going into the room which 
 she had occupied, was horrified to see Sophie, as she thought, 
 lying on the bed : she discovered afterwards that Friedrich had 
 been spending the morning in her room, as he often did, and 
 that he had arranged the clothes she used to wear upon the bed 
 so as to look like her recumbent figure. To intensify the gloom 
 and morbid prostration of this time, his brother Erasmus, who 
 had become a soldier in the beginning of January 1797, returned 
 home, sick, with no hope of recovery. As Tieck says, the house 
 of the parents was very sorrowful, pervaded as if by the abiding 
 presence of death. Erasmus passed hence on the 14th of 
 April. 
 
 When relief did come to Novalis, it was through a more and 
 more pronounced acceptance of the simple principles of Chris- 
 tianity. Herr Just dates his return to health and hope from the 
 first Easter after Sophie's death, on which day he had paid a visit 
 to her grave. Herr Just says, — 
 
 " He did not speak much of the thoughts which had come to him 
 there, but he came back with a new serenity shining in his eyes, and 
 a hush of peace over his demeanour, which showed that the festival 
 of the Resurrection had not been an unmarked day in his history. 
 That afternoon he heard the tidings of the death of his favourite 
 brother, Erasmus ; but the spiritual converse of the morning had left 
 him strong enough to endure this fresh shock with lofty faith and 
 courage. ' Be comforted,' he wrote to his brother Karl, ' Erasmus 
 has conquered. The flowers of the heavenly garland are untwined 
 here, to be woven there into an imperishable wreath.' " 
 
 If the reader will recall to mind what was said at the outset 
 
4S4 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 about the early grief of Novalis' father, the significance of the 
 following passage will be the better appreciated : — 
 
 " Between father and son a new and peculiar relationship was now 
 established. Both were alike, not only in their deep passionate sor- 
 row for a beloved one, but also in the effect of this sorrow upon their 
 characters. Both were led to a more thorough devotion to Christ, 
 and gave their souls, in the deepest inner consecration, to Christianity. 
 In the outward manifestation of it they differed from each other, and, 
 therefore, in some degree, failed to understand one another : the way 
 of the one often appeared to the other inverted and erring, whilst by 
 the father the renewing of his inner man was beheld to narrow itself 
 in the methodistic forms of the Moravians ; it was in the son a purely 
 inward and mystical experience, which could only express itself in 
 song. But in song it continually outflowed, free of sectarianism, of 
 all confessional sickliness and colouring, in deepest, most living de- 
 pendence on Jesus Christ." * 
 
 To both, however, there was the sense of a common loss ; and a 
 new and finer sympathy established between them, notwithstand- 
 ing these differences of religious apprehension. 
 
 Once again Novalis reached a point where he had to choose 
 between divided ways. Heaven to him, as with mother Mary, 
 lay at the end of a cross. In life there is no such pathetic con- 
 test as that between contending duties. To a soul at all noble, 
 or even truly upright, the relinquishment of pleasure and mere 
 self-gratification at the call of duty is never charged with lasting 
 pain. Our rank and file of the line are equal to that when called 
 away to fight in causes by no means always worthy. It is when 
 duties that seem alike to claim one, close-in and each demand, 
 on the instant, " yea or nay," and no " categorical imperative " 
 can be called to aid, that the deepest inward contest arises. 
 
 We have seen that Novalis had begun the study of medicine 
 in the hope of finding some cure or relief for Sophie. He was 
 so powerfully attracted by it, that, probably with some sense of 
 devotion to the memory of Sophie, as well as of self'development, 
 he now proposed that he should relinquish his mining studies and 
 take to medicine. Herr Just says : — 
 
 "Two studies now drew him in different directions — medicine and 
 mining ; to the first he was led by inclination, to the second by 
 duty. Already he had striven to master the prevailing system, and 
 
 * Nachlese, pp. 149-150. 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 4js 
 
 the newest discoveries in the healing art, desiring, if possible, to re- 
 duce them to a simple principle, and thereby be able to attain more 
 of certamty. But the wish of his father and the love of his family, 
 for which he, as the eldest son, was charged with a special responsi- 
 bility, determined that he should go to Frieburg, and finally prepare 
 himself for an appointment in the Saxon salt mines. He accordingly 
 went to Frieburg, December 1797. Here he assiduously studied 
 physics, chemistry, the higher mathematics, geology, metallurgy, and 
 the technical part, in fact, all the sciences which were taught in the 
 Academy of Mines. His special guide was Werner, whom he called 
 par excellence his teacher." 
 
 In Frieburg he soon recovered all his wonted cheerfulness, 
 and was eager for intellectual and sympathetic society, increasing 
 largely the number of his correspondents. In December 1797, 
 we find him writing : — 
 
 " I have learned to know Schelling. He has asked me to corre- 
 spond with him. This very day I mean to write to him. He has 
 pleased me vastly— a genuine universal tendency in him— true light 
 — power— from out the point in the Infinite. And he appears to have 
 much poetic sense." 
 
 Herr Just remarks that his heart demanded a female soul to 
 sympathise with him, and to cheer him. In Julia von Charpen- 
 tier, the daughter of a mine-inspector, he found all that his heart 
 yearned for. His love for her was not the passionate attraction 
 which he had felt for Sophie ; it was a quiet calm confidence, 
 but not, therefore, the less warm. His residence in Frieburg 
 had thus a double worth to him. 
 
 This relationship, and several other circumstances, now made 
 him desirous to lay out some clear plan for his future life. In 
 the province, namely, in Thuringia, he wished to live, and desired 
 much to obtain an appointment, which would afford him the 
 healthy interest of daily business, while yet he could devote some 
 time to his much-loved studies, science and poetry, and enjoy the 
 still delights of friendship and home-life. The influence of his 
 friends soon procured for him what was wanted. In the summer 
 of 1799, he went back to Weissenfels, and to the salt mines as 
 assessor. Thus his first wish was fulfilled, and life seemed to 
 expand with soft horizon before him. Very soon after his arrival 
 at Weissenfels, he formed two very important acquaintances — with 
 Tieck and with Reichardt. We have already seen the impression 
 
456 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 which Tieck and Novalis made upon each other, — the latter say- 
 ing that Tieck was as a new soul to him. We shall only now 
 quote from one of Novalis's letters to Tieck immediately after 
 the latter had returned home. 
 
 ' " ' Thy acquaintance,' he says, ' has opened a new book in my life. 
 As my Julie appears to possess all the best in me ; so thy thoughts 
 seem to touch all my thoughts into bloom and to be related to them. 
 .... Every word of thine I can wholly comprehend. Thou takest 
 in all parts and broadenest thy light over them, like to some subtle 
 odour that casts itself over all objects, and hangs upon them, as it 
 were a lovely flower." 
 
 It was at this time that he wrote " Belief," " Love," and his 
 romance of physical science — "The Scholar of Sais." 
 
 In August his wedding-day was fixed, his future dwelling- 
 house was taken, and he was in high hopes. He was full of pro- 
 jects in science, literature, philosophy, poetry. He had risen 
 above the morbid sentiment and fancy which, after the death of 
 Sophie, had threatened to paralyse his powers, and began to look 
 forward to noble work in the world. But this was not to be. 
 
 In the summer of 1800, disease proclaimed itself. The 
 unexpected, sorrowful death of a younger brother by drowning 
 shook him so, that a violent haemorrhage came on. In order to 
 procure good medical advice, he was accompanied to Dresden 
 by his parents and his two grown-up brothers, Carl and Anton, 
 and was visited afterwards at Weissenfels by Julie. It was dur- 
 ing these months of pain and solitude that he wrote : — 
 
 " What is an anxious hour, a night of pain, or even a dreary month, 
 compared with a long and happy eternity? Is then Julie happier 
 and safer with me than with God ? 
 
 ' In faith and trust, O Lord, I pray to move. 
 So shall I fear not for myself nor her I love.' 
 
 All anxiety comes from the devil, courage and joyfulness are from 
 God. 
 
 "To-day ( I St September) I have had a blessed day. Only some 
 slight returns of pain in the early hours ; the whole day afterwards 
 unspeakably quiet, strong, courageous, composed, Right heartily 
 have I thanked God for it. Alas ! for the sake of my good Julie and 
 my other dear ones also ! I see already a thousand fruits of these 
 dark hours. The love of my own people and of other good men, the 
 duties towards sickness and suffering, the lofty joy of inward health, 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENS ERG {NOVALIS). 457 
 
 the hearty dependence on God and Jesus, the comfort of a blameless 
 life, and a gentle and cheerful demeanour towards all other men. 
 This has all grown clearer and plainer to me. The Lord's will be 
 done, not mine. I may go on blood-spitting for some time, but I will 
 not allow myself to be over-anxious. Nothing is harder than to have 
 patience with one's self and to endure one's own weakness — God can 
 help us to do everything ! . . . . What may not help at once helps 
 in the future. Only you must not lose courage and faith. Put it 
 before yourself that you are a stranger and have it laid on you to 
 comfort yourself ! Would you not often say : ' Sir, do not be a child ! 
 Depression soon passes ; a man, and especially a Christian man, ought 
 to bear depression patiently. Do you call it Christianity to be small- 
 minded ? Be ashamed of yourself, grown man that you are !" 
 
 In spite of his sufferings he seemed bright, hopeful, and 
 eager as ever. That it was self-control, and not impassiveness, 
 which produced this effect is plain from the fact that the turning- 
 point of his illness, from which time his friends perceived him to 
 be doomed, was caused by the news of his little brother's death. 
 He w^ent home, and gradually declined during the winter. His 
 illness was peaceful and almost painless, except from increasing 
 exhaustion ; and the strange hopefulness which characterises 
 consumption made him fancy that his health was really improv- 
 ing, even when all around him knew that the end was coming. 
 His mind remained clear. He did not regard himself as in 
 the least danger, but only as faint and exhausted. His body, 
 he said, and not his soul was sick. He would not be idle. He 
 wrote and transacted salt-mining business when he was a little 
 better, and read studiously in his Bible, and his favourite Lavater 
 and Zinzendorff. Not long before he died his friend, Friedrich 
 Schlegel, came to see him, and he told him that since he had 
 been ill he had received quite new ideas on the subject of poetry, 
 and that quite other poems and songs than he had ever had, had 
 risen up within his mind. To the last he seemed bright, eager, 
 and full of life. On the morning of his death he seemed much as 
 usual, and after talking cheerfully for some time, asked his 
 brother, Karl, to play to him. Karl did so, and, lulled by the 
 music, he fell asleep amid the melodious sounds of the clavier. 
 He never woke again in this world. " Free and happy like a 
 bird of passage," he had taken his flight. 
 
 Novalis, we learn, was tall and slender, with brown hair, which 
 he wore unusually long, and hazel eyes, which shone with rich 
 
458 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 and varied expression as he talked on anything that interested 
 him. His countenance was ethereal and poetic. His hands and 
 feet were, as Tieck says, disproportionately large and without fine 
 character. There was great spirit and life about him. He was 
 never tired, and never knew a moment of weariness. " In speak- 
 ing he was lively and loud and strong in his gestures. Even in 
 oppressive or common-place company he was sure to find out 
 someone who could give him new knowledge that he could turn 
 to use, trivial though it might seem. His cheerful kindliness 
 and his frank manners made him a general favourite, and he was 
 so skilful in the art of conversation that men of lesser intellect 
 did not perceive how superior he was. Though in conversation 
 he delighted most in unfolding the deeps of the soul, and dwell- 
 ing on the mysteries of the invisible world, yet he was as mirthful 
 as a child, and would jest in free and artless gaiety, and heartily 
 give in to the humours of the company." 
 
 III. 
 
 It has thus, we trust, become apparent that, though Novalis 
 may well be cited as an example of the mystic, of the philo- 
 sophic dreamer, penetrating by some finer instinct to the hidden 
 relations of ideas and principles, this view of him by no means 
 exhausts his character or his significance. Nay, rather his origin- 
 ality, his depth, his subtle insight, and his refined vein of pervad- 
 ing poetic mysticism can only be properly apprehended and 
 understood when seen in strict relation to the daily devotion — 
 the dutiful practicality by which his life was so informed and 
 distinguished. He himself would have been the last to regard 
 as faithful to him any analysis which magnified the one element 
 at the expense of the other, because, critically, the problem was 
 thus rendered more simple. He would have urged that, however 
 hard it might be to detect the unity between his philosophy and 
 his practical life, an essential unity there was ; that the one was 
 at every point dependent on the other ; and that both in the 
 directest fashion of which they were susceptible were expressive 
 of the man. His practical life, he would have urged, was in 
 this respect more complete and connected than his philosophy. 
 
 Here, then, we have one of the very highest testimonies to the 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 459 
 
 compatibility of mysticism and speculative endeavour of the 
 most refined character, with the faithful performance of daily 
 duties thoroughly commonplace and trying in themselves. From 
 his more strictly scientific studies in view of his profession, from 
 the most prosaic details of his mining experiences, we can per- 
 ceive that he drew the richest suggestions for thought, and was 
 thus enabled to fill up many lacunx, which else had in all pro- 
 bability been left. In his later fragments, and " the Scholars of 
 Sais," this is more especially discernible, for in them illustrations 
 are more and more frequently drawn from the world of practical 
 scientific order to the world of mind and spirit. It is not at all 
 probable that, had he succeeded in his youthful desire to enter 
 the army, these later Fragments could have been so suggestive 
 as they are, so that his case presents in the most tangible 
 and efficient form an illustration of the unexpected benefits that 
 may arise to the philosophic aspirant from being compelled, at 
 the call of duty, into lines of activity, from which, by inclination, 
 he would at the moment have decisively retreated. The life of 
 Novalis — the most mystic and dreamy of later German thinkers 
 — has thus a lesson of the most valuable kind for the crowd of 
 ambitious students whose ideal of success is the attainment of 
 "lettered ease'' and corhplete escape from the encroachments 
 and vulgar interruptions of commonplace life. 
 
 And, further still, in Novalis we can see how the romantic idea 
 in its purer form is practically a regenerating one. It may claim 
 to set before the mind and heart an unselfish purpose — a noble 
 self-sacrifice, which may fulfil itself in the narrowest circle of the 
 family, thence expanding into wider and wider circles, bringing 
 all, however, into complete harmony ; and seeking, so far as it 
 concerns itself with art, for the most expressive symbol of this 
 relationship. Family, the Church, the State, the more expansive 
 circle of human brotherhood, are thus held in relation in the 
 mind of the true romanticist, who can only be said to have ap- 
 proached to success when his representation of life is disinterested- 
 ly inclusive of them all. The great errors of the romanticists, 
 as we shall hereafter see, were excesses into which they were 
 tempted by re-action against excesses of their rivals — the class- 
 icists ; the one sought to make art directly interpretative of 
 ideas, that in their abstractness froze and impeded the fluid 
 movements of creative impulse ; they, in fact, aimed at too 
 
46o PRIEDRFCH VON HARDENBERG {NOVAUS). 
 
 much, and did injury to form by their determination to present 
 too wide a surface ; while again the other erred in subjecting 
 matter to form, and initiating a series of false rules which they 
 outraged in the very act of applying them.* But romanticism, 
 as truly conceived, is more fitted to adapt from classicism than 
 classicism is fitted to adapt from it; and the great prevailing 
 literatures of the present century are distinctly romantic. What 
 Novalis so aptly said of Shakespeare may be said, without much 
 modification, of all the literature which regards him as an ori- 
 ginator and influence, and how inclusive that is those who know 
 most of literature know best. Here are Novalis's words : — 
 
 '' In Shakespeare throughout poetry interchanges with the unpo- 
 etical, harmony with disharmony, the common, low, and ugly with the 
 romantic higher beauty, the actual with the invented, the pedantic 
 and unnatural of poetry, and in the Greek drama the ruin is from an 
 opposite cause. Shakespeare's works and poems, like all the prose 
 of Boccaccio and Cervantes, are well-founded, elegant, neat, unpe- 
 dantic, and complete." 
 
 Novalis's idea of the relation of art to life is most admirably 
 summed up in his axiom, " The artist stands to the man as the 
 statue to the pedestal." And with beautiful consistency he finds 
 that, as the completion of the individual character and life can 
 only be obtained through the family, so the completion of the 
 artistic life can only be realised through the nation and its com- 
 mon sentiment and aspiration. Here he is at one with Herder 
 in his principle of nationality, with its cosmopolitan breadth and 
 fullness. These ideas Novalis has beautifully embodied in a 
 series of later axioms, which were included in the last volume of 
 his works, and are as yet but little known in England ; and which 
 have the added value of sincere autobiographic expression; 
 since, as we have seen, no man did ever more faithfully submit 
 his mind and heart to the ideal of duty as figured in the claims 
 of family : — 
 
 " Republicanism is the fluidum deferens of youth. Where young 
 people are, there is a republic." 
 
 " To live in a family — under thorough domestic regulation — is to 
 recognise a monarch." 
 
 " A prince without family spirit is no monarch.'' 
 
 * For example, in the very law of the unity of time in the drama, when events which were 
 presumed to occupy four and twenty hours, were on the stage crowded into two. 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVA LIS). 461 
 
 " The completed State is an aggregate of families ; but it is in- 
 complete in the sense of allowing freedom to the action of the 
 family sphere which anticipates it and supports it. The most com- 
 plete State may thus be the most incomplete nation, and vice versa. 
 
 " It is only thus that a sphere can be found for that magical 
 element of government — which is absolute Love. 
 
 " A cynic, and a king without it, are merely titled persons." 
 
 We may still further justify our position by translating some 
 of the earlier fragments, which, so far as we are aware, have not 
 hitherto been presented in English dress — 
 
 " Many people cling to Nature because, like spoilt children, they 
 are afraid of their father, and run to their mother for refuge. 
 
 " Innocence and ignorance are sisters ; but there are noble and base 
 sisters. Base innocence and ignorance are mortal ; they have fair 
 faces, but are unmeaning and unchangeable. The faces of the others 
 shine forever with the light of Paradise. Both dwell in Heaven and 
 visit only the noblest and most tried of men. 
 
 " Where children are there is a golden age. 
 
 " The common fables with their morals are like the pictures, under 
 which the draughtsman writes what the meaning must be. By Lessing 
 an epigram is often placed under the fable, and hence it is wel- 
 come. 
 
 " All absolute feeling is religious. 
 
 " Vei-y much in a writing must be local and temporal as in the Old 
 Testament. In the gospel lies the foundation of a more artistic and 
 higher gospel. 
 
 " Philosophy is the poem of the understanding. It is the highest 
 spring of which the understanding by itself is capable. Without 
 Philosophy the man remains divided in his actual life. He is two 
 men — a creature of understanding —and a Poet. Without philosophy 
 incomplete poet, without philosophy incomplete thinker or judge. 
 
 " Death is the romantic principle of our life. 
 
 " History is a great anecdote. An anecdote is a historical element 
 — a historical molecule or epigram. A history in anecdote — something 
 similar Voltaire has given— is one of the highest and most interesting 
 works of art. 
 
 " In all true enthusiasm and mysticism higher powers have worked. 
 
 " The life of a genuine canonical man must be throughout symboli- 
 cal. 
 
 " Every man has his own language. Language is the expression of 
 spirit. The genuine expression makes the clear idea. So soon only 
 as one has the right name, has he surely the clear idea. 
 
 " With a compass set to the east, one goes safely over all seas— with 
 
462 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 a sound practical way of thinking, without diffuseness, over-subtlety, 
 one goes easily through the whole world." 
 
 Novalis is thus, more than any of his compeers, the efficient 
 interpreter of romanticism, not in the field of art-product proper, 
 but in the representation of the necessary unity and harmony that 
 must exist between the man and his work, between the artist and 
 the citizen, the individual and the nation in its various aspects. 
 Classic art, especially as more lately exhibited, would divorce the 
 artist from the man, just at the point where the ethical element 
 is most assertive, and declare that there is really no dependence 
 of the one upon the other. It would initiate and justify a kind 
 of artificial exercise of the imaginative faculties upon a world 
 that remains undisturbed, and even untouched by any of the 
 strife and disorder of the real world in which we live and move ; 
 and would thus present us with an art-pour-art, which should 
 supply all that might thus be held as lacking to the completeness 
 of human nature. Novalis can have no value for such. His life 
 is an abiding protest against such a theory of art and life. What 
 I live and feel and create is in the last result of value only as I 
 live and feel and create in harmony with what is most essential 
 in the moral and spiritual being of man. He would have said 
 with Kant, " two things move me to wonder, the starry system 
 without and the conscience within.'' Little dogmatic as Novalis 
 was, it is this incessant recognition of the nexus between the 
 wonders of the world without and the wonders of the world 
 within, as being sealed in the moral nature of man, that gives 
 him that strong hold upon the religious consciousness ; and un- 
 doubtedly a strong hold he has there. The mystic borderland 
 on which our instinctive feelings of worship and wonder dimly 
 play, as they pass from the half-sensible perception of the gran- 
 deur and overwhelming greatness of the visible universe to the 
 consciousness of the yet more ineffable greatness of man's soul, has 
 never perhaps been uttered with more sincerity of refinement, 
 more of artistic delicacy or unaffected comprehensiveness. In 
 his hymns he sets into simple, fervid, yet familiar language the 
 dim images that hover uncertainly before the religious sense, but 
 refuse to take definite form, and are as little embodied in doc- 
 trinal hymns as they are in harshly-reasoned sermons. Novalis 
 passes inward to the human and universal of religious experience, 
 because he is faithfully recording his own sorrow, struggle, joy. 
 
FRIED RICH VON HARDENBERG (NOVALIS). 463 
 
 and victory. His friend Heinrich Kurz has discerningly noted 
 this point : — 
 
 " It is particularly Novalis's ' Spiritual Songs ' in which his proper 
 talent for the beautiful appears, and through which he also exercised 
 the most powerful influence upon the development of literature. In 
 these songs Christian devotion speaks in the purest and most worthy 
 form ; for, if it has its ground in a deep mystical comprehension, it is 
 wide apart from any special form, which would give it a pertinence 
 for any particular church view. In this it is unlike the spiritual songs 
 of other Romanticists, in especial those of Schlegel. ... In these songs 
 of Hardenberg the common Christian element is so pervasive that 
 they are alike suited for all confessions." * 
 
 It is abundantly evident, from the documents supplied in the 
 Fourth Chapter of " Eine Nachlese," that most erroneous and 
 unjust deductions have been drawn from the presence of the 
 two songs to the Virgin Mary among the " Spiritual Songs " 
 in the first edition of the collected writings edited by Tieck. 
 Novalis has thus been made to give a kind of poetical, if not 
 dogmatic countenance, which certainly he never rendered. Herr 
 Just, who well knew Novalis's later sentiments on religious as 
 well as on other matters, was intensely surprised at this, and took 
 a great deal of pains to put the matter in a true light, but it was 
 left for the editor of " Eine Nachlese " to supply the lapses. 
 We read : — " It was entirely Tieck's error that in the first editions 
 the two songs to the Virgin Mary were given as ' Geistliche 
 Lieder ; ' for Novalis wrote them as dramatic poems to be in- 
 cluded in the Second Part of ' Heinrich von Ofterdingen,' which, 
 as readers know, remains a fragment." 
 
 Great and grave fault is thus found with Tieck for having 
 departed from the classification which Novalis's own manuscripts 
 clearly directed — manuscripts which it is quite certain that Tieck 
 had before him. Not only so ; he actually transferred from one 
 part to another. The song, " Das Grab steht unter Wilden Hil- 
 den," he lifted out of the first part of " Heinrich," and placed 
 amongst the " Spiritual Songs " — a song which as clearly repre- 
 sents the voice of the Crusader, as the " Songs to Mary " repre- 
 sent the voice of the Pilgrims to Loretto. On a separate leaf, on 
 which the plan of the second part of " Heinrich von Ofterdingen " 
 was sketched, we read as follows •.— 
 
 * Nachlese, pp. 165-6. 
 
464 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 " Heinrich comes to Italy, which was shattered by war ; he puts 
 himself as general at the head of the deserters. All the elements of 
 war play in poetic colours. A great war hke a duel, throughout noble, 
 human. War-songs. In Pisa Heinrich finds the son of Kaiser 
 Frederick the Second. He becomes his truest friend. Afterwards 
 he comes to Loretto. Songs to Mary." 
 
 The contents of this manuscript page, which is found clearly 
 written in Novalis's own hand, stands thus curtailed in the first 
 edition of the writings: "Also to Loretto comes he. More 
 songs shall here follow." 
 
