I am the lord of delights and pain, Of the pest that killeth, of fruitful joys; I rule the currents of heart and vein; A touch gives passion, a look destroys; In the heat and cold of my lightest breath Is the might incarnate of Lust and Death. (3.) If a thousand altars stream with blood Of the victims slain by the chanting priest, Is a great God lured by the savory food? I reck not of worship, or songs, or feast; But that millions perish, each hour that flies, Is the mystic sign of my sacrifice. (4.) Ye may plead and pray for the millions born; They come like dew on the morning grass; Your vows and vigils I hold in scorn, The soul stays never, the stages pass; All life is the play of the power that stirs In the dance of my wanton worshippers. (5.) And the strong swift river my shrine below Mine is the fountain—and mine the force That spurs all nature to ceaseless strife; And my image is Death at the gates of Life. (6.) In many a legend and many a shape, In the solemn grove and the crowded street, I am the slayer, whom none escape; I am Death trod under a fair girl's feet; Day by day with a blow that strengthens, Doubly sweet is the breath of morn. Day by day in the lower pastures, The peaches glow on the orchard wall. Day by day, over hill and valley, The snowflakes wing their passage slow, Cold white ghosts of the forest children Dead in the tangled brakes below. Chambers' Journal. ALFRED WOOD. From The Fortnightly Review. I. WILHELM MEISTER. respondent,* * “and prose, prose forever. When I read of players and libidinous actresses and their sorry pasteboard apparatus for beautifying and enlivening the 'moral world,' I render it into grammatical English with a feeling mild and charitable as that of a starving hyæna. .. Goethe is the greatest genius that has PROFESSOR SEELEY, who has written of Goethe with an intimate knowledge of his mind, even now rare among our countrymen, has described "Wilhelm Meis-lived for a century, and the greatest ass 66 ter as not the most attractive or the most that has lived for three. I could someperfect of its author's works, but as per- times fall down and worship him; at other haps the most characteristic, and, as it times I could kick him out of the room." ↑ were, the text-book of the Goethean phil- It was not until 1828-five years later osophy. Yet he admits that most English that Carlyle could write with entire confireaders lay it down bewildered, wondering dence of Goethe as seen in his "Wilhelm what Goethe's admirers can see in it so Meister," "Here the ardent, high-aspiring extraordinary; "It still," he says, re-youth has grown into the calmest man, yet mains the book which chiefly justifies the with increase and not loss of ardor, and profound distrust and aversion with which with aspirations higher as well as clearer. Goethe has been and is regarded among For he has conquered his unbelief; the those who are Christian either in the dog-ideal has been built on the actual; no matic or in the larger sense." * longer floats vaguely in darkness and reWe all remember Wordsworth's sen-gion of dreams, but rests in light, on the tence of indignant condemnation. We all firm ground of human interest and busiremember De Quincey's article in which ness, as in its true sense, on its true he employed a heavy flippancy to make basis."‡ the book look more disgraceful and ridiculous as it "travels on its natural road to shame and oblivion." And Mr. Lewes's excuse was one of those excuses which seem to accuse: "All that can be said," he wrote, "is that the artist has been content to paint scenes of life without comment" - precisely what Goethe has not done in "Wilhelm Meister," for it is full of commentary on the life which it represents. Even Carlyle, its translator, was slow to comprehend the unity or the drift of the tale. "I go on with Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister," "he wrote in 1823, "a book which I love not, which I am sure will never sell, but which I am determined to print and finish. There are touches of the very highest, most ethereal genius in it; but diluted with floods of insipidity, which even I would not have written for the world." It is not, however, for touches here and there that any true student of Goethe values the work. "There is poetry in the book," wrote Carlyle to another cor * Professor Seeley's articles on Goethe were printed in the LIVING AGE, No. 2191, p. 771; No. 2107, p. 339; No. 2113, p. 726. † To Miss Welsh, Early Letters, i. 219. Professor Seeley has said a better word on "Wilhelm Meister," it seems to me, than that of any other English writer, unless it be this word of Carlyle; and yet I do not think that Professor Seeley has exactly hit the mark. The book, he maintains, is at once immoral and profoundly moral. It is immoral on one point -on the relations of men and women; "immoral in Goethe's peculiar, inimitable, good-natured manner." Goethe is an indifferentist as to one important section of morality, "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." But all that Goethe has to say on the choice of vocations — and this is the real subject of the book-is profoundly moral and of immense importance. * Mr. James Johnstone, Early Letters, i. 223. "Meister himself is perhaps the greatest ganache that ever was created by quill and ink. I am going to write a fierce preface, disclaiming all concern with the literary or the moral merit of the work. What a work! Bushels of dust and straw and feathers, with here and there a diamond of the purest water." ... Miscellanies, "Goethe," i. 170, ed. 1857 The greatest of all duties, he tells us, is infinite the overflowing ecstasy of life." that of choosing our occupation aright. And strains of a like kind are heard in the The lesson of "Wilhelm Meister" is opening scenes of "Faust." Secondly, it "that we should give unity to our lives by meant a return from conventions, ceremodevoting them with hearty enthusiasm to nies, false traditions, to the nature that is some pursuit, and that the pursuit is as- within us. Would we discover the true signed to us by nature through the capac-law of conduct? Let us seek it in our ities she has given us. It is thus that own breast. Would we find inspiration Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleas for song? Let us look in our hearts and ure that of the satisfaction of special write. Would we ascertain the true rules inborn aptitudes different in each individ- of art? Let us cast aside Aristotle and ual." This word of Professor Seeley, Horace and Boileau, and consult only our even if it only says a portion of the whole inward sense of beauty.