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out on one point; immoral in Goethe's the hetara of old Greek cities. After peculiar, inimitable, good-natured manner. reading these wonderful poems, if we go The levity is the more startling in a book through the list of Goethe's female charotherwise so remarkably grave. Every acters we shall note how many among subject but one is discussed with serious- them belong to the class of hetæræ ness; in parts the solemity of the writer's Clärchen, Marianne, Philine, Gretchen, wisdom becomes quite oppressive; but on the Bayadere. And if we turn to his life, the relations of men and women he speaks we find the man, who shrank more than in a thoroughly worldly tone. Just where once from a worthy marriage, taking a most moralists grow serious, he becomes Tecmessa to his tent. The woman who wholly libertine, indifferent, and secular. became at last his wife was spoken of by There is nothing in this novel of the him, in a letter to the Frau von Stein, as homely domestic morality of the Teutonic "that poor creature." She is the very races; a French tone pervades it, and beauty celebrated in the "Roman Elegies." this tone is more or less perceptible in the This strange moral theory could not other writings of Goethe, especially those but have strange consequences. Love, as of the second period, with the exception Goethe knows it, is very tender, and has of "Hermann und Dorothea." On this a lyric note as fresh as that of a songsubject, the great and wise thinker.de- bird; but it passes away like the songs of scends to a lower level; he seems incapa- spring. In his Autobiography, one loveble of regarding it with seriousness; or if passage succeeds another, each is charmhe does treat it seriously, as in the "Elec-ingly described, but each comes speedily tive Affinities," he startles us still more to an end. How far in each case he was by a certain crude audacity.

It seems possible to trace how Goethe fell into this extraordinary moral heresy. Starting from the idea of the satisfaction of desire, and with a strong prejudice against all systems of self-denial, he perceived, further, that chastity is the favorite virtue of mediævalism, that it is peculiarly Catholic and monastic. Then, as his mind turned more and more to the antique, he found himself in a world of primitive morals, where the woman is half a slave. He found that in the ancient world friendship is more and love less than in the modern - to this point, too, Winckelmann had called his attention-and, since he had adopted it as a principle that the ancients were healthy-minded and that the moderns are morbid, he jumped to the conclusion that the sentimental view of love is but a modern illusion. He accustomed his imagination to the lower kind of love which we meet with in classical poetry, the love of Achilles for Briseis, of Ajax for Tecmessa. In his early pamphlet against Wieland ("Götter, Helden, und Wieland," 1773), we find him already upon this train of reasoning, and his conclusions are announced with the most unceremonious plainness. How seriously they were adopted may be seen from the "Roman Elegies," written fifteen years later. Among the many reactions which the eighteenth century witnessed against the spirit of Christianity, scarcely any is so startling and remarkable as that which comes to light in these poems. Here the woman has sunk again to her ancient level, and we find ourselves once more among

to blame is matter of controversy. But he seems to betray a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental sultan. "I was in that agreeable phase," he writes, "when a new passion had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared." About Friederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating, bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the deepest impressions and to receive new ones; and he never looks back. A curious insensibility, which seems imitated from the apparent insensibility of nature herself, shows itself in his works by the side of the deepest pathos. Faust never once mentions Gretchen again, after that terrible prison scene; her remembrance does not seem to trouble him; she seems entirely forgotten, until, just at the end, among the penitents who surround the Mater Gloriosa, there appears one who has borne the name of Gretchen. In like manner this shocked Schiller when Mignon dies she seems instantly forgotten, and the business of the novel scarcely pauses for a moment.