 Moreover, Novalis himself had given a list of the " Spiritual 
 Songs" to Frederick Schlegel on the 20th January 1800, and the 
 " Songs to Mary " were not included in it, though they were 
 added to the list in Tieck's edition, no doubt by Tieck. The 
 compiler of " Eine Nachlese " does not hesitate to hint that at 
 the time — that is, in the summer of 1 802 — Tieck had the liveliest 
 interest in trying to make Novalis out a Roman Catholic ; for he 
 himself was at that time in Karlsbad, and in communication 
 with spiritual advisers of the Roman Church. However this 
 may be, it is abundantly proved that Tieck did not confine him- 
 self, as he ought to have done, to the task of simple editorship, 
 but took great and unwarrantable liberty with the writings com- 
 mitted to his trust ; and the very least that can be said is that 
 these circumstances reflect as little credit on his critical insight 
 as on his editorial conscientiousness. The editor of " Eine 
 Nachlese " also gives many facts in connection with the " Europe 
 oder die Christenheit," which go far to show that the circum- 
 stances under which it was written relieve it from many of the 
 inferences which have been drawn from it, declaring that it is 
 " no other than a youthful historical study.'' 
 
 " Death," said Novalis, in one of his Fragments, " is the 
 romance of life." That is a sentiment which lies at the root of 
 romantic and modem poetry, distinguishing it directly from the 
 classical, which was opposed to indefinite horizons, and to feelings 
 that could not be harmonised with simple unity of outline. 
 
 We find Frederick Schlegel writing to him : — 
 
 " I agree with you that Christianity is the religion of the future, as 
 that of the Greeks is the religion of the past, already itself become 
 old. But is it not still more a religion of death, as the classical was 
 a religion of life ? It strikes me that I find admirable illustration of 
 
FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG {NOV ALTS). 465 
 
 this in thy printed works, and beUeve it will yet more appear when 
 thou hast brought into a focus all the thoughts thou hast upon Chris- 
 tianity. I believe thou art the first man of our time who has the art- 
 sense for death." 
 
 But the man who should infer from this that Novalis was 
 merely mystical and gloomy, would gravely err. The editor of 
 " Eine Nachlese " has well said : — 
 
 " In Hardenberg's whole nature lay, indeed, a deep earnest, but no 
 melancholy ; if we find it there, it is rather the result of his actual 
 sorrow, than a natural melancholy. If we accept this temporary 
 diseased longing after death, as the foundation of the character of a 
 man who died young, before he had attained to his full development, 
 we commit an error, and the careful reader of this later legacy of his 
 writings will perceive the superficiality of such deliverances as this : — 
 ' He was a ghost seer this — a mere mad visionary enthusiast.' " * 
 
 The peculiar practicality of his mind and aims is yet more re- 
 markable than his great gifts of thought. He was perfectly at 
 home among men of business, and was admired by all his asso- 
 ciates in the mines for quite other qualites than literary ones. 
 He himself forcibly urged the wholly subordinate character of his 
 literary produce. 
 
 Writing once to his friend Just, he said : — 
 
 " Authorship is a will o' wisp. You will judge me more rightly after 
 the more important, the practical life. If I am good, useful, active, 
 loving, and true, my writings you may let pass as unuseful, harsh,, 
 hard dregs. Writings of undistinguished and ambitious men are 
 pitiful if they are soon read and soon forgotten. I handle my author- 
 ship as a means of culture (Bildungsmittel). By carefulness I learn 
 something through thinking and elaborating, and that is all that I de- 
 sire from it. If, over and above this, there comes the praise of a 
 prudent friend, my expectations are more than fulfilled." 
 
 The editor of " Eine Nachlese " supplements this deliberate 
 expression by another record to this effect : — 
 
 " NovaUs laid little weight upon the value of his manuscripts : com- 
 monly speaking to his friends in this spirit : ' Literary production is 
 a secondary thing, a means of culture : the chief matter is the prac- 
 tical Ufe. For complete culture we must ascend many steps. As 
 tutor, as professor, as hard worker, we may attain to this as well as by 
 literary labours." 
 
 * Nachlese, p. 148. 
 ■ 2 G 
 
466 FRIEDRICH VON HARDENRERG {NOVALIS). 
 
 He was a very severe critic of his own works, and was apt to 
 qualify the praise awarded to them by others. He said, for in- 
 instance, of " Heinrich von Ofterdingen," when Schelling had 
 written in high terms of it : " It is still too harsh, too hard ; it 
 fails in middle tints." 
 
 Novalis, though a faithful critic of his own works did not find 
 their defects to lie in the same direction as Mr Carlyle, who un- 
 hesitatingly summed them up in a soft diffusiveness and excess of 
 middle-tint. Other critics may judge differently, and find the 
 truth to lie somewhere between the two estimates. But even Mr 
 Carlyle would admit that Novalis could be concentrated and 
 direct enough sometimes as in this most suggestive fragment, out 
 of which many essays might be easily drawn : — 
 
 " The ideal of morality can have no rival more dangerous than 
 the ideal of highest strength or of most powerful life, which has like- 
 wise been named (and very falsely as was there intended) the ideal 
 of poetic greatness. It is the highest attainment of the savage ; and 
 it has, in these times, gained many converts, particularly among the 
 greatest weaklings. Through this ideal, man becomes merely a Beast- 
 Spirit. Something mixed, whose brutal wit, however, has a brutal 
 power of attraction for the brutal." 
 
 Yery characteristic is the reply of the father to a letter of the 
 Minister von Hardenberg, in which he offered to use his in- 
 fluence to procure for one of his sons a post in the Russian 
 service : — 
 
 " I have more sons than I have fortune, to establish each of them 
 satisfactorily, and a poor country-gentleman's portion is a miserable 
 thing. But, nevertheless, the old Freiherr is more loveable to me than 
 the new baked Graf." , 
 
 As his life was by no means that of the recluse, which the typi- 
 cal mystic is too often deemed to be, so neither are his writings 
 exhausted by mysticism. Considering that he died so young, 
 and lived so busy and absorbed a life, we have in his poems and 
 songs a remarkable width and range ; from ordinary love songs 
 and drinking songs to description suffused by sentiment he passes 
 easily. This aspect of Novalis will seem to not a few somewhat 
 strange, but it might be established by many characteristic trans- 
 lations had we the space, or were it necessary to our present 
 plan. 
 
THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 GERMAN LITERATURE. 
 
Die achte Kunst steht in nahem Zusammenhange mit den Leben, mit dem 
 Staate, mit dem Volksthume. Sie bleibt also vom stroma der Geschichte nicht 
 unberuhrt ; grosse politische Wandlungen der Volker, grosse neue Gedanken 
 in der Wissenschaft, grosse Fortschritte der allegemein Kultur wirken 
 allmachtig auf die Kunst ein. — Kinkel, Modern Klassiker, Zweiter Band, 
 P- 139- 
 
Heine says of the Romantic movement that it " was necessary 
 as a wholesome reaction against the horrible and colossal mate- 
 rialism that had grown up, and had overshadowed all spiritual 
 glory." He is, however, inclined to view it merely in its more 
 developed and reactionary phases ; and it is doing him no injus- 
 tice to say that his type of mind tempted him rather to exhibit 
 the weakness that was inherent in its more definite and ambi- 
 tious later purposes, than to trace it cautiously to its origin, and 
 to discover the strong elements it had silently contributed to 
 literature. His " Romantische Schule," which was so often 
 refurbished and elaborated, is more picturesque than penetrat- 
 ingly philosophical though his characterizations of individual 
 works and of individual men are informed by the finest insight 
 and are often marvellous for apt epithet and fine illustration. 
 Where he admired, he admired thoroughly ; and, in spite of his 
 cjmical and satirical turn, which encouraged an unsatisfactory 
 indirectness in not a little of his writing, he is often a good deal 
 of a hero-worshipper. 
 
 But Heine's way of dealing with, and of accounting for, such 
 a movement, satisfactory as it seems at first sight, labours under 
 one great disadvantage. It isolates the phenomena, and sets 
 aside too harshly the law of historical development. " One 
 thing is set over against another, and there is nothing single or 
 separate,'' as was said by a quaint and suggestive old English 
 author. No great movement springs forth, like Minerva, full 
 armed at once. It is prepared for. Seeds are sown before the 
 ripe fruit can appear. And the ground is often kept moist and 
 green by the movement of unseen waters. So it was with 
 Romanticism in Germany. The birth of the Romantic School, 
 properly so called, marked the climax of development ; and no 
 sooner did it become a recognised institution, with a special and 
 defined purpose, than it exhibited symptoms of sickliness and 
 decline. The mistake is to confuse the rise of the Romantic 
 School with the birth of Romanticism. The thing was long pre- 
 
470 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 sent as an element, doing its work silently, before it obtained 
 the high-sounding name which is now in many cases a mere 
 cant-word of criticism, and used with a reference much too gene- 
 ral and vague. To the more specific question, " What was the 
 Romantic School in Germany ? " Heine answers : " It was 
 nothing else than the reawakening of the poetry of the middle 
 ages, as it had been manifested in song, in painting and sculp- 
 ture, in art and life. But this poetry sprung directly from 
 Christianity ; it was a passion-flower that had its roots in the 
 blood of Christ. I know not whether the melancholy flower, 
 which we in Germany call the passion flower, bears the same 
 name in France. ... It is that peculiar miscoloured flower, in 
 whose calix we behold the semblance of that torture- instrument 
 by which the crucifixion of Christ was accomplished — a flower 
 which throughout is not hateful but only ghostly ; whose very 
 appearance, moreover, stirs a kind of horrible pleasure in our 
 souls, like the sweet spasmodic feelings which spring out of pain 
 itself In such respect was this flower the most proper symbol 
 for Christianity, for this most awful fascination that resides even 
 in the pleasure of pain." 
 
 And elsewhere he speaks of the phantasy that made " its rest- 
 less efforts to represent the unrepresentable in sensible pictures ; 
 for this end fabricating its colossal extravagances, heaping 
 Pelion upon Ossa, Parcival on Titurel, that it might reach to 
 heaven." And he goes on to add : " But art is only the mirror 
 of life ; and as Catholicism had died out of life, so also it faded 
 and died out of art." * 
 
 The Romantic School, as Heine says, unfortunately allied 
 itself with Roman Catholicism. The medisevalism which it 
 affected proved too much for it, and like the ivy round the oak, 
 impeding free growth, finally strangled it. But romanticism 
 remained — a vital and necessary expression of the sentiment and 
 the phantasy which in all times and ages attests man a child of 
 the infinite, against the cold and comfortless deliverance of the 
 unrestrained reason. We can trace it, like a half-hidden 
 brooklet, running through the whole history of German literature, 
 from the first decisive awakening under Lessing, down through 
 Winckelmann even and Herder ; calmly recovering itself after 
 the rapids in which it was tossed through the collapse of the 
 
 * Komantische Schule, p. 27. 
 
GERMAN LITER A TURE. 47 1 
 
 "Romantic School;" qualifying and imparting a depth and 
 colour to Goethe's later work, if sometimes, happily or unhappily, 
 it militated against the lucidity of form at which he aimed ; giv- 
 ing warmth and elevation also to the works of Schiller; and 
 later, as a constituent in the forces that' operated in the wars 
 of Independence, uniting the patriotic idea with true poetic senti- 
 ment ; and so making it doubly efficient We shall endeavour 
 to illustrate these points in somewhat more of detail ; though 
 only a suggestion of the subject, which would require a volume 
 for its full elucidation, can be touched on here. 
 
 It has been too much the fashion to regard Winckelmann 
 merely as the antiquarian — the cold and pedantic critic and 
 restorer of Greek art. But he was more than this. His great 
 divining and reconstructive power alone would justify the asser- 
 tion ; and when we consider the limited field of originals with 
 which he could deal then, compared with what we have now, his 
 prescience is really wonderful. He had not seen those magnificent 
 examples of Greek art which have, since then, fortunately been 
 disentombed and presented to us. Most of those serene and stately 
 figures, ascribed to the age of Phidias, he had not looked upon ; 
 and he had in great part to illustrate his thoughts by reference to 
 copies, imitations, and specimens of later Roman art. Perhaps 
 to this, though it was unfavourable to the completeness and 
 exactness of his criticism, was in great part due his constant 
 return on life itself, and the beauty that he found in living forms. 
 Even for him the lovely and flawless lines fixed in the marble are 
 constantly indicative of the conditions under which alone they 
 could have been produced. From them he passes to the state 
 of society which made them possible. But he does not rest 
 even there. As the noblest forms which the age beheld only 
 pointed him to a still more perfect and spiritual ideal ; so the 
 consideration of social conditions only led him to the concep- 
 tion of a yet more perfectly-harmonised social life. We have 
 seen how he traced to the humanity which the Greeks showed 
 in their warfare, as compared with the Romans, a peculiar refine- 
 ment and humanity in their art. And in the Greek life itself, it 
 is very noticeable, that he finds the conscious pursuit of artistic 
 beauty, in certain directions, was apt to defeat itself, inasmuch 
 as all the women who in pregnancy were taken to look on certain 
 statues did not beget beautiful sons. His eye, though exercised 
 
472 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 by dwelling daily on the loveliest forms then known to the world, 
 returned with delight to the realm of reality. It is only from 
 this point of view that we can rightly comprehend the signifi- 
 cance of his assertion, that he " has known many young men 
 more beautiful than Guide's archangel ; " and the necessity 
 under which he lay for that kind of unsexual passionate attach- 
 ment to younger men, which imparts such a romantic colour to 
 the otherwise calm and self-restrained tenor of his life. 
 
 Thus we find in Winckelmann a remarkable and almost unique 
 combination. A still delight and satisfaction in the contempla- 
 tion of these Greek sculptures, and a power of intuitively realising 
 their nobler intentions, along with a profound and deeply spiritual 
 perception of the highest beauty and the wider purpose which may 
 be said completely to express itself only in the ideal of humanity. 
 This is the source of what will often strike the more logical 
 mind as contradictions in Winckelmann, as indeed it did strike 
 Lessing. It is true, that he finds so much that speaks directly 
 to his own sense of harmonious form, that he is anxious to make 
 Greek art cover more of this spiritual ideal that is ever present 
 with him, than it can strictly be held to cover. And how does 
 he manage this ? Simply by importing into it an element which 
 is, in essence, romantic. He will allegorise these Greek forms, 
 projecting over them the spiritual burden of the whole race. 
 The universal meaning that should be present in the mind of 
 the spectator shall impart a warmth and immediateness, which 
 the cold and remote purity generally held to be inseparable from 
 sculpture, are inadequate to convey or to preserve. Little as 
 Winckelmann knew of the inward spiritual conflicts which stamp 
 the rarer forms of Christian experience, and impart a sense of 
 struggle to all earnest Christian art, yet he is distinctively Chris- 
 tian and romantic in his serious conviction that the God in whom 
 resides the unity and perfection of beauty, is a living Being, 
 unsensuous in himself, spiritual, perfect, and the source of all 
 perfection. Let the reader look back to the passage we have 
 quoted from the " History of Greek Art," at p. 128, and he will, 
 we think, be compelled to acknowledge this much. " The high- 
 est beauty is in God, and our conception of human beauty 
 becomes more and more perfect as it is realised in harmony with 
 that highest existence that is conceived by us as that unity and 
 individuality that we distinguish from matter. This idea of 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 473 
 
 beauty is like an essence extracted from matter by great heat : 
 it seeks to beget unto itself a creature formed after the like- 
 ness of the first rational creature, formed in the mind of the 
 Divinity.'' 
 
 Now, this idea of beauty and of its source is distinctly not 
 Greek, any more than is the idea of allegory. The sculpture is 
 to bear the weight of an idea, a thought, which can find no 
 perfect and self-consistent centre apart from the one God in 
 whom lies its unity. We may represent it ; but only in fleeting, 
 imperfect forms and symbols. The representation of it will be 
 the more effective, the less that perfection of form is in itself 
 aimed at. This, as we have said, is the source of the confused, 
 and what we may call incomplete and wistfully-unsatisfied search- 
 ing that may be said to meet one to the end in the writings of 
 Winckelmann. And it is also well worthy of notice that, though 
 the French classical school derived its leading ideas from the 
 narrower aspect of Winckelmann's teaching, the severest critics 
 of Winckelmann have been French critics, who clearly discerned 
 that his higher, if less formidable doctrine was so far unfavourable 
 to their tendencies. 
 
 Hegel has well developed, as the leading idea of classic art, 
 the happy harmony or intimate union of the spiritual with the 
 sensuous element. In virtue of this absolute identification, he 
 goes on, spirit does not and cannot appear under its infinite 
 form, in classic art. The inner principle can at no point retire 
 into itself as pure spirit, free from the tie of corporeal existence. 
 Moreover, the objective and outer element in which spirit reveals 
 itself, is here wholly definite and particular ; and therefore the 
 free spirit, as thus exhibited, can be no more than the definite 
 and independent spiritual individuality in its natural form. 
 Man is thus the true centre of classic beauty. Recognising nothing 
 above himself, he subdues all nature to himself : it has signifi- 
 cance only in relation to him. He decisively rejects any intru- 
 sion of the symbolic or allegoric idea proper. The plurality 
 which obtains in the divine world of the Greeks forms a special 
 circle of divinities, each of which is in itself a true individual 
 and in nowise an allegorical being. Each god, while possessing 
 a special characteristic, is a complete totality, having his unity 
 in himself, whilst he combines in himself the distinctive qualities 
 of the other divinities.* 
 
 * jEsthetik Th. 2, Absch. 4. 
 
474 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 And it has been well said that Hegel is here logically develop- 
 ing and illustrating the ideas which struggled loosely and imper- 
 fectly through the writings of Winckelmann. 
 
 Greek art, in a word, will recognise nothing higher than itself ; 
 herein lies its unity, its repose. The gods of Greek worship 
 more and more became mere human shapes, kindred with that 
 perfection of physical form, and serene and unimpeded, because 
 natural mental development which every Greek seriously aimed 
 at attaining. The feeling of infinite distance of elevation and 
 purity was unknown to them. Hence their lack of awe : all the 
 emotions of fear and inward disturbance, are unknown to them. 
 The idea of God as infinite personality, if admitted into art at 
 all, at once communicates to it a sense of a beauty unrepresent- 
 able, of mystery that lies beyond expression, and from this pro- 
 ceeds the sense of ineffable longing and aspiration which marks 
 all true Christian art. Like St Paul, it has not fully attained nor 
 is as yet perfect ; and this penetrating and insistent aspiration 
 imparts to art a religious sentiment, and thus unites it with real 
 life in its earnest longing and desire to rise above all the 
 entanglements of the senses. Greek art never attained this; it 
 appeared to attain a sfelf-respecting repose only by limiting the 
 field of expression and admitting nothing that conflicted with its 
 central motive ; romantic art secures it by opening up illimitable 
 horizons, and securing a unity and repose that belong to spirit 
 alone. 
 
 It is therefore with some injustice that Winckelmann has by 
 many been held only to favour the narrow pseudo-classicahsm, 
 which contents itself with a merely dry and colourless imitation 
 of ancient works ; and to have no glimpse beyond this. It is 
 true that he drove away the dust which a perverse pedantry had 
 gathered round these Greek forms ; and what more natural 
 than that his eyes should be possessed, while he looked, by the 
 purity, the simplicity, and repose of the lines thus disclosed. 
 But he always saw beyond this ; and saw the more clearly the 
 longer that he lived. He became more and more convinced 
 that the loftier productions of Greek art completely expressed 
 the life out of which they proceeded — that the calm repose and 
 serene self-sufficiency of that life were there unfolded with such 
 perfect balance between content and form, as made them the 
 permanent and perfect ensamples of plastic art in their own order. 
 
GERMAN LITER A TURE. 47 S 
 
 But, alongside of this, there runs the clearest intimation of the 
 existence of a yet higher beauty ; and the recognition of this, in 
 combination with his constant reference to the beauty of living 
 form, as he beheld it in many young men whom he had seen, 
 led, it may be at first so far insensibly, to that idea of develop- 
 nient — the central principle of which was an art representative, 
 if not fully expressive, of the whole of humafiity. It is very 
 significant in this light to find Mengs, shortly before that dif- 
 ference arose with Winckelmann, writing to a friend, that he was 
 sorry to think Winckelmann was losing much of his old clearness, 
 becoming, in fact, oftentimes unintelligible to him; as, indeed, we 
 can readily believe, if Winckelmann had begun to talk of the 
 highest beauty being found only in God, to Mengs or to Oeser 
 either. And thus we can easily understand how more and more, 
 as this idea advanced to greater clearness, he would necessarily 
 become less and less favourably disposed towards cold copies of 
 antique art. 
 
 Looked at from this point of view, there can be no doubt that 
 Winckelmann cleared the way for Herder's christianised human- 
 ism. Herder also drew some of his first and most influential 
 inspirations from Homer and the Greek dramatists; and these, in 
 his keenly romantic and deeply human imagination, were quick 
 to produce impressions that were in essence romantic, as he 
 himself has told us. And he has also set on record his convic- 
 tion of the clear and direct manner in which Winckelmann had 
 penetrated to the principles of the highest beauty, which Herder 
 held had imparted to his writings a far deeper and more perma- 
 nent value than any the most skilful dialectic could have given 
 to them. Besides what he has to say on this head to Scheffner 
 and others, in his correspondence, he has given exquisite musi- 
 cal utterance to it in his ode on Winckelmann's death — which is 
 quick with sympathetic but discerning pathos. There he calls 
 him the "Son of Beauty;"* and certainly Herder does not 
 mean by that merely physical beauty, or only external beauty of 
 form. 
 
 Lessing when, in the Laocoon, he set about clearing-up what 
 he regarded as the looseness and confusion of Winckelmann's 
 theory of the ends that classic art proposes to itself, first empties 
 the idea of beauty of any moral or spiritual element — the 
 
 * Sohn der Schonheit. 
 
476 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 intrusion of which into Winckelmann's definition had been the 
 cause of the whole difficulty — reduces it, in fact, to mere physi- 
 cal beauty, and proceeds to reintroduce in another form the 
 very confusion of which he has complained. He goes on to 
 oppose truth as the end or object of science, and indispensable 
 to human welfare, to pleasure as the end of art, that may be 
 dispensed -wiSh. And then he passes on to justify what he has said, 
 by illustration of the constraint placed upon the gladiators in 
 the arena in respect of the expression of the sense of pain, as 
 contrasted with the necessity of the actors in the theatre to 
 express it, and thus to appeal to sympathy. 
 
 " As his primal duty,'' says Lessing, " the gladiator was trained to 
 repress every outcry, every spasm , of pain ; and this because his 
 wounds and death were designed to furnish a spectacle of pleasure to 
 the beholders. It thus became his duty to overcome all sensibility to 
 pain. The slightest expression of it might have awakened compas- 
 sion ; and if this had been frequently awakened, these exhibitions 
 would have been no more patronised. But," he proceeds, " the pity 
 which was not permitted in the arena was the sole end of the tragic 
 stage. The heroes on it were bound to make display of feeling ; it 
 was their duty to express pain and to present nature in its naked 
 workings. Any constraint or studied disguises could only repel 
 sympathy ; and a chill expression of surprise was all that could be 
 given to a prize-fighter in the Cothurnus. Such a title, in my idea, 
 and no higher, belongs to all the characters in the famous drama of 
 Seneca ; and it is my firm conviction that the displays of the arena 
 were the chief cause why the Romans had so little success in 
 tragedy." 
 
 Now, here surely is a series of such inconsistencies as should 
 not have escaped Lessing's logical mind ; inconsistencies in 
 comparison with which Winckelmann's are venial and intelligible. 
 It was the business of the gladiator to repress all expression of 
 pain, because the one object of his display was to present a 
 spectacle of pleasure, which, as Lessing holds, is distinctively the 
 object of art as opposed to that of science ; and any the least 
 expression of pain might have produced an exactly contrary feel- 
 ing, which would inevitably have issued in an opposite result. 
 The business of the tragic actor, on the contrary, was to express 
 pain, and so draw out the pity of the spectator. The pity which 
 was not permitted in the arena, because it was " a spectacle of 
 pleasure," is the sole end of the tragic stage. Either Lessing's 
 
GERMAN LITERA TURE. 477 
 
 definition of the end of art as pleasure is all too narrow and con- 
 fusing, or else, according to this argument of his, the tragic actor 
 is less of an artist than the slave sold and condemned to the 
 circus, since he communicates, according to Lessing, an impres- 
 sion of pleasure at least more simple and uncomplicated than is 
 possible to the tragic actor. It was well that Lessing had already 
 laid it down that art, with its merely pleasure-giving end, was not 
 indispensable, else a stronger inconsistency might have arisen 
 through his expressed regret that the position given to the Arena 
 by the Romans rendered them less successful in tragedy, which 
 again, as ministering less directly to the feeling of simple pleasure, 
 would logically rank amongst those things which are indis- 
 pensable. 
 