* truth, is assuredly well said. Carlyle found we see it from his let ters, and he tells us so himself - that with "Wilhelm Meister," as with every work of real and abiding excellence, the first glance is the least favorable.* Such is the experience of every reader who has come to value the book; before we can judge the parts aright we must conceive the whole. Even with respect to the relations of men and women, as we shall see, the teaching of the book is not precisely that of one to whom morality is indifferent, although Goethe's point of view is a worldly one; but we do not perceive how order in "Wilhelm Meister" pronounces a judgment on disorder until we survey the earlier portions of the work in the light thrown back upon them from its close. The revolt of heart and will on behalf of freedom, real or imaginary, took two forms; the form of Titanic egoism, unbridled energy, a boundless deploying of the will; and the form of sentimental egoism, unrestrained sensibility, an abandonment of the heart to measureless desire. One we may, if we please, term the masculine, and the other the feminine form of the revolt. Goethe, before attaining the age at which Shakespeare probably was writ ing his first comedy, had interpreted the literary movement of his time in a twofold way: in "Goetz von Berlichingen " he had presented the ideal of freedom in its active form an heroic will struggling with circumstance; in "Werther he had presented the same ideal on its passive side of immoderate sensibility -a heart forever trembling and yielding to every touch of circumstance. The magic words of the eighteenthcentury revolt, the Sturm und Drang "Faust in its origin belongs to the of young Germany, in which Goethe in same period, and represents in its earlier his earlier years had been a leader, were written scenes the same tendencies. But the words freedom and nature. Limitless"Faust" is the work of Goethe's entire life, freedom in life and in literature was to be having occupied its author at intervals attained, as it were, at a bound, by a re- from early manhood to extreme old age. turn to nature. But nature is twofold; It has a real unity, inasmuch as it is the there is first the visible world, surround-product of one mind, the outcome of one ing us, the world of hill and stream and sky; and secondly, there is the native manhood in the heart of each of us. To return to nature meant to commune with the forces of the external world, and also to consult the oracle in our bosom. First, it meant the sentiment of nature. "Ah! how often," cries Werther, "when the crane was in flight above my head, have I longed on the shore of the boundless sea to quaff from the foaming goblet of the Preface to the first edition of Carlyle's translation. life; we trace in it the orbit of a great planetary spirit. It extends beyond “Wilhelm Meister" at either end, telling us of the aspiring youth of Goethe, of those early days when the two great figures of the medieval magician, Faust, and the Mr. Matthew Arnold, following M. Scherer, says that what young Germany really did was to fall from classical French literature, into another, that of Rousseau. Rousseau, to be sure, set the stone a-rolling; one sort of imitation, the imitation of the so-called but the creator of Lotte and Werther rolled it in his own German way. ideal built on the void to the discovery of the ideal built on the actual. Goethe, as Carlyle has put it, no longer "floats vaguely in darkness and region of dreams, but rests in light, on the firm ground of human interest and business." Greek Titan, Prometheus, took form in | helm Meister" is from the pursuit of the "Wilhelm Meister" sprouted, "cotyledon-wise," during the first Weimar years, and occupied Goethe from time to time almost up to the date of his Italian journey. In 1787 he wrote to the duke from the opening of his hero's fortieth year, and he wished to have it written by the arrival of its author at the same time of life. But Goethe was little of the professional book-maker; other things interested him, and "Wilhelm Meister" was laid aside. The work was resumed at a moment when the political revolt of the eighteenth century had reached its culmination, when the words "freedom" and When, after the first wild days at Wei-"nature" were again heard, but now with mar, Goethe began to settle down to his work, it quickly became evident to him that the freedom, of which so much had been said or sung by young Germany, was not to be won by a blow or at a bound; and that if a return to nature was needed so also was a true art of life. a new and dreadful significance; for Danton had just fallen in Revolutionary Paris, and in the public procession in honor of the God of Nature, Robespierre, the admiring disciple of Rousseau, had appeared as high priest. Goethe had been repelled by the violences of the French Revolution. He was of one mind with Coleridge This is an art which does mend nature, but when he wrote the lines: The art itself is nature. His duties grew many and arduous; his the Privy Council Chamber. Yet if Wer- Willst Du ins Unendliche schreiten, Geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten. The sensual and the dark rebe, in vain, Slaves by their own compuls on! In mad game They burst their manacles and wear the name * Political liberty, he held, in order to be other than a mere pretence, must be preceded by the deliverance of individual men from their own base passions and vain strivings. Now, too, it was that Schiller, the poet of freedom, was occupied with his "Letters on Esthetic Culture." "The eyes of the philosopher and the man of the world," he writes, "are turned, full of expectation, towards the political arena, where, as is believed, the great destiny of man is now developed. If I suffer ... "Franzthum drängt in diesen verworrenen Tagen, Lutherthum es gethan, ruhige Bildung zurück." |