We are also to remember that Goethe was a man of the old régime. If he who had such an instinctive comprehension of feminine character, at the same time treats women in this Oriental fashion, we are to remember that he lived in a country of

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kind of friendship. His view of life and literature is, in general, not ironical and not enervating, but sincere, manly, and hopeful. And his view of morality and religion, if we consider it calmly and not in that spirit of agonized timidity which reigns in the religious world, will perhaps appear to be not now very dangerous where it is wrong, and full of fresh instruction where it is right. The drift of the nineteenth century, the progress of those reforms in which Goethe took so little interest, have tended uniformly to the elevation of woman, so that it seems now searcely credible that at the end of the last century great thinkers can seriously have preferred to contemplate her in the

despotic courts, and also that he was en- |cious virtues, a nobly conscientious use of
tirely outside the movement of reform. great powers, a firm disregard of popular-
Had he entered into the reforming move-ity, an admirable capacity for the highest
ment of his age, he might have striven to
elevate women, as he might have heralded
and welcomed some of the ideas of 1789,
and the nationality movements of 1808
and 1813. He certainly felt at times that
all was not right in the status of women
("Der Frauen Schicksal ist beklagens
werth "), and how narrowly confined was
their happiness ("Wie enggebunden ist
des Weibes Glück "), as he certainly felt
how miserable were the political conditions |
of Germany. Nevertheless he did not
take the path either of social or of politi-
cal reform. He worked in another region,
a deeper region. He was a reformer on
the great scale in literature, art, education,
that is, in culture, but he was not a re-
former of institutions. And as he did not | half-servile condition in which classical
look forward to a change in institutions,
his views and his very morality rested on
the assumption of a state of society in
many respects miserably bad.

But the effect of this aberration upon Goethe's character as a teacher and upon his influence has been most disastrous. And inevitably, for as it has been the practice in the Christian world to lay all the stress of morality upon that very virtue which Goethe almost entirely repudiates, he appears not only to be no moralist, but an enemy of morality. And as he once brought a devil upon the stage, we identify him with his own Mephis topheles, though, in fact, the tone of cold irony is not by any means congenial to him. He has the reputation of a being awfully wise, who has experienced all feelings good and bad, but has survived them, and from whose writings there rises a cold, unwholesome exhalation, the odor of moral decay. It is thought that he offers culture, art, manifold intellectual enjoyment, but at the price of virtue, faith, patriotism.

In his hands

poetry exhibits her. On this point at least the world is not likely to become pagan again. On the other hand Carlyle himself scarcely exaggerated the greatness of Goethe as a prophet of new truth alike in morals and in religion. Just at the moment when the supernaturalist theory, standing alone, seemed to have ex hausted its influence, and to be involving religion in its own decline, Goethe stood! forth as a rapt adorer of the God in nature.* Naturalism in his hands appeared! to be no dull system of platitudes, no empty, delusive survival of an exploded! belief, but a system as definite and important as science, as rich and glorious as art. Morality in his hands appeared no longer morbid, unnaturally solemn, unwholesomely pathetic, but robust, cheerful, healthy, a twin sister of happiness. also morality and religion appeared inseparably united, different aspects of that free energy, which in him was genius, and in every one who is capable of it resem bles genius. Lastly, his bearing towards Christianity, when he had receded from If I have taken a just view, the good the exaggerations of his second period, and bad characteristics of his writings was better, so long as it seemed hopeless stand in a different relation. It is not to purge Christianity of its other-worldli morality itself that he regards with indif-ness, than that of the zealots on either. ference, but one important section of morality. And he is an indifferentist here, partly because he is a man formed in the last years of the old régime, partly because he is borne too far on the tide of reaction against Catholic and monastic ideas. Nevertheless, he remains a moralist; and in his positive teaching he is one of the greatest moral teachers the world has ever seen. In his life he displayed some of the greatest and most pre- halten;" so he writes to Carlyle. VOL. XLVIII, 2491

LIVING AGE.

side. He entered into no clerical or anticlerical controversies; but, while he spoke. his mind with great frankness, did not forget to distinguish between clericalism and true Christianity, cherished no insane am bition of destroying the Church or founding a new religion,† and counselled us in

"Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen, Als dass ihm Gott-Natur sich offenbare?"

t "Von der Société St. Simonien bitte Dich fern zu

founding our future society to make Christianity a principal element in its religion, and not to neglect the "excellent collection of sacred books" left us by the Hebrews. J. R. SEELEY.