 Now, all this confusion on Lessing's part results from his 
 having gained such simplicity in his definitions as are not to be 
 found in the subject-matter ; and Winckelmann recovers all our 
 respect as against Lessing when we find that any confusion in 
 his reasoning results from his recognition of the higher beauty, 
 and also of the higher utility, of art, which combine to involve it 
 inseparably with every great and fruitful progress in political, 
 social, and moral life. It is with him but one form of expression 
 of many tendencies which here find their highest spiritual unity. 
 His answer to Lessing would be unhesitating. " Your introduc- 
 tion of pleasure as the one end and object of fine art, by which 
 to oppose it to science whose end is utility, may be helpful for a 
 merely dialectic purpose ; but it practically expresses nothing to 
 me, since the opposition of such terms as ' pleasure ' or ' utility ' 
 held as mere abstract correlatives does not and cannot touch the 
 subtle, and as one may say, fluid elements with which life, in its 
 relation to art, is everywhere charged. You yourself seem to 
 admit this in several parts of your treatise, and in so far as you 
 do so, like Penelope, you simply unweave what you had only a 
 moment before woven, with the greatest pains." 
 
 And in this Winckelmann would have been absolutely right. 
 . Lessing's keen concern for matters lying beyond the region of 
 mere logic always tended in this way, as we have seen, to make 
 him inconsistent and unfaithful to his first positions. However 
 dogmatic he may be in form, he is never so in spirit, and in this 
 lies his great value here as elsewhere. He loved to look over 
 the fence even although he had only a moment before erected it. 
 
478 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 He was thus able to meet pedantry and cold scholasticism on 
 their own ground, so that he not only criticised and corrected, 
 but by means of broad and healthy human impulses built up 
 also. Nowhere is this point better illustrated than in the 
 " Laocoon,'' which, on the one hand, seems the most dogmatic 
 of treatises, while, on the other, it is the most dramatic ; allowing 
 even a breath of romanticism to steal within its over-exact 
 boundaries. This is one of the main points to which we have 
 been here advancing, and it deserves yet a little more attention, 
 that we may see clearly a certain line of historic development. 
 " Properly speaking, the dogmatic attitude pertains as strictly to 
 the rationalising process in its ultimate aspect, as to the theo- 
 logizing process in its self-justifying aspect ; but it is utterly 
 inconsistent with that spirit of self-questioning even under the 
 form of a questioning of others, which we have found to be the 
 essential characteristic of Lessing. His genius, even in its most 
 logical exercises, is a lyrical or intuitional one, veiling itself 
 under thin dramatic disguises. He seldom pretends to have 
 settled any question : he only aims at disturbing too rigid 
 and exhaustive classifications or too exclusive systematizations 
 already accepted, which settle it all on one side, as we may say, 
 and hinder impartial enquiry. All his activity may be summed 
 up as a protest against finally closing any question that remotely 
 touches ethics or religion or art from the intellectual side alone ; 
 and thus he stands as much in opposition to rationalism and 
 " enlightenment " as to theological dogmatism, since he admits 
 the full force of concurring elements in man's mental constitution 
 lying outside the sphere of the intellect itself. This attitude 
 could not, for a moment, consist with pure rationalism, the 
 essence of which, in its active demonstrations at all events, is to 
 deny the validity of the faculties outside the intellect, and to 
 impose the authority of the intellect qu& intellect ruthlessly over 
 the whole domain, as we see very clearly even now in the pro- 
 cesses of the rationalisers of our dear fable and fairy lore and 
 nursery stories, who absorb everything in a pre-supposed systematic 
 intellectual meaning. I^essing could never have been one of 
 them. And these inconsistencies in the " Laocoon " admirably 
 illustrate all this. The moment we view it as a finished, full, 
 and dogmatic hand-book, we commit an error and do a great 
 injustice to Lessing. As we have seen, he himself always spoke 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 479 
 
 of the " Laocoon " as the loose materials for a book rather than 
 a book itself. This hint should suffice to prevent us from 
 accepting it for what it is not and was never meant to be. The 
 " Laocoon " — like so much else that Lessing wrote — ^like the 
 famous " Fragments," and the " Letter to Goeze," the bulk of 
 the " Humburgische Dramaturgie," and the "Dialogues on Free- 
 masonry," was purely a record of a process through which he 
 had passed — biographic and confessional rather than dogmatic 
 and final. And we are therefore not at all astonished that while 
 he is able, by arbitrarily narrowing the field, to make clearer from 
 certain points of view the boundary lines between sculpture and 
 painting, painting and poetry, the drama and poetry, that he 
 should so indefinitely open the field of poetry as practically to 
 make it one with description or eloquence ; or, at all events, to 
 open it upon one side to the very influences which are favourable 
 to certain tendencies of romanticism. He says : — "Apicture in the 
 sense of the poet is not of necessity that which can be translated 
 into the more material picture of the artist. Every trait, whether 
 visual or not, which the poet may select to render his' object 
 sensuously apprehensible, so brightening it to the consciousness 
 that a livelier sense of the object than of the poet's words is 
 realised, may be denominated a picture ; in so far as it carries 
 us nearer to that degree of illusion which it is the immediate and 
 characteristic end of painting to effect. Pictures, in their poetic 
 sense, as here indicated, were called by the ancients Oairaira/, 
 and it could be wished that this name had been accepted in 
 modem criticism. . . . Poetry, bound by the law of succes- 
 sion, can avail itself only of one property in any specific material 
 object, and is therefore under the necessity of selecting that one 
 which presents the most sensuous impression of the object ; 
 regard, of course, being had to the particular relation under which 
 the poet s purpose demanded that it should be viewed." Here, there- 
 fore, Lessing takes away with the one hand what he gives with 
 the other. If he had at this point but pressed his analysis one 
 step further, and enquired how it is that the poet is under the 
 necessity of selecting (to use his own somewhat contradictory 
 phrase) only one out of many properties in any given material 
 object, the fallacy of what he urges would have become apparent. 
 The poet is under necessities in this regard because he has 
 chosen to deal with certain chords of emotion or of passion. 
 
48o THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 which for the moment limit his access of approach to material 
 objects, while they intensely quicken his vision for what in them 
 may become symbolically representative of it. To him they 
 exist only in their harmonious relation to this chord of emotion 
 or of passion, whether lyrical or dramatic in character ; and this 
 it is which even determines the metre or form that a true poet 
 may use. He is, in no sense, under any necessity to choose or 
 to neglect anything in nature taken abstractly; but only in 
 relation to the mood or passion which he has chosen and freely 
 chosen to represent. As Schiller finally found out, nature does 
 not exist as positive obstacle or impediment ; but only as rude 
 matter to be framed into harmony with the spontaneous and 
 unfettered expression of the free creative impulse of the artist. 
 This Lessing himself admits, under the form of a mere qualifica- 
 tion, when he says : " Regard, of course, being had to the 
 particular relation under which the poefs purpose demanded that it 
 should be viewed." But the qualification is of the very essence of 
 the exercise. To make any material " object sensuously appre- 
 hensible, and to brighten it to the consciousness so that a livelier 
 sense of the object than of the poefs words may be realised," 
 cannot be said to be the primary purpose of any great poetry. 
 The poet is under the necessity of selecting the one property in 
 any object which presents the most sensuous impression, because 
 he has already made himself the exponent of an order of feelings 
 or of passions for which certain aspects only of external nature 
 are fitted to be the symbols. In a more intense and absolute 
 form than can ever be that of the painter, it is his business to 
 suggest trains of emotion by the instinctive and happy selection 
 of symbols caught from common aspects of nature, life, and 
 even the "rich results of science." In this respect he is not 
 primarily a producer of pictures as pictures, but of images as 
 suggestive of common emotion or passion, whereas the painter 
 strictly has nothing to do with images, save in so far as they can 
 be brought under definite forms, and obey the laws of colour and 
 of light and shade. It was the constant confusion of these two 
 provinces which lay at the root of the incomprehensibility of 
 much of the work of our own William Blake. He tried to paint 
 symbols and images ; to put poems on the canvas, and was often 
 necessarily unintelligible. Now, Lessing, when he attempts this 
 discrimination between the provinces of the two arts, in not 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 481 
 
 clearly recognising the part which poetry plays as the exponent 
 of complicated orders of feeling and of passion with which paint- 
 ing cannot intermeddle, gains an apparent clearness in distinction 
 and definition, when he has only either missed or slipped out of 
 view one great essential of the subject-matter. Yet here, in spite 
 of the apparently strict logical development of ideas, he leaves 
 openings by qualification and by lack of strict presentment of 
 primary purpose, which might almost have been held to justify 
 the vagaries and phantasai in which the romanticists delighted. 
 Here " the particular relations under which the poet's purpose 
 demand that it should be viewed," while they seern so guarded 
 and general, open up all too wide a pathway for individual 
 freedom, which indeed it may be that Lessing had in his mind 
 when he there set them down. 
 
 Thus, we have another striking instance of how Lessing, while 
 he is laying down these rigid dogmatic rules, distinctly mark- 
 ing off one province from another, asserts the general spirit 
 which animates him and on which he constantly returns, openly 
 favouring the right of the individual genius to modify rule. It 
 is his peculiar merit that, though he sought to apply the 
 Aristotelian dicta, he made Aristotle bend to Shakespeare ; and 
 was concerned to demonstrate that the frigid classicality of the 
 French theatre was not only false to nature, but was opposed to 
 the principles of the Grecian drama. He said that Shakespeare, 
 in spite of his indifference to abstract rules, had come nearer to 
 the spirit of Sophocles than had the French dramatists, who 
 aimed at reproducing the antique form only. And here Lessing's 
 purely critical determinations reunite themselves with, and re- 
 inforce the ideas of, individuality and nationality which were 
 then struggling towards full expression and illustration ; and if 
 he seems illogical and inconsistent in his abstract arguments, he 
 amply corrects it by practice and production — as we see it, for 
 one thing, in the whole spirit of " Miss Sarah Sampson " no less 
 than in "Nathan." 
 
 If, for a moment, we can view Herder in relation to the prin- 
 ciple of nationality, which underlay and gave stable support to 
 his cosmopolitanism, we shall perhaps find a new bond uniting 
 the literature that had preceded him with that which followed. 
 To lose sight of the place which he gave to the " Voices of the 
 Peoples" as the quickening element in Hterature, as a uniting 
 
 2 H 
 
482 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 medium, influential not only through differences of character and 
 custom, but truly potent, positively because of them, is wholly to 
 misunderstand and to ignore his influence. Herder was the first 
 of Germans who expressed, in decisive form, the sense of 
 nationality in literature. His clear perception of this element it 
 was that qualified and checked his early deference to the teach- 
 ings of Rousseau ; for he soon thereafter saw in Shakespeare the 
 primitive and national associations raised into a region of free 
 imaginative creation. The first thing that impressed Herder in 
 Shakespeare was the use that he made of the old ballads, legends, 
 common stories, and common sayings that floated among the 
 populace. Shakspeare prepared him for Percy, and first suggested 
 vaguely the wide field of Folk's song and story, which he after- 
 wards worked so successfully. And in these labours the idea of 
 nationality was so distinctively central, that he would certainly 
 be a blind critic who would fail to recognise how the impulse 
 which Herder gave to romantic sentiment in his deference to 
 everything that conveyed the true ballad spirit, enwound itself 
 with the strongest patriotic feeling, and directly reinforced it. 
 For the first inevitable outcome of respect for the principle of 
 nationality, as generally perceived, is the desire to strengthen it 
 in ourselves, and to give it particular application in the relations 
 that lie nearest. 
 
 The blind impulse that struggled inefficiently through the con- 
 vulsions of the " Sturm-und-Drang," received correction, direc- 
 tion, and, if we may be allowed the word, eyesight from the 
 quickening contact with English literature, to which it was most 
 especially submitted by Herder, whose influence was not merely 
 literary, but social and practical. Even Stein said that he 
 worked under stimulus derived from the study of English books 
 and English institutions. Herder's nationality was indeed per- 
 vasive, and it was the more efficient that it was associated with a 
 truly scientific and comparative spirit. A distinguished writer 
 has well said on this point : — 
 
 " The first tumultuous utterances of the Sturm-und-Drang spirit 
 were past when the foundations of the Romantic School were laid in 
 the University ; and in after-years the ideals of youth and nationality 
 began to be set forth. That spirit manifested itself strongly in 
 Herder's works. The living man, the wonderfully formed creature, 
 the benevolently-created nature, viewed in its relation to a larger 
 
GERMAN LITERA TURE. 483 
 
 entity, is the theme of these works. If he finds the element of 
 variability in everything mortal, in all capacities of human souls, in 
 all forms and conditions spread over the earth, in all sensations and 
 conditions of thought which show themselves in nation and time, in 
 custom and religion, in the speech and poetry of peoples and indi- 
 viduals, he must rise to a sense of the universal before he can inter- 
 pret either. This was Herder's great gift. Thus his critique 
 humanises itself, and raises in the susceptible soul the full power of 
 poetic work. Thus all history, story, legend, stretches out before his 
 view in new light, and all their appearances arrange themselves 
 before him in bodily shape, and in true perspective." 
 
 Looked at from this point of view, Herder was the first clear 
 and efficient spokesman of a new tendency, which was yet to 
 regenerate Germany and to make an end of the revolutionary 
 impulse, which, turning on itself was finally spent in the effort, 
 under Napoleon, to denationalize the peoples of Europe. The 
 perverted revolutionary impulse was overturned by the passion 
 for free national development, for which literature had especially 
 paved the way. In spirits like Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, 
 both of whom, under some inward compulsion, overcame strong 
 inherited and aristocratical proclivities to proclaim it, the prin- 
 ciple was very powerfully at work ; precisely as it was in men 
 like Uhland and Amdt, and in politicians like Stein, and in 
 philosophers like Fichte, and in preachers like Schleiermacher. 
 They were the interpreters in the field of practical life and of 
 political relationship of that great and fruitful idea which 
 Lessing and Winckelmann had but vaguely divined and rejoiced 
 at, but which Herder systematically preached, proclaimed, and 
 illustrated. We have referred to Lord Byron above; and we 
 may add that his sighs over degenerate Greece might be taken 
 merely for poetic and sentimental, did not his death at Misso- 
 longhi attest a serigus underlying regard for nationality as an 
 inalienable companion of the true romantic spirit. His life and 
 his poetry (in spite of its many defects and coarsenesses) thus 
 gain a new colour through his death. 
 
 It would take a volume fully to illustrate all that is implied in 
 the statements just made. If any one doubts the correctness 
 of what we have said, let him thoroughly study the cor- 
 respondence of Herder and Scheffner, and Scheffner's letters to 
 his friends, and then devote some days carefully to the memoirs 
 of -^Baron Vom Stein. Doing this faithfully, we are bold to say 
 
484 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 that he will soon perceive in how clear and yet in how subtle a 
 manner the romantic impulse, as seen in Herder, came to wed 
 itself with the patriotic impulse, as exhibited in the heroes of the 
 Wars of Independence, who were inspired from first to last by 
 the highest and purest devotion to the principle of nationality, 
 which Napoleon so sought to outrage and destroy, — a peculiar 
 commentary on the ideas of Goethe and his followers, who 
 would have it to be inferred that such movements, or the prin- 
 ciples implied in them, had nothing to do with literature. To this 
 principle Herder did his part to draw Goethe in younger days 
 and the result is clearly seen in Goethe's earlier dramatic works. 
 The great injustice which Goethe did to Herder on that head has 
 thus its own significance in relation to political as well as to 
 merely literary development. And with this thought in our 
 minds, we may the more firmly advance to the next step in our 
 survey — Goethe's final relation to the Romantic, and the 
 peculiar ways in which it modified his art and reacted upon his 
 thinking. Goethe's peculiar desire to embrace or to assimilate 
 and use all sentiment that was specifically modern and available 
 to creative purposes, here also is seen to become detrimental to 
 that simplicity and unity from which he departed further and 
 further, as the self-appropriating desires of culture took more and 
 more the place of direct and healthy sympathy with those around 
 him, and the causes, patriotic and other, that most moved them. 
 The romantic sentiment he seized, and set it into forms suited to 
 it, when viewed merely on its artistic side ; but its ethical and 
 religious side, which is also its strongest side, he ignored, or 
 mayhap it lay just within the " blind spot of his eye," and never 
 became really visible to him as an available element, although in 
 reality that is the source of its true strength and permanence. 
 
 It is very singular indeed, and in this relation may be well 
 worth insisting on, that Schiller, on the contrary, after all his 
 thought and serious contest with the problems of life, could 
 reserve for himself two provinces still free from the perplexities of 
 necessity and " Naturkraft." From nature he at first retreated in 
 despair, as repellant and directly alien to the ideal ; Kant 
 showed him that nature is not fate, but only an accidental 
 obstacle, which, in presenting material to the will, is also, within 
 the scope of the will, overcome by it, — as the sculptor needs to 
 receive from nature the dull block that he shapes into the statue, 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 485 
 
 and without which block his ideal would ever remain incompletely 
 or partially expressed. Schiller, through Kant, came to regard 
 nature as indifferent, yet possibly friendly ; and his passive after- 
 acknowledgements of nature brought him more and more, even 
 m what may be called his classic period, to recognise the true 
 ethical element in man's free sense of ideal purpose in work, 
 wholly apart from the accidental, poetic, or artistic forms in 
 which his productiveness may issue; and next, in active and 
 self-denying union with others for the great end of securing a 
 common good. Earnest, self-denying work and community were 
 his two great rallying-points for man — ideas which were power- 
 ful with Schiller to the last, in forming such poems as the Song 
 of the Bell and the " Diver," and finding in that truly romantic 
 epos the " Braut Von Messina," the solvent of vague terror in 
 respect of fate and nature. The balance or harmony of life is 
 also restored, and action once more made possible, through the 
 frank acceptance of a religious mysticism which justifies itself to 
 the heart and soul, or what Kant would have called the Reason, 
 though not to the intellect or the understanding. Schiller's 
 Romanticism thus grew out of a sincere wrestle with the deeper 
 problems of life ; and, looked at in view of a harmonious and 
 elevating and helpful influence on that great mass of humanity 
 which can never, in any age, be deeply touched by aesthetic 
 ideals alone, Schiller is more efficient than Goethe ; and has — 
 although he never raised any pretence to having done it — made 
 a fuller and more efficient answer to man's doubts and questions 
 and benumbing and isolating intellectual perplexities. He, in fact, 
 keeps open behind him an ethical and religious sphere which he 
 would fain reinforce by his poetic activity, for he felt earnestly 
 that it was in this sphere, and not in the poetic one, that the 
 impulses to devoted activity and noble self-sacrifice really lay ; 
 and formed the point where the common man and the man of 
 genius may meet to help and strengthen each other mutually in 
 the highest aims. Schiller thus allies himself with the romantic 
 school at the very point where Goethe finally deserts it, with a 
 smile at the distracting atmosphere it must carry into the field of 
 art, by admitting an independent sphere for the ideal in common 
 belief or in common work and purpose ; and this is the point 
 again where Schiller, in spite of his friendship for Goethe, and 
 the influence the elder poet exercised over him, remained a true 
 
486 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 patriot on that side, allying himself with Amdt, Komer, and the 
 rest who fought so bravely in the Wars of Independence. 
 
 A further illustration or two may render this thoroughly 
 clear. 
 
 The recognition of a divine personal Being, active in all life, 
 but possessing himself of certain special channels for communion 
 with man, in opposition either to a poetic pantheism or to a refined 
 neo-pagan personification of nature-forms, is essential to the 
 romantic idea, which is thus specifically Christian, as is also the 
 constant confession of the inadequacy either of the intellect or the 
 artistic sense to sustain itself composedly in face of the great 
 central mysteries, or to shape for them more efficient symbols 
 than the religious sense in its free exercise can fashion. Roman- 
 ticism, though it pressed the mediaeval Catholicism so stringently 
 into its service, yet did it under this clear general idea — and thus 
 it keeps open the sphere of religion behind that of art, as secur- 
 ing thus a sure bond between the imagination and life and its 
 moral duties which the purely artistic temper ever tends to dis- 
 solve or refine away. Now Goethe, while he appropriated the 
 sentiment of the romantic and used it, refined away its god, sub- 
 stituted for its open recognition of religious mystery a pure 
 secularism or scepticism, or playful pseudo-ethical puzzle-making, 
 and occasionally carried into the most offensive forms the hidden 
 irony of the romanticists, turning it against themselves. Novalis 
 was right when he spoke of the artistic atheism of "Meister." In 
 truth, the romantic idea was too strong for Goethe as an artist, 
 though it was not strong enough to subdue him as a man ; and 
 though (face Mr Carlyle) he would have hated any one who 
 should have clearly pointed this out, the power of the romantic 
 over him has much to do with the vagary and diffuseness of his 
 later period, when even his most enthusiastic critics are at a loss 
 to reconcile and justify his productions as wholes, or to make 
 plain his meaning. Yea, it even intruded into his professedly 
 classical reproductions, sometimes running through the white 
 marble like a blue streak. If Hegel had applied his principle of 
 anachronism to the spirit of much in the Iphigenta, instead of 
 to mere details of form in " Goetz," he would have been truer to 
 liis own principles, and would undoubtedly have been more suc- 
 cessful. And since we have once more named Hegel here, we 
 may say, that if any one will read that section of his Esthetics 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 487 
 
 dealing with Classical and Romantic art, he will see that it 
 would be possible for us to justify these criticisms of Goethe by 
 the most persistent abstract analysis and application of critical 
 principles. Man, says Hegel, constitutes the true centre of 
 classical beauty, because there the inner principle cannot retire 
 into itself as pure spirit freed from the limit of sensuous existence. 
 Here, says he, the corporeal or outer element in which spirit 
 manifests itself is entirely definite and particular ; the free spirit, 
 as art presents it, can only be the equally definite and independ- 
 ent spiritual individuality in its natural form. There is thus no 
 intervention or interruption of spiritual significance and sensuous 
 form ; the one is exactly balanced by the other. ; . . Classic 
 art, he goes on, has therefore not comprehended the true essence 
 of the Divine nature, rather eliminates it, sets it aside as a dis- 
 turbance, nor has it penetrated to the depths of the soul. It has 
 not known how to develop its inmost powers in their opposition, 
 and again to re-establish their harmony. All this phase of exist- 
 ence — the evil, the sinful, the unhappy, moral suffering, revolt of 
 the will, remorse, agonies of conscience — are unknown to it. 
 Classic art does not penetrate beyond the sphere proper to the 
 veritable ideal. He goes on to illustrate this in many ways, say- 
 ing, that in the life of the Greek people, the individual, though 
 in a sense independent and free, yet could not isolate himself 
 from the general interests of the State, or separate his freedom 
 from that of the city of which he formed a part. The sentiment 
 of general order as the basis of morality thus, as he holds, re- 
 mained in changeless harmony with that of personal freedom ; 
 and he finds a very forcible illustration of this in the adequacy of 
 sculpture to interpret the Greek ideal, and the sightless eyeballs 
 in the statues. The essence of the gods on their spiritual side is 
 law and order, and they easily thus consort with the new divini- 
 ties, who may be multiplied to indefinite extent, becoming more 
 and more harmoniously sensuous. The Greek gods, he allows, 
 are moral persons, but then only under human and corporeal 
 form, while true morality can appear only with consciousness, and 
 under a form purely spiritual. Neither religion nor morals is the 
 point of view for beauty merely artistically considered. The 
 divine for the religious consciousness again is infinite, invisible 
 spirituality; while, for the moral consciousness the good is an 
 idea, a conception, a duty which demands the sacrifice of all 
 