From Macmillan's Magazine. BORROUGHDALE OF BORROUGHDALE. "For every man hath a talent if he do but find it." JOHN LOCKE.

CHAPTER I.

WHEN Lord Borroughdale of Borroughdale in the peerage of Great Britain first went to Christ Church he speedily acquired the reputation of being about the dullest and the most ill-informed young man in the entire university.

Lord Borroughdale belonged to that fortunate class who are sometimes rather vulgarly described as being "their own fathers," a circumstance all the more odd in this case, seeing that this young man's father was still alive and flourishing. His mother, Lady Borroughdale, however, who had been a very great heiress and the last of a long line of north country magnates, was dead, and her son had suc. ceeded to all her possessions.

Although the Borroughdales had always been great people, not one of them had ever been in the very least distinguished for beauty, wit, accomplishments, or graces of any sort or kind. They had lived amongst grace, wit, beauty, all their lives, yet none of those desirable qualities had ever, somehow, adhered to any one of them. Helena, Marchioness of Borroughdale in her own right, had been by no means an exception to this rule. When, at the age of twenty-four, she came into all her immense possession, she was a round faced, rather dumpy young lady, looking a great deal older than she really was, with an unfortunately muddy complexion, a pair of nice, mild grey eyes, and two comically fat little hands, which waggled about when she spoke, and at other times stuck straight from her person, more like objects unskilfully modelled in very pink wax than ordinary pieces of flesh and blood.

Of course so great a matrimonial prize would have been in no lack of suitors had her hands or her complexion been even ten times as unsatisfactory as they were; indeed, had she been of an irresolute turn of mind she might have been fairly puzzled by the number, variety, and persistency of these aspirants. Fortunately,

whatever number of other talents they may have missed, the Borroughdales have always had that superlative one of very distinctly knowing their own minds. Long before she attained her majority, therefore, Lady Borroughdale had clearly settled whom she meant to marry; nor was it very long before she proceeded to carry that determination into effect.

The fortunate individual upon whom that choice fell was a remote cousin of her own upon the mother's side - well born, poor, clever, ambitious. Mr. Cosby Vansittart had already aspired to sit in Parliament, although his hopes in that direction had up to that time never been crowned with success. After his marriage - an event which took place the same year that Lady Borroughdale attained full control over her own property

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- he quickly, however, accomplished this end, and from that time forward always had a seat in Parliament, and even several times held office, though never any quite equal to what his own abilities and the large amount of territorial influence he was able to wield entitled him, he felt, to expect.

Poor Lady Borroughdale only survived this marriage about three years, so that, in addition to the regular income, her successor had the advantage of a long minority, which was assiduously watched over and nursed by his father. Mr. Vansittart could not but feel severely mortified at times by the clownish figure cut by his only son. Without undue vanity he might have been pardoned if he expected the wit and graces of the Vansittarts might in some degree overpower or modify the surly strength of the Borroughdales. This, however, was not the case. In character, appearance, and intelligence, or lack of that quality, Lord Borroughdale exactly reproduced his ma ternal ancestors; indeed there were not wanting people ready to declare that he was stupider and clumsier than all the rest of them put together.

He was a big, shaggy, thick-set young man, not as tall as he ought, no doubt, to have been for the breadth of his shoulders, with a pair of honest, clear grey eyes, a large mouth, a clumsy nose, strong chin, and a forehead that would have seemed better but for the hair which hung over it in a dense brown thatch. His hands, too, were excessively large and red, a circumstance which would have mattered little, no doubt, but that he seemed incapable of forgetting it himself for an instant, the violent contortions which he made to con

ceal those unlucky members having natu- | amount even of taciturnity upon the part rally the effect of attracting all eyes and of others, seemed to produce any percepti attention to them. ble effect in paralyzing or even diminishing this delightful gift.

his mind and spirits, even when he was absolutely alone.

Oddly enough, the companion whom this uncouth young nobleman selected out It was this quality of his that so greatly of the entire university to be his special endeared him to young Borroughdale. friend and crony was in all respects the Unlike most dullards, that poor youth was very antipodes to himself. Granville perfectly, even painfully, conscious of his Farquart, at twenty-three, might almost own thick-wittedness. It weighed upon have posed as a model for the young An- him to the full as much, indeed, as it tinous. His hair, his nose, his figure, his could possibly weigh upon those who bore hands and his feet, all alike were perfec-him company; lying a dead weight upon tion, or as near perfection as it is given to mere mortal man to hope to attain. He was not one of those Adonises, however, who rest contentedly upon their merely physical advantages; on the contrary, his mental qualifications were, in many respects, even more exceptional still. He had come up to the university with a considerable reputation for scholarship, which, however, he had not, it must be said, as yet set himself strenuously to maintain. The career and prestige of a college don, he sometimes owned to his intimates, was not one which he himself at all seriously ambitioned.

It was only in Farquart's company that the hereditary load seemed lifted for a minute. Not that even then he aspired to be a sharer of such good things as were afoot. The mere consciousness of being upon a footing of intimacy with such a prodigy of wit, of accomplishments, of social dexterity, was enough. It raised him immensely in his own estimation. He could sit and listen to Farquart's music, watch him painting, hear him dis course by the hour; his own sluggish temperament seeming thereby to be lifted into a more comfortable and less opaque atmosphere than that which it was its misfortune usually to inhabit.

When he looked forward at life it often, indeed, seemed to Farquart that to excel in many directions was almost as bad as to excel in none. A strong musical ca- Of course there were plenty of people pacity, for instance? Of what use, save ready to aver that Farquart toadied young amusement, was that to a man who would Borroughdale, and made up to him for never dream, of course, of taking up any his great possessions. No accusation, thing of the sort as a vocation? Painting, however, could be further from the mark. it is true, was more feasible; but even If either of the two men toadied the other there there were drawbacks, and he was it was Borroughdale that toadied Farnot at all clear that even its undoubted quart, not Farquart Borroughdale. Not prizes and immunities quite made up for only did the poor fellow seek out his them. At present, at any rate, he was friend upon every possible occasion, but merely keeping his hand in in this direc- he was never tired of bragging about his tion by sketches and studies which might intimacy with him to others. He swag. or might not come in handily hereafter. gered about Farquart - the artist, the Literature? Well yes; there, he owned, musician, the man of letters to every he did more seriously incline; indeed at comer. To such a degree indeed was that very moment he was the main support this the case that it was seriously comof more than one of those ephemeral peri- puted by some one who once spent a week odicals which burst into brief life at Ox-in the house with him, that out of eleven ford, and then disappear to make way for other and equally evanescent growths. Over and above all these various acquire ments and accomplishments, Farquart's greatest talent still, however, remains unmentioned. This was his extraordinary gift for sociability, by which I do not merely mean that he was a brilliant or an ornamental member of society, but that wherever he was, there, as if by magic, society began to exist. It had been said of him by an admirer that he could make a companion out of a garden rake, and certainly no amount of stupidity, no

occasions upon which the Marquis of Borroughdale had been known to open his mouth, no less than ten of them had been in order to make some observation about Granville Farquart.