488 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 the senses. It is vain, therefore, to be enraptured with Greek 
 art and beauty ; for the soul does not recognise itself in the ob- 
 ject of its worship, because what it conceives as a true ideal is a 
 spiritual, infinite, invisible, absolute, personal God, endowed with 
 moral qualities — goodness, justice, &c. Of this, the Greek gods, 
 in spite of their beauty, entirely fail to furnish us an image. . . . 
 Here Hegel reaches by his own peculiar process to the very 
 height of the thought which Winckelmann imperfectly struggled 
 to express, and proceeds : — 
 p "Christianityhas its art and poetry in itself; ... the tendencies 
 , , AT " I to mysticism and asceticism which are urged against it are truly 
 W contrary to art, but these are morbid exaggerations of the Christian 
 
 / principle. The thought and sentiment which constitute the basis 
 I of Christianity are specially favourable to art, and have been the 
 I seed of a new and loftier art, inferior to the antique in sculpture 
 ' only ; on every other side it is superior, by all the loftiness of its 
 j idea and aim, in comparison with the ideas and aims of paganism. 
 ... The god of romantic art, on the contrary, makes his appear- 
 j ance as a god who sees, who is conscious of himself, who knows 
 I himself in his own inner personality, opening the recesses of his 
 nature to the contemplation of the conscious spirit of man. This 
 God, who, though in Himself universal, still assumes human 
 form ; His reality is, notwithstanding, not limited to particular ■ 
 j immediate existence in the form of Christ, but reveals itself in all 
 humanity more or less clearly, and in this humanity the Divine 
 Spirit becomes ever present, and in this revelation remains one 
 \ with itself. This spreading abroad constitutes a divine world — a 
 i kingdom of God — in which the Divine, from the centre outwards, 
 f possesses the reconcilement of its reality with its idea, and in 
 , completing itself in this reconcilement truly attains to independ- 
 i ent existence. There the romantic art finds its sphere, carrying 
 to the fair summit of its conception ideas of which classic art 
 ; never dreamt. Self-sacrifice and death in themselves become 
 '. holy. The infinite pain that attends the sacrifice of the subjec- 
 , tivity or personality, the suffering and death, which were more 
 or less excluded from classic art — or, to be more correct, which 
 : appeared there only as natural suffering —attain to the rank of 
 , spiritual necessity for the first time in romantic art." 
 •-^^ Now, think of this as applied to some of Goethe's works, say, 
 first, " Wilhelm Meister." Here the whole issue of the novel is 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 489 
 
 a reduction of the sense of mystery, in order to substitute, if not 
 a merely general intellectual lesson, a series of lessons. Even 
 when the ethical teaching apparently rises highest, it distinctly 
 detaches itself from all religious basis, and seeks to justify itself 
 on the ground of good order alone. Christianity itself is impli- 
 citly robbed of its specific characteristics, and re-absorbed in a 
 merely ethnical or heathen atmosphere ; that is, the spiritual or 
 supernatural, and therefore mysterious, aspect of what may be 
 called firom one side its truths, and from another side its myths, 
 is rationalised in the worst form. What else can mean that 
 parody on the flight into Egypt in the opening of the " Wander- 
 jahre ? " what else the passage in which we are invited to a wor- 
 ship of sorrow, as if sorrow in itself had any peculiar claim on 
 human reverence and worship ? Apart from some other conse- 
 crating influence, we hold that sorrow, which the Greeks well 
 personified in Niobe weeping, has no real independent existence 
 in the Christian ideal, which, as Professor Bain would say, never 
 ceases to regard it in its correlation. Further still, what can mean 
 that religion of the three Reverences, in which things above us, 
 things below us, and things around us, are as if personified after 
 a fashion purely Greek. There is nothing in things below us in 
 themselves entitling them to a sincere reverence. We regard 
 Goethe, in his objection to Christian forms, as being guilty of 
 having thus eliminated the root-idea of God the person, and of hav- 
 ing set on the purely sentimental side of that conception a merely 
 pagan crown. We remember quite well that Goethe spoke of its 
 being impossible for humanity, having once attained this Divine 
 height, ever to retrograde ; but Goethe, in disowning God and 
 Christ in their true personalities, simply redraws the Christian 
 doctrine down to a common point with natural sufficiency or 
 necessity, and re-baptizes it with pagan rites. 
 
 Thus, while the central motive of " Meister " is in itself essen- 
 tially romantic, the intention of Goethe is purely pagan. Hence 
 a profound sense of opposition and of disturbance, as of ill-balanced 
 elements, driven by sheer force of will and artistic trick into 
 association. Goethe was quite right when, with a sardonic smile, 
 he told Eckermann that it was meant as a puzzle. He justified 
 himself by the manysidedness of the life presented ; but in art it 
 is not as in real life. Harmony there must control and subject 
 variety to itself, else we had better have been referred direct to 
 
490 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 life itself. Mr Lewes defended "Meister" from the social, 
 if not the moral, standpoint by a side-glance at the newspapers ; 
 but the newspapers bring us as far as they can into contact with 
 unharmonized daily life, and profess to do no more. Look- 
 ing at " Meister " from this point of view, we are tempted to 
 say of Goethe that, like Neoptolemus with Philoctetes, he stole 
 the weapons that he then used with such effect ; and think of Mr 
 Disraeli's clever thurst against Peel, and say he found the roman- 
 ticists bathing, and walked off with their clothes. Goethe found 
 the romanticists bathing, and walked off with their clothes, dress- 
 ing in them the figures that were to ridicule romanticism. Let 
 us look at " Meister" still a few moments longer, with this thought 
 in our minds. 
 
 In spite of his surroundings, and the air of prosaic realism 
 amid which Meister moves, he himself is essentially without a 
 consistent basis, conceived as an actual being, and derives the 
 whole unity of his existence from the conscious and preconceived 
 ideas of his creator. Wilhelm is not by any means incompre- 
 hensible to the intellect when thus viewed — a truth which Schiller 
 very directly hinted at ; in truth, he is a real being only to the 
 intellect, and, as Schiller said, it was a necessity that he should 
 more and more be exhibited through mere abstract symbol. He 
 ends as Heinrich von Ofterdingen begins ; and ends are more in 
 art than beginnings. So, in a sense, did Faust. It is because the 
 outset or opening part, both in " Wilhelm Meister " and " Faust," 
 viewed from the romantic side, is too realistic and involved in the 
 actual and even transient circumstances of the times in which 
 Goethe lived, that he finds it impossible to build for himself a 
 smooth bridge by which to pass imperceptibly into the realm of 
 symbol. He himself essays to create a protective atmosphere in 
 his Prologue in the " Faust," and he is vastly helped here in the 
 " Faust " by what the actual legend had decisively done for him ; 
 but see where he is when he has, so to speak, to knead as well 
 as to bake his own loaf ! Eulogistic criticism, to save breaking its 
 own teeth, must demean itself in one of two ways, neither con- 
 sistent ; either, as seen in Mr Lewes', it refuses in effect to regard 
 the two parts of these great works as really belonging to one con- 
 ception, or, in fact, as products of the same mind, which, as ex- 
 tremes meet, shows the eulogists meeting the most determined 
 of the detractors, and embracing them ; or, as illustrated in Herr 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 491 
 
 Rosenkranz, it pretends, by deep diving, to find all that is in the 
 last consciously or half-consciously prefigured in the first. This 
 process is much more successfurwith the "Faust" than with "Wil- 
 helm Meister," for the reason we have just given; but there is a 
 good deal of special pleading in it, and it often betrays the weak- 
 ness of over-ingenuity making the whole comprehensible to the 
 intellect. To return to " Wilhelm Meister :" the introduction of 
 the Harper and Mignon is a purely romantic motive also ; without 
 apology or due preparation they are lifted right out of the past 
 into the present, and the conception of the wandering players, 
 simply as a kind of hybrid troubadours compelling ladies of high 
 birth to their inclinations by their song, is as distinctly mediaeval 
 as any conception in romance could be. Who could say that 
 that is real ? Now, Goethe failed there, at all events, as a realist, 
 because he would be romantic, and failed as a romanticist because 
 he would be real. Our point is, that Goethe did not escape the 
 very evils to which the romanticists were most exposed, and can- 
 not be regarded as lying outside the pale of romanticism — only 
 he wished to be romantic without sympathetically recognising a 
 Christian past. As he scorned to look at Assisi and the church 
 associated with St Francis, or at the Florentine scenes ever me- 
 morable because of Savonarola, so he chose to exhibit only that 
 in romanticism which could be welded to non-christian purposes ; 
 and even his mighty genius at last, like a wave, broke away on 
 two sides, and spent itself in great degree almost vainly. 
 
 The Epilogue to the second part of " Faust," again, is a purely 
 artistic expedient — no more, no less ; and the author's evident 
 use of it as a mere piece of dramatic machinery is what so dis- 
 tinctly separates it from the realism of the Prologue to the first 
 part, in which God the Father is freely represented as bandying 
 words with Mephistopheles. It is very notable, indeed, that in the 
 close of the second "Faust," where he might have been reverently 
 represented, God the Father is not represented at all, though there 
 is a Trinity of " Fathers ; " that Fate {Geschick) does somewhat 
 unhappily intrude; and that the " Ewig-Weibltche" stands, not 
 as something once for all individualized in Mary, the mother of 
 Jesus, but as a diifused presence, charged with the attractive 
 power of drawing upwards, and thus the idea of sex and ordinary 
 sensual love or affinity is once more set forward as the final agent 
 in the spiritual love, which is strictly the annihilation of sex, un- 
 
492 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 less, indeed, we must say that, here as elsewhere, Goethe used 
 Romantic sentiment and symbol merely to paganize it. In one 
 aspect, if not in more, he anticipated one element in Comtism. 
 And if we are prosaic and courageous enough to read alongside 
 of this the stanza from the " Song of the Flower Girls : — 
 
 " What is best in woman-nature, 
 Is so near to art allied 
 (Denn das Natural! das Frauen 
 1st so nah mit kunst verwandt)," 
 
 We may do no great violence to Goethe, and find a gloss that will 
 be in one way helpful. 
 
 True it is that Christianity first of all gave woman her due and 
 proper place as a power in the realm of the spiritual ; that, how- 
 ever, is hardly what Goethe can intend to symbolise in this 
 place ; and the very idea of absorbing the ministry of Mary in 
 the " Ewig-weibliche,'' sounds something to us of an anti-climax. 
 Such penalty did the Romantic, which Goethe would fain have 
 played with without mastering, inflict on the greatest poetic 
 mind of Germany, detecting him not seldom in what looks too 
 like artifice and insincerity about the most momentous matters. 
 If there is one point on which the Romantic was assured, it was 
 the elevation of woman as woman to a high position of rever- 
 ence. Goethe here too, both in his life and heart, plays with the 
 romantic idea, and finally explodes it in the interest of the old, 
 paganised conception of woman as a slave ! 
 
 Goethe, in one word, seems to us, hal&knowingly and quizz- 
 ingly, to do violence to the spirit of the Christian ideal, even 
 when he appears to be honouring it ; withdraws from it its 
 informing force and radical impulse, and casts over it the alien 
 lights of a bastard ideal — but this unfortunately, or it may be in 
 one sense fortunately, to the injury of his own work. His con- 
 flicting motives and double mind infect and give a colour to his 
 creations : it is as though Greek and prosaic living forms dashed 
 athwart each other in an imposing dance before eyes troubled by 
 looking through a medium of stained glass. 
 
 And so Goethe was a romantic atheist, and was thus not to be 
 looked on as the opponent of Tieck, whom the Schlegels pitted 
 against him ; but as the enemy — under disguise — of that spirit 
 which the romanticists sought to interpret, and to which they 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 493 
 
 sought to give living and actual form in society, the church, the 
 world. In this intent Goethe was not their helper. We shall 
 see by and by how it was through the channels of the romantic 
 that inspiring patriotic ideas arose to lift Germany out of her 
 degradation ; it will suffice at present to have shown in what 
 deeper and more essential respects Herder, Schiller, Tieck, and 
 the rest, were so far unconsciously and of necessity opposed to 
 Goethe and his influence. We must here gratify ourselves by 
 quoting the whole of a most significant passage from Heine, of 
 which we had already given a single sentence. It is from the 
 " Romantische Schule " : — 
 
 " If Schiller completely throws himself into history, is inspired by 
 the cause of social progress in humanity, and chants the history of 
 the world, Goethe is more absorbed in individual feeling, or in art, or 
 in nature. In the end natural history must be the engrossing occu- 
 pation of Goethe, the pantheist. Not only in poetry, but in scientific 
 works, he gives the results of his inquiries. His indifferentism was 
 also a result of his pantheistic view of the universe. Unfortunately 
 it is the case, and we are compelled to confess it, that pantheism has 
 often led men into indifferentism. They argue thus : if everything is 
 God, then it is quite an unimportant matter what is the subject of 
 one's investigations — whether clouds, antique gems, national songs, 
 or the skeletons of apes, men or comedians. But herein lies the 
 error : everything is not God, though God is in all things ; God does 
 not manifest Himself in an equal degree in everything, but rather in 
 different degrees in different things ; and everything bears within itself 
 the impulse towards a higher degree of divinity. This is the great 
 law of progress in nature. No ! God does not manifest Himself 
 equally in all things, as Wolfgang Goethe supposed, and by this he 
 drifted into indifferentism. Instead of occupying himself with the 
 highest human interests, he busied himself with theatricals, anatomy, 
 theories of colours, botany, observations of the clouds. God has His 
 being in perpetual manifestation ; He is in movement, in action, in 
 time ; His divine inspiration is wafted towards us from the pages of 
 history, which is the true book of God. Frederick Schiller felt this 
 as by instinct, and became ' a prophet casting glances backward ; ' 
 and he virrote ' The Revolt of the Netherlands,' ' The Thirty Years' 
 War,' 'The Maid of Orleans,' and 'WiUiam Tell.' Goethe, no 
 doubt, chanted also some great histories of emancipation, but he 
 chanted them as an artist. He thrust aside as odious to him Chris- 
 tian enthusiasm, and either did not or would not comprehend the 
 philosophical enthusiasm of his time, fearful lest it should disturb 
 the equanimity of his spirit; and so he dealt with enthusiasm gene- 
 
494 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 rally after the historical method — as something yielded as material to 
 be worked on. Spirit itself became matter in his hands, and he gave 
 it a fair and pleasing form." 
 
 How exactly Heine, in the words italicised above, hits the 
 narrowness and the narrowing element in Goethe's character, 
 which we have endeavoured in some detail, and by careful refer- 
 ences to his activity in many aspects, to make clear ! Perhaps, 
 however, it is more important to point out that the conception 
 of Fate is utterly repugnant to the romantic ideal, which demands 
 for imagination and phantasy the right to form their own rules, 
 and also to create and to deal with conceptions and characters 
 which are in themselves outrt or even repulsive, if by them a 
 loftier or a deeper impression may be produced. Classical art 
 admitted no motive that could conflict with a definite content 
 which absolutely predetermined the form ; hence the expansive- 
 ness and inexhaustibleness of the world of thought and emotion, 
 of character and life, which Christianity, in its regard for the 
 sorrowful, the weak, the suffering, the contemned, contributed to 
 art, wherein lies at once its ineffable mystery, and its power to 
 avail itself of all motives, and to accept new forms. Humanity 
 has also been led, through this principle, to look at nature in a 
 new spirit ; while language has been greatly enriched. These 
 are two subjects which we cannot now pause to discuss ; but if the 
 reader will think of the feeling for the romantic in scenery, 
 which has been an inseparable accompaniment of the movement 
 which we have tried to trace, and to which, properly speaking, 
 it owes its origin, this will become more and more clear ; and 
 then, if we think of the wealth of association which has been 
 added to the common elements of language through the writings 
 of Scott and Byron in our own country, of Victor Hugo in 
 France, and of Schiller in Germany, we are sure that he will 
 speedily come to an agreement with us. 
 
 We must briefly summarize what has been said. 
 
 Properly speaking. Romanticism had its fountain-head in 
 Herder, if even its source — a thin thread, hidden by overhanging 
 rocks and thick fringes of pine — was not to be traced to Lessing. 
 Stranger as he seems to all extravagant fervours, yet Lessing was 
 clear on two things — first, that humanity was more than hard 
 critical rules or culture, which, divorced from the higher 
 interests, inevitably became pale and bloodless ; and, secondly, 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 495 
 
 that art was dependent on constant and close contact with the 
 life that it would enlighten and beautify. He was in fullest 
 sympathy with that idea of humanity and of the atmosphere of 
 universality which, through the simple and efficient unfolding of 
 a great thought or emotion, sanctified true nationality. The 
 nexus between " Minna von Bamhelm," the most national of his 
 plays, and "Nathan der Weise,'' the most universal, might 
 indeed be found here, implicitly presenting an illustration of the 
 very ideas which Herder so often urged. " Nathan " is the full 
 outflowering of the genius of Lessing, as has already been 
 pointed out — " Die Juden " again containing, as it were, the 
 germ of this latest fruit. The unity of Lessing's dramatic 
 endeavours is found here imparting a colour and an individuality 
 to all that he did; and, in face of what might appear a pro- 
 nouncedly alien intellectual tendency, specially reflecting the 
 ideas of the eighteenth century, yet in spirit Lessing carried near 
 to his heart a warm vein of Romanticism. With him, and in 
 spite of all his clearness and mastery of style, spirit was ever 
 above form ; this was the point on which he quarrelled with 
 the French culture, the point on which he found affinity with 
 English dramatic literature ; and this is the reason why he could 
 defend Herder's Folk-Songs against the ridicule of Nicolai, — the 
 extreme man of the " Enlightenment ; " and also the reason why 
 Herder, in writing to Moses Mendelssohn at the time of Lessing's 
 death, could say that his ideas were so often at one with Lessing's, 
 that he could claim a close bond of brotherhood. This assuredly 
 Herder could not have done had Lessing been the grim 
 rationalist merely. To Lessing, as to Herder, again, the proposal 
 to divorce art from all moral reference would have sounded 
 ominous and fatal. Lessing's practice was pre-eminently at one 
 with his principles here; and, strictly, "Nathan" is the most 
 romantic and spiritual of his works, informed, as Heine has well 
 said, by the most elevated ideas of humanity, which are so pre- 
 vailing as to triumph over the ordinary laws of dramatic com- 
 position, regaining influence by efficient moral purpose and lofty 
 spiritual perception. The introduction of the " Three Rings," 
 and the dramatic moralising of that fable, is a motif in the very 
 spirit of Romanticism. And in spite of assertions to the con- 
 trary, he firmly held, as his brother Karl said, by the idea of a 
 personal God. 
 
496 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 Now we find in Lessing, when thus viewed, all the leading 
 ideas for which the romantic school contended. When they 
 narrowed their field of illustration to a semi-Catholic medisevalism, 
 they erred, and they erred also when they sought to combine a 
 direct polemic with art, even though they seldom failed to 
 associate it with irony and fanciful satire. In this they departed 
 from the example of Lessing, who left his polemics behind when 
 he had gained from them an impulse to creative production; 
 and, through the force of a great moral conviction bearing up an 
 imagination by no means strong, set forth great and living forms 
 from many nationalities to bear witness for him and for his high 
 ideal of humanity and religion. 
 
 But the critic who should fail to trace the impulse which 
 finally issued in German romanticism back to the English 
 influence, would only half pursue his' object, however minute 
 might be his examinations of German writings. The sympathetic 
 interest in English literature is coincident with the recognition of 
 something " more deeply interfused," some aroma of humanity 
 and hint of mystery which the reason can dimly apprehend, but 
 cannot satisfactorily grapple with or disperse. The stirring of 
 wider interests, inclusive of much that under the old rules would 
 have been easily disposed of, now demands a freer medium in 
 which to embody itself — a medium relieved wholly from the old 
 codes of literary law. The revolutionary influence and the 
 teachings of Rousseau, moving hand in hand with the inspiring 
 study of Shakespeare and the early English dramatists, creates a 
 world of wider horizons, of higher aspirations, in which the sense 
 of individual freedom and right is infinitely expanded. The most 
 conservative cannot fence themselves from contact with it, how- 
 ever alien by discipline and long habit from any great innovation 
 or departure from severe standards of form. Tieck, when he 
 first met Goethe at Jena in 1798, set him to the study of Ben 
 Jonson, Marlowe, and others of the Elizabethan dramatists, 
 causing the great author of Faust to lay aside other works, as 
 some of his friends thought, to their detriment; and composed 
 and self-sustained as Goethe was, he was not able to resist the 
 influence, and it certainly affected powerfully both the spirit 
 and the form of his later work. 
 
 Some deltoid rivers in India capriciously change their 
 channel, divide, and seem to return upon themselves. So it may 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 497 
 
 be said of German romanticism as drawing inspiration from 
 England, and sending it back in double streams to solicit further 
 returns of influence, till the exact amount of benefit given and 
 received becomes very difficult to appraise. Goethe's Gotz von 
 Berlichingen stimulated Scott, who also derived some hints from 
 the most romantic parts of Meister ; but Scott, again, influenced 
 Goethe, and very powerfully influenced the German poets and 
 novelists who succeeded him. And this mutual influence was 
 possible, because there were strongly in force certain currents of 
 tendency that were universal and inclusive. When Herder 
 began to collect his ."Stimmung der Volker," he showed him- 
 self the true continuator of the romantic influence; and the spirit 
 of " Nathan," as we have seen, is, in spite of its didacticism, pene 
 trated by a fine and enlarged humanity, that makes it romantic, 
 and a gathering of the voices of the peoples also. Had it 
 not been so, its didacticism had dragged its poetic flower under 
 water altogether, and destroyed all its bloom and freshness. 
 
 " German romanticism and English laking," says a good 
 authority, " are one. Their origin is the same. They are the 
 products of one wide-working cause. They are the children of 
 reaction, and that reaction not single, but double : reaction first 
 against the over-refinement of the French culture of Louis XIV., 
 secondly, against the over-excitement of the French Revolution 
 of 1792. Percy in England began the reaction against the first, 
 in his ballads, and influenced Wordsworth and Scott, Burger and 
 Uhland. But the Germans were not content to drink at the 
 English stream alone. Having escaped from French unities, 
 Gottsched rules, &c., they began in earnest a new chase after 
 nature, and carried their curiosity to many fields. . . . From 
 the days of Herder to the present hour the 'Voices of the 
 People ' have been gathered together in Germany, from the north 
 and from the south, and from the east and from the west. The 
 mighty heart of Gottfried Herder called around him every sweet 
 echo of every age and every time. Humanity was his watch- 
 word, as indeed it may be said to be the all-comprehensive 
 watchword of German literature now." 
 
 The earlier German Romantic School was strong and had a 
 great work to do, in so far as it sought to carry into true applica- 
 tion these principles, so well revealed, though probably not in all 
 their applications consciously realised, by Lessing and Herder. 
 
 2 I 
 
498 THE ROMANTIC ELEMENT IN 
 
 On the one hand, it had to testify against the excesses of the 
 " Aufklamng,'' which sought, as more recent forms of agnosticism 
 do now seek, to close up certain avenues of the soul, by denying 
 the legitimacy or the validity of any light flowing from them in 
 the eye of reason ; a point on which Lessing never was at one 
 with the Aufklarung — always reserving, amidst his keen logic 
 and his attacks on this and that form, a certain religious reality, 
 whose validity to the soul was indeed its own attestation of use 
 and power. And this is why he never could become the mere 
 scomer, escaping from the real problem amid the flash and the 
 smoke of his own wit, as too many other sceptics have done. In 
 this line, then, there certainly was work to do in Germany — a 
 great testimony to be raised in art and literature, against influ- 
 ences which could not have failed in the long run to dry up at 
 least some of the sources of art and poetry. The Romantic 
 School, in its later form, confounded a religious reality with a 
 dead s)rmbol ; but so far as Tieck, Novalis, and their friends 
 upheld the religious sentiment as an essential element in a great 
 national life, wherein true culture and art were to have free scope, 
 we cannot but regard them as the preachers of a great idea. 
 Tieck is the most efficient in his expression of it, though we 
 have to deduct much on account of individual temperament and 
 constitution in his case ; but he has a historical place in German 
 literature mainly on this account. No man was ever more alive 
 to the special penalties that attend the artist in the way of 
 narrowing or effacing real sympathies, while creating a factitious 
 order of sympathies and needs ; and there can be little doubt, 
 we think, after what we have written, that the distinct influence 
 of the earlier Romantic School can be traced in the greater 
 patriots of the Wars of Independence — Schleiermacher, Fichte, 
 Amdt, and others. While Goethe, as the pure artist, was study- 
 ing antiquities and endeavouring to make himself serviceable to 
 Napoleon, the Romanticists were at least in earnest, and desirous 
 to act for their country ; and if Lessing had lived then — in spite 
 of his strong rebukes to fussy and offensive "patriots" — he 
 would assuredly have been with them as against a tyrant and 
 French rule ! This distinction, or rather opposition, between 
 the tendencies of the mere artist and the duties of the man, was 
 one which had a chief place in the creed of the Romantic School 
 as against classicism — which has always tended to absorb the 
 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 499 
 
 man in the artist — and also against the art-poiir-art idea which 
 has been so associated with all forms of classicism. This idea 
 receives many forms of expression from Tieck. In the following 
 passage we have perhaps the most efficient utterance of it : — 
 
 " He who has once been intoxicated with the seductive sweet- 
 ness of a beautiful art may be looked on as a lost man in practi- 
 cal life. He becomes more and more absorbed in his own secret 
 pleasures, and finds at last that he has no heart to feel with his 
 fellow-men, or hand or will to labour for them. In our admira- 
 tion of the work of man — a product of mere self-pleasing imagin- 
 ation — we become forgetful of the whole to which it belongs ; we 
 forget humanity itself. For my own part, I confess that I am 
 shocked at the folly I have been guilty of when I reflect on my 
 whole life devoted to the one luxury of music ! . . . I cannot 
 escape the knowledge that thousands are suffering under as many 
 kinds of affliction ; that every vibration of the pendulum is like 
 the stroke of a sword for some human creature ; that the whole 
 world, indeed, is crying out loudly for help ! Yet here I sit 
 amusing myself with pleasant music like some child playing with 
 bubbles, as if I knew nothing of the grand earnestness of the life 
 around me, or of the death that lies before me in the future. 
 The luxurious emotions of the artist may triumph over the com- 
 mon claims and interests of humanity. I may forget that I am 
 a man, in my zealous strivings to be an artist." 
 
 If we would do the Romantic School justice, we must view it in" 
 the light of the ideal that inspired it, not in that of the excesses 
 into which it fell ; and as this ideal was efficient to influence 
 practical conduct in a time of great danger and perplexity, and 
 suffering, we have already a powerful testimony that it was not a 
 mere fantastic " dressing-up of old worn-out trumpery." In 
 briefly tracing out, as we have done, the long life of Ludwig 
 Tieck, we have detected a vein of fantastic and fanciful extrava- 
 gance that is not aided by the cynicism and satire which often ac- 
 companied it ; but, along with this, a high and noble purpose, 
 which recognised constantly that in view of a true art man must 
 not be absolutely insulated and emasculated even by the flowery 
 chains of art, and must faithfully fulfil the duties of daily life, if 
 he would not become cold, remote, and inefficient. This was the 
 side of romanticism which was specifically illustrated in the later 
 career of Uhland, and in the lives of Korner and Arndt. 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND 
 POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
" The French people have completely failed to appreciate Germany through 
 paying attention only to its art, which is but one face of its intellectual 
 activity : for complete comprehension of it, other two faces must be carefully 
 conned — those, namely, of its religion and its philosophy." — Heine, De 
 V Allemagne, 
 
 ' ' A disciple of Confucius, named Tsze-loo, asked on one occasion what 
 constituted an ideal man. The master said, ' The cultivation of himself in 
 reverential carefiilness. ' ' And is this all ? ' asked Tsze-loo. ' He cultivates 
 himself,' was the reply, 'so as to give rest to others.' 'And is this all?' 
 again asked Tsze-loo. The master said, ' He cultivates himself so as to give 
 rest to the people. ' . ■ . Even Youri and Shun [earlier sages] were still 
 solicitous about this." — Confucian Analects, xiv., xv. 
 
If there is any truth in the sentence we have quoted from 
 Heine as a motto to this chapter, we may well hope to find it 
 exemplified in the Wars of Independence, and the pecuUar part 
 philosophical and religious ideas played in that great movement, 
 which has well teen called Germany's " Second Reformation." If 
 we look faithfully at the chief inducing causes of Germany's pros- 
 tration — her loss of unity arising, in great degree, from her sub- 
 jection to foreign impressions, her lack of conviction in the sur- 
 render to a false cosmopolitanism — and then consider the means 
 by which at last her freedom was achieved, we shall be com- 
 pelled to admit that the consideration of philosophical and 
 religious elements is essential to any true comprehension of her 
 history at that period. The cosmopolitan impulse, with a sensa- 
 tional dogmatism for its back-ground, was found inefficient to 
 supply motives to noble patriotic action; and the one thing 
 necessary was to awaken the individual conscience to a sense of 
 duty to God and to fellow-men. 
 
 The worship of the individual and of nature as enshrined in 
 him, which constituted the gospel of Rousseau, was found com- 
 patible with such a dogmatism as in the hands of Wolf could 
 venture on separating altogether the sanctions of morality and 
 religion. At one wrench the world of belief, frozen hard at the 
 touch of dogmatism, was separated from the world of practice. 
 The pietists, who had before this offered their most efficient pro- 
 test against the tendencies of the time, saw in Wolf's deliver- 
 ances disastrous tokens of coming disintegration. Their instincts 
 were right, though the part they took in prosecuting Wolf was 
 not prudent, inasmuch as extreme courses always breed reaction, 
 as was the result in this case. Mr Maurice has well said on this 
 point : — 
 
 " Apparently Wolf was doing more than any contemporary philo- 
 sopher to disconnect knowledge from life — to make men into walking 
 books. An instinct that this would be the effect of his labours seems 
 to have set Francke and the German pietists of the day in deadly 
 
504 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 hostility to him. We may cherish the hope that if Francke had been 
 left to himself, his good sense or his faith in the truths which he him- 
 self proclaimed would have hindered him from taking any steps- to 
 silence Wolf." * 
 
 Wolf was not silenced ; and though under the scrutiny of Less- 
 ing and others the fatal defects of his system were efficiently 
 exposed, its influence 'for a considerable period remained in a 
 very peculiar manner, preparing the way for seeds which were 
 soon to be sown. Some kinds of artificially-reared flowers are said 
 to grow better from frequent transplanting, and so French thought 
 and French ways took extreme developments when transferred 
 to German lands. Everything native and simple came to be 
 held in disrespect ; everything foreign and imported took a higher 
 value from the mere fact of its being so. The national judgment 
 seemed paralyzed, and a greedy pursuit of pleasure led the way 
 to frightful frivolity. The Germans, naturally so simple, brave, 
 and open, threatened to surpass the nation from whom they bor- 
 rowed. The sense of union was impaired. No man trusted his 
 fellow, as of old ; and even the sentiment of political freedom 
 waxed fainter and more faint. " Enlightenment had been doing 
 its work, and frivolity in the upper classes, and coarseness in the 
 lower, met half way, and brought about a life estranged from 
 God, natural, earthy, sensuous." Instead of pride in being Ger- 
 mans, the aim was now to be cosmopolitans. The learned were 
 above the weakness of a paltry patriotism, and sought satisfac- 
 tion in their studies, boasting of their suffrages as citizens of the 
 world, and laughing at the aims of the few who had glimmerings 
 of the truth, and gave their warnings with mild seriousness. A 
 great preacher deemed it right to prove in the pulpit, when 
 preaching on the text, — " So, then, ye are no more strangers and 
 pilgrims, but fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of 
 God," — that " the cosmopolitan is not only a stranger and a pil- 
 grim in his own country, but everywhere ; for he has no strong 
 bond of union with anyone — he is wanting in love, devotion, and 
 sympathy, and has no certain sphere of action." Action in any 
 shape for the public good, passed out of fashion. The only ideas 
 that had scope were speculative : each man looked on himself as 
 free to develop his system as he pleased ; the only coin that had 
 
 * Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 438. 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 505 
 
 had good currency was pleasure, and each one was held right to 
 seek it in his own way. 
 
 Schleiermacher wrote to Reimer : " The universal dissipation 
 is frightful, and one sees on all sides a depth of baseness and 
 cowardice to which but a few individuals, and especially the king 
 and queen, afford a striking contrast.'' And Jung Stilling, about 
 1790, pointed out that pride, luxury, and especially the lament- 
 able immorality and godlessness that prevailed, were the real 
 causes of the Revolution, and he then went on to ask : " Now, 
 my honest German fellow-citizens, lay your hands upon your 
 hearts, give glory to God, and say truly, is not the class of people 
 I have been describing very numerous, and therefore formidable, 
 especially among the learned and people of rank ? Unmeasured 
 pride, unbridled sensuality, a secret aversion to Christ and his 
 religion, and a fearful indifference to God, are at once the sources 
 and characteristics of the revolutionary spirit. Titan-like, it pre- 
 sumes to assail the throne of God, and, therefore, it is not likely 
 it should submit to the authority of man. Let us first take the 
 beam out of our own eye before we venture to take the mote out 
 of the eyes of our rulers." 
 
 Through all phases of activity the deleterious influence could 
 be traced. Morality had now to recognise itself as dependent on 
 philosophy ; but a morality which is regarded as inseparably 
 bound up with philosophy has never deeply influenced the masses 
 in any time or country. As Heine says again : " Philosophy 
 can do little for morality, and still less for religion; and the 
 moment that religion solicits the aid of philosophy its ruin is 
 inevitable." * Hence the coarseness which characterised the 
 lower orders of Germany, while the learned were busy in the 
 search for " Enlightenment." If ever science had a chance of 
 proving itself equal to supply the place of religion, or substantially 
 to aid it, now assuredly it had that chance. But those who had 
 most leisure for the pursuit of science and philosophy were those 
 who had least either of religious reverence or humility, always 
 the springs of noble public action. Hence the very gifts which 
 were special to Germany — her keenness for new thought, her 
 subjectivity, and her love of nature — turned into weights to drag 
 her down when they became mere mediums for an inroad of 
 foreign influences. Separation and opposition become more and 
 
 * Religion and Philosophy in Germany, p. 128. 
 
So6 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 more apparent. In the political field the same phenomena 
 speedily proclaimed themselves. Each power and little state 
 fancied it could stand alone. At worst, it could shelter itself 
 under the wing of a stronger kingdom. The evil principle 
 that thus tainted political Ufe, when reflected back from high 
 places, showed itself in exaggerated forms in all social and per- 
 sonal developments. The separation of Prussia from the alliance 
 of states which struggled against the revolution and against Napo- 
 leon, as its heir, was only a marked and ominous sign of a gene- 
 ral characteristic. So long as Prussia thus held aloof she 
 suffered; she began to recover herself the moment that she 
 became the leader of the national enthusiasm against the French 
 domination. 
 
 For a time the French influence was almost omnipotent, and 
 it was only detrimental. In setting up a worship of humanity it 
 canonised the individual, but in the very process it robbed him 
 of his most attractive and beautiful features. When the Revolu- 
 tionists, in their wild fever of blood, compared the brutal Marat 
 to our Saviour, they only uttered a prophecy. It was a symbol 
 of that putting of humanity into the place of God, which has 
 ever since been the awful doom of French thought and French 
 life generally. From Rousseau to Renan, the root of the 
 apostacy lies here — the determined rejection of mystery, while 
 yet humanity is made more contradictory, and inexplicable, and 
 mysterious than are all the puzzles of revelation. A very dis- 
 tinguished Roman-Catholic woman, when she heard of the more 
 recent developments of French philosophy, how by it humanity 
 was being made its own god, cried out with warmth, " What a 
 dirty god he must be, to be sure." France, by her rebellion 
 against mystery, by her determination to have nothing to do with 
 the unseen and spiritual, and by her all too commanding and 
 wayward fancy, has constructed a religion without a God ; a 
 philosophy without conscience ; and has formed a State without 
 recognition of any enduring, because spiritual sanctions. 
 
 And at this time Germany was deeply experiencing the weak- 
 ening effect of such ideas on national health — was very nearly 
 drawing upon herself the fate which has more recently overtaken 
 France. " We wish," writes someone about the end of the 
 eighteenth century, "to protect our towns and territories from 
 the attacks of the French, but we and our minds have been taken 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 507 
 
 captive by them ; witness our manners, language, and dress. We 
 have, so to speak, become French inside and out, and yet we 
 regard the French as our enemies. No one of any sense can 
 dispute that when men's minds are taken captive, and they are 
 so addicted to foreign ways, very few will stand up zealously in 
 defence of faith and country. Many have no other desire than 
 to be subject to foreign domination." 
 
 Those who had most deeply drunk at this poisonous stream 
 were not slow to prophesy the extinction of other waters, from 
 which the souls of men had drawn strength and hope for genera- 
 tions. "We must not relax our efforts, and then in twenty 
 years' time the name of Jesus, in a religious sense, will no more 
 be heard." So wrote Beister to F. H. Jacobi in one of the 
 closing years of last century ; and the words are significant his- 
 torically, because they express what was more than a personal or 
 party feeling when they were uttered. Seldom, it is true, did the 
 sentiment come clothed in words so plain, and so calculated to 
 disturb all the convictions and feelings on religious matters 
 which had twined themselves around what was most noble and 
 prized in the history of Germany. But none the less largely did 
 they represent the feelings of the more cultured and powerful. 
 Even where assent would not have been given, or under reserve, 
 there was a leaven at work very much alien to the " simple living 
 and high-thinking " which had combined to raise Germany to her 
 honoured place among European nations. That his own land 
 had been the cradle of the Reformation, when a new impulse had 
 been given to European progress, and a new right won for the 
 individual soul and intellect, was a distinction of which a German 
 man could scarce help being proud. But now this reformation 
 work, if glanced at at all, was regarded very much either from a 
 poetical or sentimental point of view, or valued only because of 
 the personal benefits it had conferred. Germany, in seeking to 
 extend her influence by assimilating freely the thought and 
 culture of other peoples, lost the firmness of her own foothold, 
 and in the first instance was stripped and despoiled, that she 
 might regain her position to occupy it more worthily. Instead 
 of the fulfilment of Beister's arrogant prophecy, exactly twenty 
 years after it was uttered came the defeat of Jena, which was 
 the first really telling stroke of that scourging which led Germany 
 back to something of the simplicity and self sacrifice that had 
 
So8 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 formerly characterised her — setting open afresh the springs of 
 personal and religious life. 
 
 Napoleon's victories over Germany were thus not won by the 
 sword alone. He was the heir of the Revolution, and inherited 
 the evil influences that went to make it what it was ; and by 
 means of these influences, which Germany had so fully appro- 
 priated, she had been weakened and disunited. A long series of 
 invasions of ideas and habits had paved the way for the inroad 
 of Napoleon's soldiers. Far more subtle and more powerful 
 these than any infantry or cavalry. 
 
 The idea of fate or destiny, on which the Napoleonic power 
 rested, was only calculated to sow the seeds of political vice and 
 of social disorder. It re-erected into the ideal good the pleasure 
 of the individual, and emancipated the conscience from all 
 restraints, save only the restraints oi force. It scouted at belief 
 in the unseen, and reduced religious faith to a sentiment, whose 
 best use was to be chained to the wheels of a greedy political 
 expediency. 
 
 Napoleon had made the French people a nation of fatalists, 
 and not only the French; through a long course of years 
 Germany, too, had been subdued. She had tasted of the poison 
 and staggered like a drunken man. It was in these circum- 
 stances that Napoleon followed up the invasion of French ideas 
 by his unscrupulous legions. In defiance of pledges, he marched 
 into Germany, throttled three-fourths of it, and at last laid his 
 foot on the neck of proud Prussia. Then the nation writhed 
 under its humiliation, and its greater men — its truer heroes — 
 began to call the people to repentance, — called them to behold 
 the marvellous manner in which God was turning their own 
 pride and vanity into scourges for them. " French ideas, French 
 sensualism in life, and French sensationalism in philosophy, we 
 must disown once for all, and return upon the simplicity and 
 trustfulness which were our chief characteristics of old time." 
 
 Napoleon, by carrying his arms into Germany, awakened it 
 from the torpor it was falling into as well as France, in the arms 
 of a common sensualism ; and thus, as Perthes says. Napoleon 
 was an " instrument in the hand of God ; and when he had done 
 his work, like other worn-out tools, he was thrown into a 
 corner." 
 
 It was not till Germany's best men came to see clearly that 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 509 
 
 the preliminary battle must be waged against spiritual enemies 
 that there was the remotest hope of success. Happily they did 
 soon awaken to this fact, and that they did awaken is the reason 
 why Europe was not wholly enslaved. Schleiermacher's keen 
 desire to occupy a professor's chair was originated and stimu- 
 lated by the firm conviction that a new generation must be bom 
 of the Spirit, if the country was to be free and have a great and 
 worthy future. This may be looked on as a Christian and holy 
 war, said Arndt, for if Napoleon rules much longer, freedom, 
 virtue, and justice will vanish from the earth. Arndt had seen 
 Napoleon's legions perish before the forces of Russia, and noted 
 the part which religion played in the patriotic eiforts of the 
 Czar and the Russian people, and in his lofty enthusiasm he 
 wrote : — 
 
 " The French will not be conquered by the usual warlike prepara- 
 tions, nor by the arts and calculations of human foresight, nor the 
 most skilled applications of physical and mechanical means . Buona- 
 parte arid his Frenchmen bear a charmed life against debased views. 
 They must fall by means of lofty views, and lofty views means trust 
 in God, devotion to our country, an ambition to live and die for the 
 sake of honour : it means faith in virtue and in the people." 
 
 Fichte, the philosopher, in the same spirit begged to be 
 allowed to proceed with the army, that he might strengthen the 
 patriotic fervour of the soldiers by his addresses ; iirmly believ- 
 ing that no mere machinery of 'military effort would suffice, but 
 only a living faith in God, begetting complete trust in men's 
 hearts towards one another ; and in this spirit, after the battle of 
 Jena, he was ready to lead his students to the war. The meek- 
 tempered but lion-hearted Schamhorst reached the same conclu- 
 sion, asserting that batdes could no longer be won by the military 
 alone — they must be aided by the love of the citizens for king, 
 for country, and freedom. The moral principle, he said, must be 
 strengthened, by giving the soldier the feeHng of being part of 
 a whole, instead of extinguishing it by degrading punishments. 
 Even the rough Bliicher, in the fits of humility which always 
 seized him after a more than ordinarily daring exploit, repu- 
 diated praise for himself, spoke of his children, his soldiers, and 
 of their wondrous daring, of Gneisenau's discretion, and the great 
 mercy of God. Schleiermacher, with his intuitions, became one 
 of the chief agencies in quickening the religious pulse j but had 
 
5IO GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 it not been for his influence on the side of politics, his preaching 
 might, with justice, have been declared more of a temporary 
 medicine or restorative than a settled and supporting diet. But 
 he keenly felt the need of awakening the political spirit, and 
 versed in Greek lore as he was, he found one avenue by which 
 he could appeal to it, and this he most effectually used. His 
 preaching, freed from dogmatic fixture, was the fitter for this 
 end. However loose his doctrine, he spoke like a patriot ; the 
 very want of dogmatic hold helped him to command the people's 
 sympathies. He was a struggler, too, like them, and he keenly 
 communicated to them the sense of this ; just as our own 
 Maurice caught the sympathies of the English working men as 
 much by the marks of labour and defeat and sorrow upon him, 
 as by what of clear knowledge he contrived to convey to them. 
 Schleiermacher wrought bravely to imbue the patriotic conscience 
 with a sense of high sanctions, and to this extent he deserves the 
 place which Baur has assigned to him. 
 
 But others were even more powerful than Schleiermacher on his 
 own ground. There was Frederick Perthes, for instance, a man 
 of the noblest character and splendid intellect. Never despising 
 trade, even when he took up the sword as a patriot, he saw in 
 bookselling his proper means to make literature, science, and 
 philosophy firm starting-points from which to work for national 
 unity and religious regeneration. 
 
 " Has not Germany, for many years, been the general Academy of 
 Sciences for all Europe ? " asks Perthes. " All that was discovered 
 or expounded, felt or thought, in or out of Germany, was at once 
 generalised by the Germans, and elaborated into a form which might 
 further the progress of humanity. But in so far as we Germans had 
 any vitality, we had it not for ourselves alone, but for Europe. Alas ! 
 we have never known how to use our treasures ; we have always 
 devoted ourselves to knowledge for its own sake. We have never 
 founded those national institutions which would have a tendency to 
 keep alive the feeling of national honour, and which might preserve 
 us from the aggression of foreign enemies. That which we think, and 
 have thought, can only be real and influential when we shall have 
 learned to act as well as to think.'' 
 
 In this spirit Perthes readily gave up his all, and not only took 
 arms for the free town of Hamburg, but, with wise caution and 
 extraordinary energy, fanned the dead or quickly-expiring flame 
 of patriotism in other breasts j whilst Yorck, whom Frederick the 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 511 
 
 Great had driven out of his army because he had the heart to 
 say plainly that plunder was theft, carried the idea into the 
 practical training of the soldiery, rousing their sense of honour, 
 instead of maintaining a mechanical disciphne of abuse and 
 punishment; and he considered it one of the chief merits of 
 Kant that he so clearly laid down the requirements of duty. 
 And, undoubtedly, Yorck thus seized on what was a providential 
 element among the many influences which helped to regenerate 
 Germany. 
 
 A powerful awakening of the individual conscience to a sense 
 of duty, honour, and faith was thus held to be a necessary for 
 any true reformation of the national life. To Napoleon's idea of 
 destiny and his immoral habit of pretending to honour all 
 religions in order that he might make them politically serviceable 
 to himself, the more clear-headed of the Germans came to see 
 that they must vigorously oppose the idea of Providence and 
 true faith in God, in immortality, and in virtue. And seldom in 
 the course of history has a great national revival traced itself so 
 distinctly to a few individuals of more than ordinary energy and 
 self-denial — individuals, the majority of whom, it is true, were in 
 high places, but some of whom derived and could only derive 
 their influence from greatness of character alone. The spirit 
 that rose at last to thwart and finally make an end of the 
 ambitious pretensions of Napoleon was so directly the outcome 
 of personal resource, that the history of the period is more than 
 that of most, a study of the inner purposes and aspirations of 
 individuals. 
 
 But all this was to some extent rendered possible by what 
 philosophy had itself already achieved. The better time for 
 Germany was prophesied in its thought. The first decisive 
 campaign against sensationalism and French influence was dis- 
 tinctly fought in the philosophic field, and there the enemy was 
 signally worsted. Kant began his philosophic labours just about 
 the time of Wolf's death ; and his whole strength was directed 
 to filling up the breach between knowledge and duty, between 
 belief and practice, that Wolf had been so largely instrumental 
 in making. Whatever may be said generally of the stern 
 rationalism of Kant's process, he was synthetic where Wolf was 
 disruptive or destructive. In removing the idea of duty from 
 every possibility of being reduced to something contingent or 
 
SI2 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 conditional, he inflicted a death-wound on the sensational philo- 
 sophy. Kant recovered all the ground that had seemed to have 
 been lost by the stern limits put upon the Pure Reason, so as to 
 make an end of unedifying dogmatism, by the " genuine Prussian 
 violence," as Schmidt calls it, of his Practical Reason. In deal- 
 ing, as he did, with the various forms of questioning as to how 
 God can be justified with respect to the happiness of His 
 creatures by maintaining that the ■ world does not exist that 
 mortal creatures may be happy, but only that duty may be done, 
 he laid deep in philosophic thought the foundation of the new 
 reform, after which Germany was already sighing, weary of the 
 trammels which French thought had twined round some of her 
 greatest men — even round the neck of Frederick the Great him- 
 self. Kant rendered into philosophic form, under his " Categorical 
 Imperative," the idea which asserted itself afresh in the German 
 mind when the sense of its degradation under Napoleon broke 
 fully upon it. And he, too, may thus be held to have a place 
 among the regenerators of Germany. Certainly, most of those 
 who distinguished themselves in the Wars of Independence had 
 earnestly studied him, and those who had been most deeply 
 influenced by his thinking proved the most devout and patriotic 
 men. Let us quote Schmidt's own words : — 
 
 " The man who, at the age of twenty-two, declared that he had 
 the power as well as the purpose to cast down the previously exist- 
 ing philosophy, and laboured for this end without ceasing till he 
 attained the age of fifty-seven, and then suddenly fought his chief 
 batties, which put an end to the old literary regime, as did the battles 
 of the Seven Years' War, had in him something of violence, though 
 it might lie hidden under modesty. The Transcendental Idealism 
 cut through the Wolfian Philosophy as Prussia broke down the 
 German Empire. It did not make an end of it by one stroke, btit 
 drove a wedge into it, the working inward of which forms, even at 
 
 this day, the most essential feature of our intellectual life The 
 
 influence of the doctrine [of duty, not happiness] to which Kant gave 
 so sharp a formula, was felt in the times of need as an animating 
 power. The race of East Prussia, which in the War of Independence 
 pressed around the Government with offerings of self-sacrificing 
 devotion, was formed by Kant, and inspired by his teaching and 
 example." 
 