On the other hand the latter was apt to adopt a rather apologetic tone in speaking of his friend, and of the intimacy that had sprung up between them. "Poor old Borroughdale! Well, yes, he is a bit of a lout certainly, but then such a goodhearted creature," he would say to those who insinuated that it was hardly that young man's personal qualities which had

procured him the privilege of his friend- | a small, dark, rather foreign-looking man, ship.

particularly, even strikingly well-dressed, with an air of distinction partly natural, partly acquired, which was also rather that of a well-bred foreigner than of an Englishman. He and Farquart had never, as it happened, met before, but they at once took to one another, the elder man losing no time indeed in expatiating upon his satisfaction at the eminently sound judgment displayed by his son in the matter of friendship.

ancient character of the house for hospitality was to be in any degree maintained.

One of these expected guests was the Dowager Lady Southend, well known by name, at all events, to all admirers of beauty, particularly those whose own climacteric lies some twenty or perhaps twenty-five years nearer to the beginning of the century. Lady Southend was to be accompanied by her daughter, Lady Venetia Foljambe, a young lady whom Farquart felt some little curiosity to see, rumors of an intended alliance between her and his friend having somehow floated to his ears. Indeed he had not been many days at the castle before Mr. Vansittart found an opportunity of speaking to him, not, it is true, directly upon the subject, but upon what appeared to bear not remotely upon it, choosing for that purpose a moment when they happened to be alone in the smoking-room, and prefacing his remarks by a few general observations upon his own son's character and disposition.

This friendship of theirs had lasted for over two years, before Farquart had had occasion to pay Borroughdale a visit in his own maternal castle of Borroughdale, in the north of Fellshire. It was not for want of asking, but somehow other things had always hitherto come in the way; indeed Lord Borroughdale himself spent quite as little time in those ancestral dominions of his as could with any decency be achieved, the amenities and civilities There was to be a regular influx of of life which it was so necessary to exer- guests, the latter learned, in a few days' cise there being but little, it must be time, over whose coming Borroughdale owned, to his taste. To Farquart, on the groaned pitiably, but which his father asother hand, when at last the long-talked-sured him was absolutely essential if the of visit. did come off, the whole thing was a new experience, and he made a point of enjoying it to the uttermost. He even began to look at Borroughdale himself with new eyes, surveying him against this large and picturesque, if somewhat antiquated background, the merits of which he now, for the first time, he felt, appreciated. Of money by itself he thought lightly, but some, if not the greater part of these things, are not so very easily procurable by money alone, even in these enlightened days. When, therefore, he had heard the wheels of their carriage rattle across the drawbridge which still united the castle to the outward world; when he had been ushered by his friend into a stone entrance hall as large as a moderate-sized cathedral, and through it into a blue satin room with Gainsboroughs, a red one with tapestry, along a passage beset with sulky-looking ancestors in panels, and had finally found himself lodged in a turreted bedroom, with windows commanding a green league or so of deer park, dark under rippling brack- "He is as good, as the French say, as en, and stately with immemorial oaks, good bread, that I need hardly tell you, elms, and chestnuts seeing and appre- and has never given me a moment's sericiating all these things as he so thorous anxiety in his life," he concluded emoughly could, Farquart, as he unpacked his portmanteau, owned to himself with a philosophic shrug of the shoulders that the last word upon primogeniture had hardly in England at any rate as yet been uttered. Mr. Cosby Vansittart was not at Borroughdale Castle when the two friends first arrived, but he made a point of ap "Yes, married. Many men pearing there a few days later, and assist. I suppose, in my position would prefer ing his son to do the honors of his house. to keep their son from forming new ties, The situation, as may be conceived, had and therefore more in their own hands, its awkward side, but Mr. Vansittart was but that is not at all my feeling. I have eminently well fitted, fortunately, to meet studied Borroughdale's character carefuland brush aside any such slight awkward-ly, and I am convinced, perfectly con. nesses as fast as they appeared. He was vinced, that he is made for domesticity."

phatically. "At the same time, I don't mind telling you in private, my dear Farquart, that it would be a comfort, a great comfort, I may say, for me to see him safely settled," he added in a tone of confidence.

"Do you mean married?" Farquart said inquiringly.

most men,

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