 This element of philosophic force from the time of Kant has 
 been working with wonderful results right through upon practi- 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 513 
 
 cal life, and in this way bringing the heretofore dissociated 
 segments of the national life into quiet and prevailing harmony. 
 Kant, indeed, has hardly had the recognition he ought to have 
 had, as being perhaps the most potent force in awakening 
 Germany, and reuniting it against Napoleon, and— may we add ? 
 — restoring to it a true basis of ««dogmatic religion, out of 
 which a freer fabric of dogma, might again arise, while yet main- 
 taining the necessity for some association of the religious and 
 the political life of peoples. German philosophers, since his 
 time, have all been fond of applying their more abstract ideas to 
 politics, and find there very often a balance, a corrective, and a 
 test. The watchwords won and raised up in the Wars of 
 Independence have in truth been so prevailing, that no late 
 thinker has been able entirely to escape from their influence. 
 And however far the later thinkers of Germany may have 
 travelled from Kant in developing portions of his system, they 
 return to kindly unity with him on these more practical points. 
 Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the rest, can prove well that Kant 
 is justified of his children. Take these three instances from 
 extreme points of the speculative circle — Fichte, Hegel, and the 
 late Richard Rothe, well known as the friend and companion of 
 Schenkel in the formation and development of the Protestanten- 
 Verein. Look at Hegel first. 
 
 Hegel's philosophy, in its higher form, is so abstract that few 
 Englishmen would care to study it. But happily Hegel was not 
 a mere abstract thinker, and he has taken care to illustrate his 
 system by reference to history and politics. All his more 
 popular works, indeed, have distinct political bearings; he 
 was never tired of elaborating his idea of the State. He was 
 fond of the political work of art, a phrase which to many may 
 sound a paradox, but which has a very specific meaning in 
 reference to all his writings. To show how he never ceases to 
 hold the hand of the master Kant, his great point as a politician 
 is, that a statesman should above all endeavour to bring the 
 national conscience, in its several manifestations, political, moral, 
 and religious, into entire harmony. There can be no true 
 society till this is approximated. Revolution in one form or 
 other is latent otherwise ; and the nation, unrestful and subject 
 to excitements from without, will be almost at the mercy of 
 foreign influences. And was not this the very position of his 
 
 2 K 
 
514 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 own country in the end of last century ? French ideas revolu- 
 tionised Germany, and then the French, in the heat of their 
 Revolution, desired to carry it into Germany; and therefore 
 Hegel, with fine insight, writes : — 
 
 " It is a false principle that the shackles of right and freedom 
 should be stripped off without the previous deliverance of the con- 
 science — that a revolution is possible without reformation. Until 
 religion is reconciled with political freedom periodic revolutions are 
 inevitable. The problem which France has been striving to solve is 
 the accomplishment of a political revolution without a reformation of 
 the Church, while the proper course is precisely the reverse. The 
 position of matters is happier in Germany, where there is no such 
 gulf of separation between the secular and the religious consciences, 
 and where there is a real co-operation of the people in the work of the 
 State."* 
 
 And, as might be expected in such a system as this of Hegel, 
 the whole political influence finds its source in the sentiment of 
 commonness, which has its foundation in the spirit of the family. 
 Therefore he writes : — 
 
 " The Spirit of the Family — the Penates — form one substantial 
 being, as much as the Spirit of a People in the State ; and morality 
 in both cases consists in a feeling, a consciousness and a will, not 
 limited to individual personality and interest, but embracing the com- 
 mon interests of the members generally. But this unity is, in the 
 case of the family, essentially one oi feeling, not advancing beyond 
 the limits of the merely natural. The piety of the family relation 
 should be respected in the highest degree by the State ; by its means 
 the State obtains as its members individuals who are already moral (for 
 as mere persons they are not), and who in uniting to form a State 
 bring with them the sound basis of a political edifice — ^the capacity 
 of feeling one with a Whole." 
 
 And here, let us say, Hegel merely develops and exhibits, 
 from his own point of view, the great doctrine of Fichte. Fichte, 
 rejecting totally the juridical notion of the State, laid it down 
 that the true State must be based on a recognition, either by in- 
 stinct or by reason, of the true life,|in which the personal life of 
 man is dedicated to that of his race, so that the one is lost and 
 forgotten in the other. " To forget oneself in others : not in 
 others, however, regarded in z. personal character where there is 
 
 * This same passage is quoted in a very interesting article on " Hegel as a Politician," by 
 J. Scot Henderson, in the Fortnightly Review. 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 515 
 
 still nothing but individuality, but in others regarded as the race, 
 is the duty of man ; " and to lead its citizens either by partial 
 servitude, if need be, or, better still, by freedom, to the full per- 
 ception of this, is the business of the true State, which he defines, 
 again, as an artistked, rather than an artificial family. It is an 
 " artistic institution," he holds, which, if it entertains purposes 
 for any beyond its own citizens, can only profitably do so in the 
 light of the whole human race. " It therefore becomes neces- 
 sary, first, that all individuals, without exception, should be 
 taken into equal consideration by the State; and, second, that 
 every individual, with all his individual powers, without excep- 
 tion or reserve, should be taken into equal consideration" Can 
 we doubt that these ideas, preached by men like Fichte, did 
 much to overflow the lines of class distinction, and draw kings 
 and people close to each other in the Wars of Independence? 
 and can we not see how the idea of Fatherland to the German 
 even now stands somehow identified in idea with the good of 
 the human race ? It was in the Wars of Independence that the 
 identification of the Fatherland with the idea of humanity took 
 most definite form. Fichte, in his " Reden an die Deutschen " 
 (Addresses to the German People), says : — 
 
 " Even the stranger in foreign lands pleads with you, in so far as 
 he really understands himself and knows his true interest aright. 
 Yes, there are in every nation minds who can never believe that the 
 great promises to the human race of a Kingdom of Law, of Reason, 
 and of Truth, are but vain and idle delusions, and who consequently 
 cherish the conviction that the present iron time is but a point in the 
 progress onward towards a better state. These, and with them the 
 whole later races of humanity, trust in you. A large portion of 
 these trace their lineage to us ; others have received from us religion, 
 and others culture. Those plead with us, by the common soil of our 
 Fatherland, the cradle of our infancy, which they have left to us free, 
 — these by the culture which they have accepted from us as the 
 pledge of a higher good, to maintain for their sakes the proud posi- 
 tion which has hitherto been ours, to guard with jealous watchfulness 
 against even the possible disappearance from the great confedera- 
 tion of a newly risen humanity, of that member which is far more 
 important to them than all others ; that so, when they need our coun- 
 sel our example, our co-operation in the pursuit and attainment of 
 the true end of this Earthly Life, they shall not look round for us in 
 vain. . . . Providence itself, if we may venture to speak so, and the 
 Divine Plan in the creation of the Human Race, — which, indeed, 
 
Si6 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 only exists that it may be understood of men, and by men be 
 fashioned into Reality, — plead with you to save their honour and 
 their existence.'' 
 
 And this is merely a popular application of doctrines which 
 were rigidly deduced and laid down by Fichte, in those lectures 
 in his course on the Present Age which dealt with the Absolute 
 Form of the State. 
 
 " What," he asks, " does the State hold as real representative of 
 the race ? All its citizens, without a single exception. Were there 
 some Individuals, either not taken into account at all in the common 
 purpose, or not taken into account with all their powers, while the 
 rest were included, — then the former would enjoy all the advantages 
 of the union without bearing the attendant burdens, and thus there 
 would arise serious inequality. Only where all are, without exception, 
 taken into account, is there equality. Consequently, in this new con- 
 stitution, the individuality of each absolutely disappears in the com- 
 munity of All ; and each one receives back his contribution to the 
 common cause, strengthened by .the united powers of all the rest. 
 The purpose of the isolated individual is his own enjoyment, and he 
 uses his power as the means to the attainment of it ; but the purpose 
 of the Race is Culture, and the honourable subsistence which is the 
 condition of culture in the State. Each Individual employs his 
 powers not for his own immediate enjoyment, but for the purposes of 
 the Race, and he receives in return the whole united culture of the 
 Race, and together with it his own honourable subsistence. . . . The 
 State is essentially an unseen idea, just as the Race itself has already 
 been described: it is not single individuals, but their continuous rela- 
 tion to each other. . . . The rulers are not the State, but merely citi- 
 zens, like the rest ; there is absolutely no individual character in the 
 State but that of Citizen." 
 
 The Lectures Fichte delivered in 1804, just before the beginning 
 of the strife with Napoleon, were supplemented by the Addresses 
 to the German People some years after ; and the two contain the 
 complete application to politics of Fichte's philosophy. There 
 can be no doubt that the elevated notions of citizenship and of 
 the State proclaimed in them have taken deep hold of the Ger- 
 man mind and heart; and that even now we can trace their in- 
 fluence in recent manifestations of German patriotism. For one 
 thing, it may safely be asserted that there is no country in the 
 world where service of the nation more completely annihilates 
 distinctions, or where class-feelings are held so lightly as actually 
 to vanish at the touch of patriotism, leaving only citizens. 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 517 
 
 Some time ago the Spectator pointed out that the Prussian sol- 
 diery, whilst the best in Europe, is the most poorly paid and 
 rewarded. In one point of view this fully bears out our position. 
 The Prussian is a citizen army, and not a band of hirelings. 
 Much of Prussia's success is undoubtedly due to this. Indeed, 
 might we not say that the difference between German ideas and 
 French feeling and habit here finds sharpest expression ? And 
 might it not be added that in the clear form in which Hegel 
 expresses this idea in all his popular works, he, too, may of right 
 find a place among the regenerators of Germany, in as far as he 
 has called his countrymen back on the ground of reason to devout 
 reverence for simple feelings, out of which originally sprang their 
 greatness ? 
 
 The truth is, that the idea which lies at the root of the politics 
 of German philosophers is distinctly spiritual. The State is 
 unseen — it is an idea, and only its outmost and least effective 
 element can take incarnation to restrain individuals by actual 
 force. We have in this the most potent refutation of the French 
 Imperialist idea, which makes the State a mere engine for minis- 
 tering well-being to individuals or to classes, and this arbitrarily, 
 and therefore by force or injustice ; so that even its bene- 
 volences are frauds — attempts to make the nation overreach 
 itself by setting one part against another, that the pseudo-State 
 (the body of rulers) may serve its own ends. This, which is 
 but another way of expressing the Fichtian or Hegelian politics, 
 is no speculation ; it was actually, sternly realised in France 
 during the reign of the Third Napoleon. Such a State is not, 
 and cannot be, the. agent of justice, for it is founded on the idea 
 of repression, and that not repression of special manifestations 
 for the common good, but repression of true citizenship and 
 national spirit for the ends of individual aggrandisement, which 
 is necessarily but another term for weak and vicious indulgence. 
 Such a State can never be ethical ; and it is only not positively 
 immoral where it exhibits and proves the existence of total inca- 
 pacity for political ideas on the part of its subjects generally ; 
 interpreting the blind and undeveloped spirit of a people to 
 itself, that so it may justify its using of that unenfranchised spirit 
 for its own ends. Napoleon III.'s plebiscite was thus his own 
 absolute condemnation. If it is true, as has been said, that 
 Napoleon III. respected nationality, that was only on theory 
 
Si8 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 and so far as expediency dictated, as the later facts of his hfe too 
 sorrowfully proved. 
 
 It is not intended to be inferred here, of course, that such a 
 State has been realised in Germany. Only, in spite of the Tory- 
 ism of Bismarck and King William, there is really existent in 
 the German people a true political spirit, which compels confi- 
 dence and which makes impossible such absolute distance 
 between the rulers and ruled. The sense of commonness — i.e., 
 apprehension of objects as common to all classes — is recognised, 
 and carried into manifold fruitful relations. Above all, the 
 purity of the family is apprehended in its relation to the State 
 with a more or less clear conception of the principle so admir- 
 ably laid down both by Fichte and Hegel. The family is the 
 foundation of the State ; it is, in short, the State in miniature, 
 the natural State in its first process, and rising into an artificial 
 character, as it comes nearer and nearer to supplying new 
 citizens ; and if its relations are not recognised as carrying any 
 sanction with them, one powerful element of true citizenship 
 has gone. Now, the disregard of the claims of the family in 
 France opens up a large subject into which we cannot enter 
 now ; but the contrast between France and Germany in this 
 regard is notorious. 
 
 Now as to Rothe, our other typical speculative thinker. He 
 entirely declined to regard the State as secular. He was not 
 properly Erastian, for he held the State was not yet moral, 
 although it was in part religious, and therefore not fitted to 
 exercise absolute authority. When once it became tnoral, in his 
 idea, there would be no more Church and State ; but the Church 
 would be merged in the State, which, lifted up to a higher plane, 
 would be transformed into a set of organs for the Christian 
 Church to work by. In fact, Rothe, with Fichte and Hegel, 
 held the State to be but one great family which could find its 
 true ground of consolidation only in the recognition of common- 
 ness, by the reason, as it had at first done by the instinct. In 
 truth, the supervenience of a second instinct of this oneness is, 
 with Rothe, the emergence again of the religious and truly 
 Christian idea under which every form of activity and interest 
 takes its due place, for the sake of the whole. There will then 
 be no need for priests or for dogmas, for humanity's common 
 organisation will be but Christian ministers. Such in brief was 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 519 
 
 Rothe's Erastianism. High-flown it may well seem to more 
 practical minds ; but still there is a germ of truth in it. It is 
 the doctrine of Hegel carried up again into the speculative 
 sphere by a man who was too shy and retiring to come forth 
 and mix in the loud clamour of politics. It has this in common 
 with the idea of the great thinkers who were also fighters in the 
 Wars of Independence, that it recognises no ground of possible 
 purification for the State save through the turning of the indivi- 
 dual heart and conscience towards Christian faith, and the lofty 
 idea of duty and sacrifice which it enshrines, and makes more 
 and more lovely in its associations through the manifold forms 
 of practical activity. Multitudes of other instances and extracts 
 calculated to bear out our idea might be given, had we space. 
 These suffice to show how, since the days of Kant, German 
 philosophy, amid all its destruction of the old dogmas, has 
 never lost sight of a religious element in political life and the 
 need of a recognition of the Divine in the effort after political 
 reconstructions. 
 
 It is because Rothe was of this type, that we have chosen to 
 name him here as a later representative of German thought, in its 
 relation to politics and social life ; for, while he was the friend of 
 Schenkel, and wrought with him for some time in the Protestan- 
 ten-Verein, he soon discovered that his co-workers were going 
 too fast and too far in the direction of annihilating the super- 
 natural. He withdrew from them as far as he could, and in his 
 later works distinctly maintained that while as a scientific philo- 
 sopher he would speculate, as a believer he would always 
 reserve intact the field of the supernatural, as the sphere into 
 which one could return and find rest and spiritual refreshment 
 when the intellect was overcome and beaten back by the blind- 
 ing brightness of the Truth, which thus conquers by its glory, 
 when the human intellect fancies it has won a final triumph. 
 Rothe, doubtless, regretted the part he had taken with wild 
 rationalists, like Schenkel, in their extreme charges against so- 
 called orthodoxy ; and on his very death-bed he begged that 
 Schenkel and others would not revive angry controversy over 
 his grave. Richard Rothe was a true German, daring in specu- 
 lation, yet devout in spirit, and his thoughts must influence men's 
 minds after Schenkel's fiery rhetoric is forgotten. 
 
520 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 From this point of view we discover afresh the significance of 
 those words of Rosenkranz : — 
 
 " The French have the reformation of their rehgious consciousness 
 still in the future ; that of ours is, in all essential points, behind us. 
 In the external outlines of pohtical formalism the French are farther 
 advanced. But since the religious element is the deeper and more 
 comprehensive, the course of history with us must be very different 
 from what it is in France. Nothing, in fact, is further from the 
 truth than the notion that we Germans, in order to be able to pro- 
 gress politically, must necessarily repeat all the phases of the French 
 Revolution from 1789 downwards. Many of us have become so 
 engrossed with the writings of Thiers and Mignet, that we are 
 unable to get beyond those conceptions which in them have become 
 rooted. It will become apparent that we Germans will finally pro- 
 duce not merely a new edition of the French forms, but also another 
 form of constitution from other materials." 
 
 Germany has recently passed through a great crisis. Success, 
 victory, enrichment are sometimes more fatal to national life 
 than are loss and poverty. So it was with Greece and Rome ; 
 so with the nationalities of the ancient eastern world. If now, 
 again, we see in Germany a loosening of ties that a great 
 common cause had made strong ; a tendency to return to a false 
 pride and a false cosmopolitanism, together with " great restless- 
 ness in church life," and "an entire lack of religious home- 
 culture," as Professor Von Schulte assures us — we must, in part, 
 attribute this to peculiarity of position ; and are driven back on 
 the consolation that Germany has already had experience of the 
 antidote, and must once again have recourse to it. It lies in the 
 development of individual earnestness and conviction, together 
 with such patient tolerance as will allow Time to "wrong the 
 wrongers and to render right," as respects all forms that are alien 
 to truth and nature. A return to greater definiteness of religious 
 view is essential to her ; but at the same time she must preserve 
 all that was of permanent value in former developments, that she 
 may unite a liberal fulness of thought and sympathy witli a firm 
 foothold in the great doctrines of Christianity — as a guard, on 
 the one hand, against the vagaries of the individual intellect, and 
 as a witness, on the other, in support of the futility of specula- 
 tion, in itself, to help the religious life, or to aid true national 
 development. 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LIFE. 521 
 
 And if the late remarkable utterance of the Emperor of 
 Germany on this subject has any significance naturally, we can- 
 not but think that it lies in this direction. Few having read his 
 vvdse and pregnant words could fail to connect them with an 
 certain element in the historical development of German 
 nationality; and we are glad to be able to close this volume 
 by the following paragraph from the Spectator: — 
 
 " At the commemoration festival of a religious society connected 
 with the Cathedral in Berlin, the Emperor of Germany spoke a few 
 words, to the following effect : — ' If there is anything capable of act- 
 ing as a stay to us in the life and turmoil of the present time, it is the 
 support alone to be found in Jesus Christ. Let not yourselves, there- 
 fore, be misled, gentlemen, by the tendencies prevailing in the world, 
 especially in our days ; and do not join the great multitude who 
 either entirely leave the Bible out of account, as the only source of 
 truth, or falsely interpret it in their own sense.' This profession of 
 faith rather gained than lost significance, by the strong expression of 
 the desire to respect fully other convictions than his own with which 
 the Emperor followed it up. The sincerity of his own Christian 
 piety is unquestionable. And though it will count for a negative quan- 
 tity among the cultivated Socialists of Germany, it will be regarded 
 by all impartial men as not without significance in a strong-minded 
 realist, — so far as crowned personages can be realists, — who has 
 lived a life of action, danger, and self-reliance. Doubtless this 
 avowal is the expression of one of the chief elements of the Emperor's 
 mental and moral firmness." 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
I.— CHRISTIAN TOBIAS DAMM. 
 
 Christian Tobias Damm— the "Greek oracle of Spreestadt"— 
 whose biography is deeply interesting as well on account of his rela- 
 tions with Winckelmann and Mendelssohn, as on that of his works 
 —was born on the 9th January 1699, at Seithain in Saxony. He 
 studied at Halle, and was successful as a private tutor in various 
 places. In 1730 he became Conrector of the Kolnische Gymnasium 
 at Berhn, in 1742 Prorecktor, and he died 27th May 1778 as the 
 Rector of this institution, having, however, been pensioned off in 
 1766. Besides valuable translations of Homer, Pindar, Cicero, and 
 Pliny's Letters, with Commentaries, which are still in request, he 
 compiled a Standard Greek Lexicon, and wrote some theological 
 works, particularly one on the Epistle of James, which are still held 
 in repute. His was a worthy and laborious life ; but, owing to some- 
 thing in one of his writings, he was accused of Socinian views. 
 His character suffered severely, as well as his peace of mind, through 
 the scandals that arose out of this incident. A multitude of slanders 
 were spread abroad for which there was no foundation ; but it was 
 felt by those interested in the Gymnasium that his usefulness could 
 not but be impaired in that position ; and he was superseded in his 
 post of Rector by one Buschings, whom, for a short period, he was 
 allowed to assist in some portion of the work. Finally, his connec- 
 tion with the Gymnasium terminated altogether. Though he received 
 a small pension in consideration of his long services, nothing could 
 console him for his enforced separation from his pupils. His life was 
 thenceforth one of regrets, and in so far of misery. Though he found 
 many opportunities for private teaching, similar to the engagement 
 he had with Nicolai and Mendelssohn, he never reconciled himself 
 to his circumstances, and we meet with many traces of him in letters 
 and memoirs of the time, which recall the figure of a man whose 
 highest purposes in hfe had been thwarted. We find Mendelssohn 
 writing thus regarding him, after he had been superseded, but before 
 he had wholly retired from teaching : — 
 
 " All that we hear of as darkening the existence of Damm is mere 
 fabrication. He is still retained in his office; but has made a solemn 
 promise not to give the youth any instruction in theology. This, 
 however, he can all the more easily do, in that he has given but 
 little theological instruction for the past ten years. His Correspond- 
 
S26 APPENDIX. 
 
 ence on Homer and Pindar is now ready, and will appear with his 
 portrait. Certainly, I hardly think this bold step was at present 
 advisable. I have seen him often lately, and deeply feel for him. As 
 he himself admits, he has now the additional mortification of finding 
 that his best friends and former scholars pass him by as if they did 
 not know him, and that people who did not know him now point 
 the finger at him ! O Truth, Truth, they who love thee for thyself 
 are but a feeble people. With stones must the man make neighbours, 
 who will live satisfied with thee and thee alone ! " 
 
 When, by-and-by, the tie with the Gymnasium was completely 
 broken off, Damm wandered about an object of pity to all who could 
 be moved by such a spectacle. To his more intimate friends he was 
 wont to pour out his regrets and his griefs that now he had no boys 
 to teach ! He was a true scholar and a true pedagogue of the higher 
 type, and a devoted lover of the truth, who so suffered for it that he 
 was rightly called the " unfortunate Damm." 
 
 II. — HAMANN. 
 
 Johann Georg Hamann was born in Konigsberg on the 27th August 
 1730. His father, Johann Christoph Hamann, was a physician there. 
 His mother was pious, and aimed at making her children such. 
 Johann was sent early to school, and was soon moved from lower to 
 higher ; going to the university of his native town in the summer of 
 1746, where he studied for five years. Having finished his studies, 
 he went to Riga as a tutor. After some time in a family — which 
 turned out to be an excellent one — he became restless, and wandered 
 from place to place, now returning for a short time to Konigsberg, and 
 then leaving it again. In 1756 he went to Berlin, where he became 
 acquainted with Mendelssohn, Sulzer, and Ramler. From Berlin 
 he went to Amsterdam, and after some time he went back to Riga, 
 where he procured a situation in the office of a merchant named 
 Berens. He remained in this position for some time, prosecuting 
 many studies in his spare hours. Unfortunately, for his own comfort 
 and peace of mind afterwards, he got the offer of a commercial com- 
 mission to London, and accepted it, probably as much with the idea 
 of extending his knowledge of English and English literature, as of 
 making money. Whatever may have been his expectations, he cer- 
 tainly did not succeed as a commercial man. He met with losses 
 that preyed upon his mind, leading him, as some say, into dissipated 
 habits, and, as others say, to severe illness. Be this as it may, we 
 have his own word for it that he recovered moral strength and faith 
 by reading the Bible. He says, in a letter to his friend Jacobi, that " as 
 
HAMANN. 527 
 
 Jeremiah was lifted out of his dungeon by means of a few cords and 
 rags, so he was raised from despair by means of a few old and de- 
 spised texts." His life thereafter was pure but imprudent ; he was, 
 according to the old saying, his own worst enemy. He married a 
 poor girl, under him in station and intelligence ; she lost health, and 
 became a care and burden, instead of the aid which his lack of prac- 
 tical capacity rendered necessary to him. In 1759, appeared a work to 
 which he had devoted much time and thought, under the title " Sokra- 
 tische Denkwurdigkeiten ;" this was followed by " Die Wolken" in 
 1761 ; and this again was followed by the " Kreuzzuge einer Philo- 
 logen'' in 1762. These works drew attention to him in influential 
 literary quarters ; and in 1763 he became a clerk in the war-depart- 
 ment at Konigsberg. He did not relish this employment, however, 
 and in 1764 he quitted it to undertake editorial work for Kanter, the 
 bookseller in Konigsberg. It was here that he met Herder, to begin 
 that friendship which lasted for the rest of their lives, and was so 
 fruitful in many respects. In his later years Hamann luckily gained 
 friends who were able to aid him in a substantial way. Among these 
 Moses Mendelssohn, Jacobi the philosopher, and the Princess Galit- 
 zin were the most notable. He died in 1788, worn out with work and 
 anxiety. He was then at the house of the Princess Galitzin, near 
 Munster, and was buried in her garden, where a stone was erected 
 to his memory. 
 
 Hamann, though loose and unsystematic in his way of writing, was 
 a man of fine insight, often penetrating to the very heart of the mat- 
 ter. He was more a poet than a metaphysician. At a time when the 
 " Enlightenment " and Berlin rationalism were at their height, Ha- 
 tnann was not ashamed to stand up for intuition and inspiration, 
 demanding for nature and the spontaneous impulses of the human 
 heart a full and open recognition. His view of nature was at once 
 lofty and fruitful ; and his conception of poetry, as being the undivided 
 utterance of the whole harmonious activity, recommended itself to 
 Goethe and to Richter, as well as to Herder, who developed, in a 
 very masterly manner, suggestions derived from Hamann. Nature, 
 the written word, and history could only be faithfully seen in their 
 relation to each other, or, as he called it, their concord ; so that the 
 product of an isolated facility or perception was doomed to sterility. 
 His works abound in pregnant sentences in this spirit : " God reveals 
 himself in Nature and in writing," he says, "but he combines both 
 with a like art in our own souls." Again : "All the treasures of nature 
 are more than an allegory, a mythological picture of a heavenly sys- 
 tem." He was an enthusiast for Jewish history, and was never 
 wearied in illustrating the wonderful meanings that lie in it ; his ideas 
 on this subject were, in some points, exhaustively developed by Her- 
 der. " Jewish history," he says at one place, " has evermore become 
 
528 APPENDIX. 
 
 for me the only universal history ; and the people themselves a pre- 
 figurement of Christianity as v?ell as of the whole of human develop- 
 ment. ... A wonder of wonders is the godly Providence, the order 
 and the statemanship that marked it ; more than Noah's ark and Lot's 
 wife, and Moses' burning bush, is every Jew to me." 
 
 Even with Kant, Hamann had some passages of arms. He declared 
 that Kant reduced religion to a merely ethical element or a rationalised 
 morality. In a word, Hamann hated cold rationalism, negation, and 
 abstraction, and was anxious rather to give the impulse to upbuilding 
 and healthy creativeness. He was one of the first to introduce 
 English literature to Germany, and to do justice to its greatness, 
 originality, and truth to nature, in opposition to dry rule ; and this, 
 combined with his enthusiasm, and the spiritual and elevating aspect 
 of his teaching, justified the title which it gained for him of " Magus 
 of the North." 
 
 Herr Hugo Delff has gathered characteristic passages from Ha- 
 mann's writings, and arranged them under the various heads of 
 Belief and Knowledge; Language; Philosophy; God, Creation, &c. ; 
 Christianity; the Bible; Deism; State, Church, and Ecclesiastical 
 Relations ; Nature-History, and Man ; Education and Instruction ; 
 and Life-Wisdom — short extracts — often mere Pensdes, Lichtstrahlen, 
 as he well calls them ; and has prefaced them by a slight memoir. 
 From that little volume, without attacking the more ponderous works 
 of Hamann, one can gather a very fair idea of the man and the 
 thinker, — such an idea as makes one cease to wonder at the great 
 influence that Hamann had upon Herder and others. The writings are 
 penetrated by deep glances, expressed in the clearest and most direct 
 words. 
 
 III.— JOHANN GEORG SCHEFFNER. 
 
 JOHANN Georg Scheffner was bom at Konigsberg on the 8th of 
 August 1736. He early displayed a keen love of learning, but also a 
 great passion for a military life, which he was determined to gratify. 
 In 1757 he became secretary in the service of Duke Charles of Hol- 
 stein-Beck, and quitted this office in 1760. Through a friend of his 
 father's, named L'Estocq, he was now enabled to present an applica- 
 tion to the grand old veteran Zeithen, and through his influence he 
 was attached to a regiment of Prussian hussars, which was engaged 
 in the seven-years' war. He saw a good deal of service, but he did not 
 forget literature. In a very frank and quaint autobiography,* which 
 he wrote in his old age, and which was published after his death, he 
 
 * Mein Leben, wie ich J. G. S. es selbst beschrieben. Leipzig. Printed 1816, published 
 1823. 
 
JOHANN GEORG SCHEFFNER. 529 
 
 gives a striking picture of his lying in camp at Glogau, and reading 
 Rousseau's " New Heloise," as well as the earlier works of Goethe 
 and Schiller. Owing to a severe wound, he was compelled to leave 
 the army, and became secretary to the Konigsberg Chamber in the 
 end of 1765. He was speedily on intimate terms with the well-known 
 bookseller Kanter, and gave him much aid in some of his editorial 
 work, particularly in that of the Kantersche gelehrte Zeitung. While 
 here he became an intimate friend of Kant, of Hamann, and of Hippel, 
 and began a correspondence with Herder (whom, however, he had not 
 seen, as Herder had left for Riga before he had returned to Konigs- 
 berg). This correspondence speedily became extensive and extremely 
 suggestive, as most matters of interest in literature, art, or philosophy, 
 were touched on, either by the one or the other. A fair selection from 
 these letters is given, as we have already seen, in " Herder's Lebens- 
 bild," edited by his son Emile. We find Herder, for instance, writ- 
 ing to Scheffner from Riga on the 4th October 1766, to this effect, in 
 answer to one of Scheffner's earlier letters : — 
 
 " There is, it must be confessed, something of a blank in our soul 
 when we are writing to a friend whom we have never seen. Our 
 phantasy paints a picture for itself, and the heart's wish is busy with 
 a most obedient pencil ! I could wish, just for once, to be magically 
 transported to your side, in order to see whether you are anything 
 like what I think you are, whether my imagination is truly predictive, 
 or whether it misguides me ; for then that would be a demonstrative 
 experiment upon the sympathy and idiosyncrasy of the spirit." 
 
 In 1767, Scheffner went to Gumbinnen as war councillor; and 
 here he applied himself so thoroughly to the duties of his office, that 
 he by-and-by brought to light many errors and defalcations in the 
 management of affairs, exposing them in so bold and uncompromis- 
 ing a manner, that even Frederick the Second himself was offended, 
 and practically dismissed him, refusing to allow him any pension. 
 To a special petition from Scheffner for two hundred thalers, the king 
 thus replied : — " How the devil would it look for me if I gave a 
 pension to a war councillor, when so many brave officers are without 
 resource. The two hundred thalers which you request will be given 
 to an invalided officer." Certainly neither a courteous nor a courtly 
 mode of dismissing such a petition. 
 
 For a time Scheffner now lived in retirement in Konigsberg, to 
 which he had returned ; but a minor appointment was, before long, 
 found for him there. The allowance from this, added to a small 
 private income, and the products of his pen, which was always busy, 
 enabled him to live in comfort, and with some measure of refinement, 
 in intercourse with the most distinguished men of his time, and ever 
 ready with sympathy and help to younger stragglers. He was very 
 active during the Wars of Independence — the friend of Arndt and of 
 
 2 L 
 
S30 APPENDIX. 
 
 Stein, in both of whose biographies we frequently find him referred 
 to. When Arndt was in Konigsberg in 1813 (during which residence 
 he wrote the Hnes on the "German Fatherland" amongst other 
 things), he became intimate with Scheffner, and thus refers to him in 
 his " Wanderungen : " — 
 
 " I had also much intercourse with the Kreigsrath Scheffner, a 
 handsome and amiable old man, whose character had been formed 
 by the Seven Years' War and its results. He had been the friend of 
 Kant, Hamann, and Hippel, and was famed for his great wit and 
 vivacity, sparks of which were still to be detected. It is said, indeed, 
 that those I have named, and not a few others, whose writings are 
 the glory of Prussia, drew very industriously from his flower-beds. 
 His mind was one of those which require society and conversation 
 to strike sparks out of them, and can produce little in solitude. He 
 was certainly an original genius ; and was even at that time the 
 centre of a small but thoughtful circle ; and his mind was strong and 
 clear, though he was now of great age. It was not his wit alone 
 which was admired ; his sterling honesty and good sense drew 
 towards him the esteem of aU good men." 
 
 A very different kind of man gives a similar account of Scheffiier — 
 Hoffman, to wit, — who lived in Konigsberg in 1795-96, and whose 
 biographer, Hitzig, draws a graphic picture of the two : Hoffman, so 
 boy-like, small of stature, so restless and quick in his movements ; 
 and Scheffner, an old, lank, haggard grey figure — ^for Scheffner 
 never wore clothes other than grey — physically short-sighted to such 
 an extent, that often he did not recognise his most intimate friends 
 when he met them, Scheffner died in 1820. 
 
 In no work of his do his honesty and patriotism come out more 
 thoroughly than in some of his pamphlets published during the strife 
 with Napoleon. In particular, we should refer to the letters contained 
 m the pamphlet titled " Der Kriegsrath Scheffner und die Konigin 
 Luise." 
 
 From those of his works to which we have been able to get access, 
 it is abundantly evident that Arndt's high opinion of him is far from 
 unwarranted. Scheffner was not only a man of high aspiration, but 
 of remarkable capability. He had a clear and capacious mind, a 
 power of reducing complicated questions to their simplest elements ; 
 and we are not seldom astonished at his foresight and his intimate 
 knowledge of men. As a writer, he is too prone to content himself 
 with a first and often inadequate expression of his thoughts ; he is 
 disinclined to that exacting labour and patient polish which alone are 
 powerful to perpetuate writings, however informed by thought and 
 high purpose. He abounds in glimpses, in suggestions ; and we can 
 easily believe that his conversation was pregnant with fruitful 
 impulses for younger minds. He was a poet also ; and wrote some 
 
FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU. 531 
 
 lyrics, which are full of spirit, and in some cases very finished and 
 complete. Besides, they are informed by a fresh, youthful purity and 
 enthusiasm, all the more surprising in that he can justify the name 
 chosen for them of " Spatlinge " * (or "Late Blossoms") by these 
 words: "'Late Blossoms' I can the more properly name them, 
 because, with a very few exceptions, they were written after my 
 fiftieth year." This volume includes the best poems from two or 
 three volumes which had previously appeared. The Uttle section on 
 Freemasonry is especially worthy of notice, and the "Praise of 
 Masonry" ("Lob der Mauerery") has been read by us with not a 
 little appreciation of its sentiment and rhythmic march. Here are 
 the first and last' verses of it : — 
 
 " Heil der Kunst, die ihre Werke 
 
 Nach der Weisheit Plan beginnt, 
 
 Erst auf ihres Bauer Starke, 
 
 Dann auf seine Schonheit sinnt, 
 
 Die mit innrer Kraft zufrieden, 
 
 Nicht auf Memphis Pyramiden 
 
 Eitel wie die grosse Welt 
 
 Ihrer Ehre Kleinod stellt. 
 ***** 
 
 " Heil der Kunst, so reich an Gaben, 
 Weisheit schmiickt ihr Haupt Panier, 
 Ihre Wort und Zeichen haben 
 
 Bild und Ueberschrift von ihr. 
 Die nach ihrer Vorschrift wandeln 
 Edel denken, liebreich handeln, 
 Nehmen zu an Lust und Kraft, 
 Zum Gewinn der Meisterschaft.' * 
 
 IV.— FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU. 
 
 We referred to Logau in speaking of Lessing (see p. 33), because, 
 in conjunction with Ramler, Lessing issued a volume of Logan's 
 epigrams with introduction and notes. Logau was in every respect a 
 man of the type to fascinate Lessing. He has indeed been named 
 the Lessing of his own period. He was an earnest man in an artificial 
 time — steadfast amid temptation and trial, preserving a warm faith in 
 God and in the good side of human nature. He wrote some remarkable 
 poems, but his epigrams are almost unapproached for their penetration, 
 grasp of truth, felicitous expression, and the firm hold they often have 
 on the events and tendencies of his time. He was a genuine lover of 
 
 * *' Spatlinge," Von Johann G. Scheffner. Konigsberg, 1803. 
 t "Spatlinge," pp. 349, 3SO. 
 
532 FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU. 
 
 truth, and never shrank from the utterance of his convictions for any 
 personal consideration. 
 
 He wrote the bulk of his epigrams in the common language of the 
 people, sincerely loving the old speech, and mixing much with the 
 people in all kinds of circumstances, without any feeling of con- 
 descension, in order that he might make himself thoroughly familiar 
 with their modes of feeling and ways of thinking. The language he 
 used might account so far for the forgetfulness into which he has 
 fallen. Lessing and Ramler in their preface express a doubt whether 
 Logau was more than a name in their time,* and it is hardly to be 
 expected, in spite of the worthy effort they made to re-present him to 
 their contemporaries, that he should be more in ours. They did what 
 they could to modernize his language, and still preserve its native 
 force, confessing, however, that the very few and slight changes they 
 had made did not in the least make the old poet modern, and that amidst 
 his genuine lightness and sparkling raillery they had faithfully sought 
 to keep true to the spirit of his speech. And they go on to add that 
 their great love and respect for the old dialect will be clearly seen by 
 the observations which they had given upon it in the form of a 
 glosssary they had appended to the selection ; and it was in every 
 respect an interesting and careful piece of work. 
 
 " Very many of Logan's gnomic pieces," says Herr Miiller in the 
 " Bibliothek Deutschen Dichter,"t " have the excellent beat and ring 
 of the old German folk's speech, and stamp themselves as such in- 
 stantaneously and indelibly on the memory of the hearer ; others re- 
 commend themselves through the clear picturesque force of their 
 imagery ; and others still through the heartfelt cheerfulness of their 
 sentiment." 
 
 At a time when German was still held by cultured Germans to be 
 fit only for the meaner purposes of life, he proved it capable not only of 
 expressiveness, but of point and delicacy and refined suggestiveness. 
 One says of him : — 
 
 " He had such an undoubted faculty for the epigram, that every 
 thought, every observation, every impulse, as it were, involuntarily 
 sought this form, so that the matter which he produced is of the most 
 manifold and varied character. Among the extraordinary mass of 
 epigrams which he composed (and they number over four thousand) 
 very few are throughout worthless, and either through their content 
 or their form are highly satisfying. AU his epigrams, or more pro- 
 perly thoughts or proverbs, are rich in reflection and in unexpectedly 
 brilliant turns, being written out of the living feeling of the poet, pure, 
 earnest, and loving. Nevertheless, Logau is as great in the witty 
 
 * Friedrich von Logau, Sinnegedichte, Herausgegeben von Ramler und G. E. Lessing. 
 Leipzig, 1759. 
 t Band vi., pp. 20-21. 
 
FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU. 533 
 
 epigram as in the pure pemde or proverb ; and he is in this sort as 
 sharp and cutting as he is mild and cheerful in the other. Both 
 classes are thus far alike to him, that in all the hearty and honest dis- 
 position shines through. Then in his satirical epigrams, in which he 
 particularly dealt with the political and moral condition of his time, 
 his deep feeling for truth and rectitude are as prominent as in his 
 "^^XTQ fiens^es s in them, too, he spoke out his warm love of fatherland 
 and genuine sense of freedom. The unfortunate time of the Thirty 
 Years' War, and the still more depressing nature of the peace that 
 followed it, filled him with the liveliest sorrow, which he uttered in the 
 keenest words with lofty and uncompromising scorn." 
 
 Logau was born in June 1604, at Nassebrochut, near Nimptsch. 
 The family of Logau or Logaw, was one of the oldest noble houses of 
 Silesia, their main Une being that of Altendorf, in the Principality of 
 Schweidniss. The latter form of the name explains the anagrammatic 
 7iom de jiluTne of Salomon von Golaw, under which he vreote. Of 
 Frederick's youth and the manner of his education we know nothing 
 more than that he visited the university, where, by his studies of law, 
 he prepared himself later to assume the position of Chancery- 
 Councillor (Kanzleirath) to Prince Louis of Brieg, attached to whose 
 service he remained through life ; at first whilst Prince Louis, in 
 conjunction viith his two brothers, governed Brieg, and later, after the 
 Prince had, in 1653, become Prince of Liegniss. Prince Louis seemed 
 to have been deeply attached to Logau, for we learn that at no other 
 place than Brieg or Liegniss did Logau ever make his residence.* 
 We are quaintly told by one authority that " his service was no court 
 service with the lip and the eye in the dining chamber, but in thought 
 and deed." We have spoken of his sufferings in the Thirty Years' 
 War, and these were intense. His possessions were entirely wasted 
 by it. Wallenstein's troops overran the duchy and left a track of 
 barbarism behind them, with genteel poverty for his fate ; but nothing, 
 we are assured, could shake his inherent goodness and unbounded 
 generosity. We know further from his poems that he was twice 
 married, and had an only son ; and of this son we find traces after his 
 heroic father's decease, which took place at Liegniss on the Jth of 
 June 1655. 
 
 Miiller well says that Logan's poetic character is intimately bound 
 up with his personal character, and that they cannot be viewed apart 
 from each other.t In this too he resembles Lessing. A true friend, 
 he was also an unbending enemy ; but nothing personal, it is clear, 
 entered into his contests ; for this, he was too devoted to the cause of 
 truth, which alone would have set him in opposition to any living 
 creature. 
 
 In his epigrams he assayed almost all metres from the Alexandrine 
 
 * MuUer, vol. vi., p. 12. t Jbid.^ p. 16. 
 
S34 FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU. 
 
 to the eight-foot trochaic, and to all he gave new force and character. 
 We shall endeavour here to render into English one or two of them, 
 merely by way of giving a tasting of his quality — no more — ^first 
 printing the German of each ; but we cannot pretend to have carried 
 over the force and point and power of the original : — 
 
 WEINFREUNDSCHAFT (Wine-Friendship). 
 
 Die Freundschaft, die der Wein gemacht, 
 Wirkt, wie der Wein, nur eine Nacht. 
 
 The friendship that the wine makes bright 
 Works, like the wine, but for a night. 
 
 HOFFNUNG UND GEDULD (Hope and Patience). 
 
 Hoffnung ist ein fester Stab, 
 Und Geduld ein Reisekleid, 
 Da man mit durch Welt und Grab, 
 Wandelt in die Ewigkeit. 
 
 Hope is a staff, steady and strong ; 
 
 Patience a travel-suit, wearing full long : 
 
 With these through the world and the grave we pass free, 
 
 Till we reach the land of Eternity. 
 
 HAUSREGIMENT (House-Order). 
 
 Ein jeder ist Monarch in seines Hauses pfahlen, 
 Es sei denn, dass sein Weib neben ihm will zahlen. 
 
 Each man as the King of his house will stand. 
 If his wife will but range her his next in command. 
 
 STARKE UND EINIGKEIT (Strength and Unity). 
 
 Tapferkeit von aussen, Einigkeit von innen 
 Macht, das Keiner ihnen mag was abgewinnen. 
 
 Bravery without, and unity within. 
 
 Make that no one over us the victory may win. 
 
FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU. 535 
 
 GELD (Gold). 
 Wozu ist Geld doch gut ? 
 Wers nicht hat, hat nicht Muth ; 
 Wers hat, hat Sorglichkeit ; 
 Wers hat gehabt, hat Leid. 
 
 Wherefore is the gold still dear ? 
 Who hath it not, hath little cheer ; 
 Who hath it, hath his care full store ; 
 Who once has had, hath sorrow sore. 
 
 GEDULD (Patience). 
 
 Leichter traget, was er traget, 
 Wer Geduld zur Burde leget. 
 
 More lightly draws he o'er the ways, 
 Who patience to the burden lays. 
 
 WEIBER (Women). 
 
 Wer ohne Weiber Konnte seyn war' frey von vielerley Beschwerben, 
 Wer ohne Weiber woUte seyn war" aber nicht viel Nutz auf Erden. 
 
 He who without women could be were free of many abuse, 
 
 He who without women would be in the world were scarce any use. 
 
 GOTTES MUHLEN (The Mills of God). 
 Gottes Miihlen mahlen langsam, 
 
 Mahlen aber trefflich klein ; 
 Ob aus Langmut er sich saumet, 
 
 Bringt mit Scharf' er alles ein. 
 
 God's mills do very slowly grind, 
 
 But grind exceeding small, 
 Long, long He is to wait inclined, 
 But sharply grinds He all. 
 [From which, of course, Longfellow took his famous lines in his 
 poem " Retribution."] 
 
 FRUHLING (Spring). 
 
 Fruhhng is des Jahres Rose, Rosen sind des Friihlings Zier ; 
 Und der Rosen Rosenfursten seyd und beisset billig Jhi-". 
 
 Spring is the Rose of the Year, and roses the crown of the Spring ; 
 And the rose of the roses' crown ye fair ones unfailingly bring. 
 
S36 FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU. 
 
 May. 
 [Clearly he was a faithful lover of the Spring and the May-time, and 
 has consecrated many exquisite couplets to them ; here are two : ] 
 Dieser Monat ist ein Kuss, den der Himmel gibt der Erde, 
 Dass sei jetzund seine Braut, kiinfftig eine Mutter werde. 
 
 This month is a kiss, which the heaven gives to the earth, 
 To make her a bride, that later may come a bright birth. 
 
 And again : — 
 Einmal nur ist May im Jahr, immer lacht das Gliicke nicht ; 
 Wer, wann Gliicke bliihet, trotzt, zaget auch wann Gliicke bricht. 
 
 But once in the year comes May, and fortune does not always shine ; 
 Who is bravest when most she smiles, fears also for her decline. 
 
 SUNDE (Sin). 
 
 Menschlich ist es, Siinde treiben ; 
 Teuflisch ist's, in Siinden bleiben ; 
 Christlich ist es, Siinde hassen ; 
 Gottlieb ist es, Siind' erlassen. 
 
 Manlike is it, sin to do ; 
 Devil-like, ne'er sin to rue ; 
 Christlike is it, sin to hate ; 
 Godlike, to forgive, forget. 
 
 DIE NACHT (Night). 
 
 Der Schlaf gibt neue Krafft ; hilfif, das des Grabes Nacht, 
 O Gott, auf jenem Tag mich ewig freudig macht. 
 
 Sleep gives new powers unto men ; grant that the grave's dark night 
 O God, on that day may bring me eternal joy with the light. 
 
 DER ALTEN DEUTSCHEN SCHRIFT 
 (The Old German Writing). 
 Der Deutschen ihr Papier 
 War jhres Feindes Leder ; 
 Der Degen war die Feder, 
 Mit Blute schrieb man hier. 
 
 The Germans for paper 
 Took their enemy's skin ; 
 Their pen was their sword, 
 That with blood wrote " we win." 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbt, Thomas, 162 (note), 167, 169, 170, 173, 
 
 226, 227 (note) 
 Albani, Cardinal, 117, 122, 123 
 Alison, Sir Archibald, 15 
 Anti-Goeze, 84, 85 
 
 Archangeli, Winckelmann's murderer, 124 
 Archinto, C^ount, 108, 115, 116 
 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 313, 314, 332, 359, 483, 
 
 486, 498, 499, 509 
 Arnold, Matthew, 249, 341 
 " Aufklarung," the, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 206, 397, 
 
 498 
 
 Baader, 404 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 5 
 
 Beister, 507 
 
 Ben Israel, Rabbi (note), 185 
 
 Biering, 392 
 
 Bleichroder, 141 
 
 Bliicher, 509 
 
 Bohme, Frau, Goethe*s friend, 276, 280 
 
 Borne, Ludwig, 318, 319 (note) 
 
 Boysen, 102^ 104 
 
 ** Briefe an seine Freunde of Winckelmann," 
 
 109 (note), 112 (note), 114 (note) 
 Browning, Mrs Barrett (quoted), 271 
 Brunswick, Prince Charles William of, 179 
 Bunau, Count, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 120 
 Burger, 395 
 
 Burgsdorf, Wilhelm von, 392 
 Busch, Frau, 220 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 13, 25, 73, 313, 3i4» 352. 
 
 400 (note) 
 Cervantes, 418 
 
 Cherbuliez, M. M., 42, 78, 127 
 "Clarissa," Richardson's, 30 
 Coleridge, 406 
 Comeille and Racine, 42 
 Crouslfe, M., 8 
 
 Damm, Tobias. 97, 98. 160, 161, 525. 526 
 
 Daschieri, Tieck's friend, 39^. 422 
 
 Daveson, and Madam Daveson, 60 (note) 
 
 David, Michael, 180 
 
 De Quincey on Goethe, 343 
 
 Dohm, Councillor von, 184, 185 
 
 Doudan, M. (quoted), 270, 362 
 
 EcKEKMANN, 323 (note), 333 (note), 58, 359 
 
 (note), 360. 417 ,_ 
 *' Ernst and Falk, 84 
 t'Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts of 
 
 Lessing, 11,77.84 
 Eschenburg, 49 
 
 Fabricius, 59 , XT J 
 
 Falk on Goethe and Herder, ii 
 
 Fichte, J. G., 401, 402, 444, 483, 509, 513, 515^ 
 
 516 
 Flachsland, Caroline, 225, 226, 228 
 Francke, the Pietist, 112, 113, 114, 120, 121 
 Frankel, Rabbi David, 135, 137, 140, 144 
 Frederick the Great, 25, 26, 40, 26 (note) 
 " Freigeist," The, 67 
 
 French Encyclopaedia, The, and Voltaire, 10 
 Friedlander, D., 192 
 Froude, J. A., 81 
 
 Galileo, 5 
 
 "Gamester," Moore's, 30 
 
 Gedike, Frederic, 388, 392 
 
 Gellert, 45 
 
 German and English Literature, 14, 15 
 
 German lan^age and literature, 5-6^ 
 
 German philosophy ^and political life, 503 ; 
 moral condition of Germany before the 
 War of Independence, 503-507; Napoleon 
 and Germany, 508-509; Fichte's patriot- 
 ism, 509; Schleiermacher's aid to the 
 patriotic impulse, 509 - 510; Frederic 
 Perthes the bookseller, 510; Yorck, 511; 
 Defeat of Napoleon due to individual 
 effort, sii; Kant's influence in the Ger- 
 man Revolt against Napoleon, 512 ; 
 Hegel's philosophy, 513-514; Fichte's doc- 
 trines and their influence, 514, 517; the 
 politics of German philosophers, 517-518; 
 Richard Rothe, 518, 519; present condi- 
 tion of Germany, 520-521 
 
 Germany, condition of, 4-5 
 
 German study of English authors, 16 
 
 Gervinus, ^7 
 
 Gleim, " Father," 31, 36, 102, 104, 170, 180 
 
 Goethe, 10, 11, 13; his "Gotzvon Berlichin- 
 gen," 14 
 
 Goethe a pantheist, 15; Confessions of a 
 Beautiful Soul, 16, 31, 46, 56, 72, 87, 90, 
 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 211, 272, 227, 
 234, 235, 248, 250 ; Goethe bom, 272 ; 
 Frauiem vonKlettenberg, 276; illness, 278- 
 279; goes to Strasburg, 280; Frederica, 
 281; writes "Die Laune des Verliebten," 
 282 ; Herder and Goethe, 283-292; " Goetz 
 and Faust," 287-288; Goethe and Merck, 
 293; Goethe's opinion of Merck, 294; 
 contributes to the " Gelehrten Anzeigen," 
 295 ; Kestner and Charlotte BufiF, 297-298 ; 
 Goethe and Anna Schonemann, 299; at 
 Weimar, 300; "Iphi^enia" written, 300; 
 Friendship with Schiller, 301; Frau von 
 Stein, 302-303; coldness of Goethe and 
 Schiller, 303-304; Goethe's return from 
 Italy, 305; Christiane Vulpius and Goethe, 
 306-30^; Bettina, 311-312; death of Goethe, 
 317; his writings, 317-326; life and charac- 
 
 2 M 
 
538 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 ter,_ 333-340; the style and character ex- 
 hibited in his writings, 332-375 ; his 
 personal character, 375-379, 399, 402, 433 
 
 Goeze (Lessing's opponent), 51, 52, 54, 74, 92 
 
 Gottsched, 30, 45 (note), go, 144 
 
 Griefe, H., 390 
 
 Grimm, Rector, 212, 213, 214, 21S (note) 
 
 Griin, Karl, 84; on Lewes, Carlyle, and 
 Goethe, 373 
 
 Gugenheim, Abraham, 168 
 
 Gugenheim, Fromet, Mendelssohn's wife, 
 t6S, 169, 172 
 
 Gumpertz, 26, 144, 154, 156 (note) 
 
 Gutzkow, Herr, 320 
 
 Hamann, 217, 218, 243, 263, 526-528 
 
 Hardenberg, Frederic von (Novalis), 12, 13, 
 400, 433; the Hardenburg family, 442-443; 
 birth of Novalis, 443 ; sent to Jena as a 
 student in 1789, 444; leaves Jena for 
 Leipzig, 445 ; goes to iWittenberg to finish 
 his studies, 447 ; mee^ Sophie von Kuhn, 
 448; Sophie's illness, 450; her death, 451 ; 
 Julia von Charpentier, 445 ; acquaintance 
 with Tieck, 455; his illness, 456-457; and 
 death, 457; personal appearance, 457-458; 
 his mingled practical talent and mysticism, 
 458-466; his value to the Romantic School, 
 498 \ 
 
 Hartknoch, 220, 221, 263 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 435 
 
 Haym, Robert, 270, 397 (note), 417 (note) 
 
 Hayward, Mr (note), 293 
 
 Hegel, 76, 90; his contrast of romantic and 
 classical art, 473; his philosophy, 513, 517, 
 518, 519 
 
 Heme, 14, 16, 77, 82, 83, 86,90, 203, 206, 322 
 (note), 329, 412, 469, 470, 493, 494 
 
 Heinemann, Dr, 158 (note), 169, 171, ig8 
 
 Heine's '*D' L'Allemagne," 16, 203 (note), 
 330 (note) 
 
 Hennings, Von, 79 
 
 Hensler, William, 392, 394 
 
 Herder, 6, 8, p, 10, 11, 14, 72, 174, 181, igo, 
 207, 208; his schooling, 213; servant to the 
 deacon of Mohrungen, 215; appointment 
 with the rector of the cathedral school of 
 Riga, 219; goes to France, 222; his stay 
 and travels, 223; service with the prince- 
 bishop of Holstein-Eutin, 224; Caroline 
 Flachsland, 226 ; Goethe and Herder, 227 ; 
 preacher to Count Lippe, 228 ; married to 
 Caroline Flachsland, 232; his writings, 
 233; Mendelssohn, 233; head of the Con- 
 sistory of Weimar, 234; "The Volk's 
 Lieder,"' 235 ; Journey to Italy, 238 ; re- 
 turns to Weimar, 240 ; death, 240; Herder's 
 character, 240-24.6 ; as a poet, 246-254 ; his 
 writings, 254-266, 280, 282-292, 359 ; devo- 
 tion to the principle of nationality, 481; his 
 love for folk-lore and for Shakespeare, 482 
 
 Herder's Nachlass, Aus, 159 (note), 182, igo 
 (note), 22^, 228 (note) 
 
 Herz, Henrietta, 397 
 
 Hettner, Herr, g, 10, 35, 39, 33 (note) 
 
 Honegger, Herr, 422 
 
 Hulferding, Peter, 26 
 
 Humboldt, Alexander von, 406 
 
 Hume, 91 
 
 Hutton, R. H., 336, 338 
 
 Immerman, 413 
 Jacobi, 77, 404, 507 
 
 Jahn, Otto, 104, 109, iii, 277, 278 (note) 
 Johnson, Dr S., 31 
 Judaism, 185-189, 191-202, 208 
 "Juden, Die," 8 
 
 Just, Kreis-Amtmann, 447 (note), 448, 453, 
 454. 463. 465 
 
 Kant, Emmanuel, 28, 263, 512 
 
 Kanter, 217 
 
 Kayserling, Dr, 29, 62, 63 (note), 153 (note) 
 
 Kisch, 143 
 
 Kleist, 35, 36, 37, 38, 62, 89, 170 
 
 Klettenberg, Fraulein von, 276 
 
 Klopstock, 15, 22, 22 (note) 
 
 KlotZ, 42, 221 
 
 Koch, the actor, 23 
 
 Kohut, Herr, 259 
 
 Konemann, 60 
 
 Konig, 46 
 
 Konig, Amelia, 58 
 
 Konig, Eva, 46, 47, 48 
 
 Koepke, 401 (note), 403, 406, 407, 410 (note), 
 
 416, 423, 434 
 Korner, 15, 332, 359, 486, 499 
 Kotzebue, 15, 403 
 Kreise, 392 
 
 Kuhn, Sophie von, 448, 450-453 
 Kurz, Heinrich, 463 
 
 Lajwprecht, Herr, 120 
 
 Lamprecht, Obermann, lox 
 
 " Laocoon," 38, 40, 65, 84, 85, 475, 478, 479, 
 495 
 
 Lavater, 176, 178, 179, 181, 263, 457 
 
 Leibnitz, 73 
 
 Lessing, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 72; his family, 19; 
 inclination to follow his father's studious 
 ways, 20 ; sent to school, 20 ; Christlieb 
 Mylius, 20; Rector Heinetz,'2o; sent in 
 1741 to the " Furstenschule " of St Afra, 
 Meissen, 20; goes to the Leipzig Univer- 
 sity, 21 ; his friend Weisse, 22 , his great 
 liking for the stage, 22 ; determines to be a 
 
 I playwright, 22; "Die Alte Jungfer" and 
 " The Young Scholar " published, 22 ; 
 returns home, 23 ; afterwards goes back to 
 Leipzig, 23 ; at Wittenberg, 23 ; writes 
 some plays at Berlin, 24; his defence of 
 his friend Mylius, 24 ; his difficulties with 
 his familjr, 24, 25 ; translates documents 
 for Voltaire, 25 ; dislike of interested 
 attacks on religion, 25; his sympathy for 
 the Jews, 26; plays of " Die Juden" and 
 *' The Freethinker," 27 ; M. Crousl&'s 
 criticism on Lessing's plays, 27 ; Mylius's 
 quarrel with Riidiger, 28 ; Lessing writes 
 " Der Schatz " and " Weiber sind Weiber,'* 
 28 ; leaves Berlin and goes to Wittenberg, 
 28 ; Lessing and Voltaire, 29 ; returns to 
 Berlin, 29 ; his friendship with Mendels- 
 sohn and Nicolai, 29; "Miss Sara Samp- 
 son," 30, 31, 32; goes back to Leipzig, 32 ; 
 sets out for Holland, 33 ; Kleist and Les- 
 sing, 33 ; return to Berlin, 33 ; sketch of 
 " Emilia Galotti," 33 ; the " Literary 
 Letters" started, 34; death of Kleist, and 
 Lessing's letter to Gleim, 36 ; characters of 
 Kleist and Lessing, 37 ; " Phiiotas," 37 ; 
 acquaintance with Colonel Tauentzien, 38 ; 
 writes " Minna von Barnhehn" and outline 
 of the " Laocoon," 38; decnnes the profes- 
 sorship of eloquence at Konigsberg, 39 ; 
 accepts the post of manager of a Hamburg 
 theatre, 41; resumes "Emilia Galotti, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 539 
 
 43 : V^ in charge of library at WolfenbUt- 
 Jel, 43; Frau Konig, 46; her letters to 
 Lessing, 46; success of "Emilia Galotti," 
 47 ; letter to Karl Lessing, 47 ; visit to 
 Italy, 48; picture of his daily life, 48; 
 death of his wife, 49; letter to Eschenburg, 
 49; letter to Karl, 50; Goeze's attack on 
 Lessing, 51, 52; his reply, 53, 54; Nathan 
 der Weise, 56; Joseph Wessely's aid to 
 Lessing, 57; death, 58; Mendelssohn's 
 letter to Karl, 59 ; Lessing's character, 60 ; 
 his dramatic power, 61-64, 81 ; Lessing as a 
 poet, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 79, 80; his style, 
 66-86; Russell Lowell on Lessing, 68 ; Mr 
 Sime's criticism, 6g, 70, 71 ; Mr Hawkins 
 on Lessing, 69 ; Lessing's theology, 74, 79 ; 
 Cherbuliez's opinion on Lessing, 78; Les- 
 sing as a critic, 82, 83, 85 ; his life and cir- 
 cumstances, 87-92 ; his style and character 
 as a writer, 89, gr, 92, 147, 148, 149, 150, 
 i5f. 152. 15s. iS7» 159. 180, 264 
 
 Lessing and the romantic element, 475-481 
 
 Lessing, Karl, 50, 59, 77 
 
 Levin, Rahel, 397 
 
 Lewes, Mr G. H., 278, 280, 281, 285, 287, 290, 
 291, 297, 298, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 307, 
 308, 369 
 
 Leyser, Herr (note), 280 ' 
 
 Lichtenberg, 395 
 
 Literary Letters, 156, 165, 166, 167 
 
 Logau, Fred, von, 531. 
 
 Louvain, M. de, 29 
 
 Lowell, Russell, 68 
 
 Luther, 1-2, 73-74 
 
 Macdonald, George, 435, 436, 437 
 
 Matthison, 395 
 
 Maurice, F. £)., gi 
 
 Mendel, (note) 319 
 
 Mendelssohn, Moses, 26, 20, 30, 33, 57, 58, 
 59, 62,^ 63, 79, 91 ; Mendelssohn s father, 
 136; his education, 136; sent to the Jewish 
 seminary, 136 ; advanced to a higher 
 school, 137; Rabbi Frankel, his teacher, 
 leaves Dessau, 138 ; Mendelssohn starts 
 for Berlin, 140 ; his life with Rabbi 
 Frankel, 140-141 ; his studies, 142-143 ; 
 meets Gumpertz, 144; tutor to Isaac Bern- 
 hard's children, 145 ; cashier at the silk 
 factory, 146 ; the " Moral Preacher " 
 started, its failure, 146 ; Lessing and 
 Mendelssohn's friendship, 149; Mendels- 
 sohn's " Philosophische Gesprache," 149, 
 i5o> i55t ^^58; Nicolai and Mendelssohn, 
 150; Mendelssohn's writing and studies, 
 154, 155; Nicolai, 160, i6j; Abbt, 162-163; 
 translates Shaftesbury, 163; condition of 
 the Jews, 164; Mendelssohn's difficulties, 
 165 ; an anecdote, 165 ; the Literary 
 Letters, 165-167 ; betrothed to Fromet 
 Gugenheim, 168; married, i6g; death of 
 his wife, 173; Abbt's death, 173; Mendels- 
 sohn's difficulties with Lavater, 176, 177; 
 a member of the Royal Academy of 
 Berlin, 180; stays with the Count of 
 Schaumburg-Lippe, 181-182; Mendelssohn 
 and the Jews, 183-igo; "The Wolfenbiit- 
 tel Fragments," 190 ; Lessing's death, 
 igo-191 ; Wessely and Freidlander, 192; 
 the "Morgenstunden," 193; Mendelssolm's 
 children, 194; his last studies, 195-197; 
 his death, 197 ; his personal appearance, 
 197; character, 198-202; his influence on 
 Judaism, 203-208 
 
 Meiner, Charlotte, 277 (note) 
 Mengs, Raphael, 113, 114, 115 
 Menzel's, Wolfgang, Deutsch literatur, 9 
 Merck, Johann Heinrich, 225, 289, 293, 294, 
 
 295 
 Merkel, Herr Gustav, 11 
 Middleton, 155 
 "Minna von Barnhelm," 38, 40 (note), 84, 
 
 495 
 Mirabeau, 81, 82 (note), 189 
 Mohnike's Lessingiana, 43, 44 
 Montaigne, 5 
 
 Muchler, Professor, 158-159 
 MiiUer, Max, 9 
 Mylius, 22 (note), 22, 24, 62 
 
 "Nathan dek Weise," 8, 55, 56, 57, 59, 65, 
 
 ^9> 70» 79i 80, 81 
 Nicolai, Frederick, 6, 33, 58, 149, 150 (note), 
 
 i57i i59» 16O) 161, 163, 166, 193 (note), 246, 
 
 Niebuhr, 9 
 
 Novalis's Nachlese, 446, 4471454, 463 (note), 
 464, 465 
 
 OCHLENSCHLAGER, 407 
 
 CElsner, 406 
 
 Oeser, Herr, iii (note), 113, 278 
 
 Perthes, Frederick, i66, 508, 510 
 
 Pietism, 2-3 
 
 Phillipine, Charlotte, 180 
 
 Ramler, 33, 36 
 
 Raumer, Von, 415 
 
 Reformation, the, 1-2 
 
 Reimarus, 50, 51, 52, 56, 100 
 
 Reimarus, Elise, 51, 58 
 
 Reimer, 407 
 
 Reinhold, Adelheid, 413 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul, 422 
 
 Riedesel, Baron von, 120 
 
 Romantic element in German Literature, 
 469 ; Heine in relation to it, 469-470 ; 
 Lessing, Winckelmann, and Herder, 470- 
 471 ; Winckelmann and " Greek Art," 471- 
 472) 4^5 ; Hegel, 473-474; contrast of 
 romantic and classic art, 488; Lessing, 475- 
 481 ; " Miss Sara Sampson," 481 ; Herder's 
 devotion to the principle of nationality, 
 481 ; his love for folk-lore and Shakespeare, 
 482; _ contrast of Schiller and Goethe in 
 relation to romanticism, 484-494; Heine on 
 Goethe, 493-494; fountainhead of romantic- 
 ism in Lessing and Herder, ^95; English 
 influence on German romanticism, 496-497; 
 Goethe's study of English dramatists, 496 ; 
 the earlier romantic school and its influence, 
 497 ; its influence traced in the patriots of 
 the War of Independence, 498 ; Tieck, 499; 
 the side of romanticism specially illustrated 
 in the lives of KSrner and Arndt, 4g9 
 
 Rotscher, 56 
 
 Rosenkranz, Herr, 3, 10, 249, 250, 212 (note), 
 218 (note) 
 
 Rothe, Richard, 518, 519 
 
 Rousseau, 8, 10, 156 (note), 242, 243, 245, 251 
 482 
 
 Rumohr, 404 
 
 Samosz, 142, 143 
 " Sampson, Miss Sara," 30, 31, 32 
 Schafer, Herr, 4, 22, 284-285 
 Schamhorst, 509 
 
540 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Scheffner, 263 ; correspondence with Herder, 
 483. 528-531 
 
 Schelling, 76, 401, 455, 513 
 
 Schenkel, 510 
 
 Scherer, Dr William, 295-296 
 
 Scherer, M., 318, 354, 364 (note), 363, 367, 
 360 (note), 434 
 
 Schiller, 13, 15, 16, 56, 72, 127, 211, 301, 303, 
 304, 368, 325 (note); contrast of Schiller 
 and Goethe in relation to romanticism, 
 ^84, 494; Schiller opposed to Goethe's 
 influence, 493 
 
 Schlegel, 40, 397, 399, 402, 408, 409, 457, 464 
 
 Schle^els, the two, 12, 13, 399, 400, 403, 448 
 
 Schleiermacher, 397, 407, 483, 498, 505 
 
 Schmidt, Ferdinand, 57, 85, 140, 500 
 
 SchGnemann, Anna, 297 
 
 Schulte, Professor von, 520 
 
 Spalding, Johann, 171 (note) 
 
 Spener, 2, i6 
 
 Stael, Madame de, 16 
 
 Stahr, 26, 47 
 
 Stein, Baron vom, 303, 314 
 
 Stein, Frau von, 301, 302, 307 
 
 Stilling, Jung, 227, 280, 505 
 
 Stolberg, Count, 15 
 
 Stosch, Baron, iz6, 117, 122 
 
 Taine, H. a., 9 
 
 Tappert, Rector, 97, 100, 99 (note) 
 
 Tauentzien, Colonel, 38, 39 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, 334, 366, 367, 369 
 
 Taylor, William, of Norwich, 15 
 
 Temple, Dr, 76, 77 
 
 Thiers and Mignet, 3, 320 
 
 Tieck, Ludwig, 12, 13, 32; his opinion of 
 "Minna von Barnhelm," 40; his opinion 
 on "Emilia Galotti," 45 ;_ sent to a school 
 in the Grunstrasse, Berlin, 387; removed 
 to the Gymnasium, 388 ; Herr Griefe, 389; 
 Tieck's studies, 390; meets Daschieri, 391 ; 
 Wackenroder, 391, 392; and other friends, 
 392 ; Reichart, 392; 393 ; death of Biering, 
 393 ; his betrothal, 394 ; goes to Halle, 
 through Saxony, Thuringia> &c., 395; at 
 Erlangen and Drackenburg, 368 ; return to 
 Berlin, 396; begins " Peter Lebrecht" and 
 finishes " William Lovell," 397 ; meets 
 Schlegel, 397 ; quarrel with Nicolai, 398 ; 
 death of Wackenroder, 398 ; Genoveva, 
 3^9; visits the Schlegels and meets Nova- 
 ks, 400; Tieck leaves Jena, 401; his im- 
 pressions of the Hardenber^ family, 401 ; 
 Goethe and Tieck, 402; " Pnnce Zerbino," 
 403; death of Tieck's mother, 404; pub- 
 lishes " Fortunatus," 405 ; starts on his 
 tour in England, 405; Coleridge, 406; 
 visits Paris, 406-407; Death of Solger, 
 
 407; writes his "Novellen," 408; his jour- 
 ney to Weimar, 410; visits Goethe, 411; 
 death of hiswife and daughter Dorothea, 
 413; at Berlin, 413 ; his last writings, 414- 
 415; his death, 416; different periods of 
 Tieck's writings, 416-^21 ; his character as 
 displayed in his writings, 421-437 ; speci- 
 mens of his humorous style, 
 
 Tieck on Novalis, 448 ; Novalis' acquaint- 
 ance with Tieck, 455, 456 ; Tieck, 463, 
 464 ; his setting Goethe to study the 
 English dramatists, 496, 499 
 
 Tillotson, 19 
 
 Toll, Frederic, 392, 394 
 
 Uden, 99 
 
 "Ueber Borne," by Heine, 14 
 
 Veit, Fraulein, 397 
 
 "Volk's Lieder," Herder's, 9, 229, 231, 235, 
 
 236 
 Voltaire, ro, 15, 25, 29, 40, 42, 44 
 Voss'sche Zeitung, 30 
 Vulpius, Christiane, 307, 364 
 
 Wackenroder, 391, 394, 395, 396, 397 
 
 Weisse, 23, 32, 45, 170 
 
 Weisser, 388 
 
 " Werther," Goethe's, 8 
 
 Wessely, Joseph, 57, 58 (note) 
 
 Wessely, Naphtali Hartwig, 192 
 
 Wieland,i5, 16, 34, 170, 305, 306, 309, 403 
 
 " Wilhelm Meister," 13 
 
 Winckelmann, his "Historyof Ancient Art," 
 39; Winckelmann's father and mother, 97; 
 his studies at school, 97; goes to the 
 Kolnische (gymnasium in Berlin, 98; acts 
 as tutor to the rector of Salzwedel, go; 
 goes in 1738 to the University of Halle, 
 100; tutor to Lamprecht, 102; writes to 
 Bunau, 105; taken into his service, 107; 
 leaves Nothenitz, log; goes to Italy, 112; 
 his friend Mengs, 113; begins " History of 
 Greek Art," 114; Stosch invites him to 
 Florence, 116; service with Cardinal 
 Albani, 1T7; his life there, 118-1 19; "His- 
 tory of Ancient Art," 121; published, 122; 
 his other works, 121, 122; leaves Rome, 
 1768, 122 ; at Vienna, 123 ; starts for Rome, 
 123; his death, 123 ; Winckelmann's char- 
 acter, 124-127 ; his writing and style, 127, 
 132-174; Herder's estimate of Winckel- 
 mann, 263,^ 264 
 
 Wolf (or Reichenmeister), Abraham, 62, 63 
 (note) 
 
 ZiMMERN, Miss, 48 
 ZinzendoriF, 2 
 
 TUENBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH. 
 
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