Goethe so ruined it at the close. The adventures of the company and William's share therein, and his subsequent career till he finds himself domesticated with Serlo, are in a manner perfect in the narration. We could say no more for the sketch of Serlo, with the circumstances which went to make him what he became, than that it goes far to atone for much that comes thereafter. William may or may not have found his vocation; if not, it seems a pity that his stay with Serlo and Aurelia should so hold the reader's interest as compared with his stay with Lothario and Natalie.

It is at this point, however, that Goethe outrages our feelings in a fashion past redemption. We might, indeed, have been disposed to stigmatize, not William's relation with Mariana, but the tone of its narration, as of another nationality than the moral and edifying German; but this we passed over, conceiving the purpose of the author to be a development of good from the evil. But a certain passage between William and Philina cannot be excused by any excuse worthy of being called such. It is unjust to Philina, who has abandoned her pursuit of William, and is about to slip away with Friedrich, as the best thing on the whole for her. It is unjust to William, who has resisted Philina when long before she flung herself upon him, his determination being strong not again to outrage his higher nature after the affair with Mariana. We do not condemn the scene from the moral standpoint simply; we condemn it from the artistic standpoint, in that when a certain result has been achieved, with no little pains, the author goes back upon himself and the reader, only because another idea has seized upon him, which idea he develops in the readiest to hand manner, without regard to previous continuity. This incident is a striking illustration of the patchy, done in bits character of Goethe's literary work; it is introduced obviously to carry a point in the Mignon part of the story, a point which, if worth carrying at all, should have been carried in some other manner. We are not expressly told whether Friedrich really stands to Philina in marital relation; but the doubt that is cast in the matter of her expectancy is none the less an odious one, and the jesting between Friedrich and William as to paternity compels us to ask whether there is here some hidden meaning, subtle and profound, which justifies this sort of thing in Goethe, but not in another. If so, we might prefer a teacher whose meanings are less profound and less subtle. It is impossible not to recall a similar passage in Le Sage, where Gil Blas, with that touch of

masculine bravado which saves him from priggishness, assures the mischievous reader that his suspicion is an unjust one; and to agree that the writer whose utmost posing as a teacher is in the modest hope that his readers will find the beneficial mingled with the agreeable, has the best of it in the comparison.

Instead of that development of Natalie, Theresa, and the countess, by which this group might have counterbalanced in interest and hold upon the reader that of Mariana, Aurelia, and Philina, Goethe has given us the "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," these confessions forming the bridge, as it were, from the earlier part of his work to the later. These confessions, the critics tell us, are based upon the Reliquien of Fräulein Klettenberg, a friend of Goethe's early manhood. We have no fault to find with the fair saint, unless it is a touch of spiritual pride. But we should much prefer our pietism by itself, and our romance by itself, with such lesson as naturally attaches thereto. In connection with the fair saint there is introduced an uncle, the guardian in their childhood of Natalie and the countess, with Lothario and the volatile Friedrich. This uncle is a connoisseur of art, and his view of life is balanced against the fair saint's pietism. The uncle, we are told, stands for Goethe himself. Certainly it would seem true that in William we have not a little of Goethe, and something, one must think, in Jarno, as well as in Lothario, all his writings, as Goethe himself tells us, "forming part of one great confession." Yet this most introspective of writers it is, whom we are required to place with Dante and Shakespeare, as forming a triad in modern literature.

"William Meister," alas! is one of those books which steadily diminish in interest to the close. It is painful to have to acknowledge that William loses his hold upon us as he passes from his mistaken to his true vocation, from his false view of life to his genuine and just one. Any interest that we may have felt in Natalie is quite dissipated by the time we are at last presented to her; and it is entirely in keeping that William, who ever since his glimpse of Natalie upon the mountain has dreamed of her and her only, except when his fancy has reverted to Mariana, should seem not unwilling, before the interview with Natalie is brought about, to accept Theresa. That there is stuff in the concluding portion of the book for any number of full-fledged romances does not help the matter much, for it only illustrates how entirely unselective Goethe's art is. What we chiefly deplore is his subsequent handling of the exquisite theme of Mignon and the harper.

From our childhood we have known of this Mignon, her wondrous song has exercised upon us its weird fascination. If we have waited for full acquaintance till time and opportunity should enable us to cultivate it in the picturesque original, bitter will be our disappointment. Those who have constructed the Mignon episode from the beautiful opera based upon it, will be as much at fault as those who have constructed Margaret from the lyric drama, at least in the idyllic termination. We do not complain, indeed, that poor little Mignon should end her mortal life, seeming, as she does, scarcely a creature of mortal mould. But the theatric preparation of her dead body, the sort of travesty of a burial service in the Hall of the Past, her identification by the crucifix tattooed upon her arm, the story of her origin, on whose head of horror horrors accumulate Mignon is the child of a terrible sin, assuredly; but it is difficult to see why it should be visited upon her with this sort of expiation. As for the harper, we do not know whether we are the more disgusted at his coming out smug and young, or at the ghastly physical detail in regard to him which follows thereafter. And what, we have a right to ask, has there been in the first meeting of Mignon and the harper with William, and their idyllic wanderings with him, which could possibly forebode such a termination?

More and more, as we have become further acquainted with the works of Goethe, have we been impressed by a theatric quality, theatric, that is, in the sense in which this term has come to be used in distinction from dramatic, in the large and vital sense. The dramatic quality, by which, apparently without formal preparation, without adventitious or factitious accompaniment, a scene is made to come vividly before the mind of the reader, a quality which so abounds in the work of Scott, which fairly glows in Victor Hugo, is possessed by Goethe in inverse proportion. In place thereof, we have the theatric quality of which we have just spoken. We must, of course, take our Goethe as we find him ; but there could be few greater drawbacks than the presence of this vicious characteristic. We have had a curious touch of it in the presentation of "Hamlet," where as Hamlet and his companions yield the ground from consternation at the ghostly voice beneath them, jets of flame appear successively where they have stood. This detail, like that of the seven-leagued boots which "stride onward in haste," and more of the sort in the second part of "Faust," is of the nature of a trick of the pantomime. Nothing than the jets of flame could to the English reader be

more un-Shakespearian. And it is curious that the further we remove from the theatre and the play-actors, the more we have of this theatric quality. We are most outraged by the parade over the dead Mignon; but the climax of absurdity is reached in the secret tower, when the sort of society which has all along been tracking William down, with a view to drawing him from his false to his true vocation, has it all its own way. Of William personally, the best and strongest thing is his ready assumption of the obligation of paternity, as soon as he has reason to believe that Felix is his son; but we fail to see how the oracular voice in the tower can establish the conviction, which has wavered after Mariana's dying attestation, and the complete circumstantial evidence of the old Barbara.

We cannot leave "William Meister's Apprenticeship" without observing, as a certain offset to our dissatisfaction with Natalie as crown of the work and ornament of William's true vocation, that we find in Goethe a just discrimination, a certain quality of his defects, so to say, in its way admirable. If Natalie is a failure, if Theresa, excellent housewife and stewardess as she is, is so much only, he at least does not leave his doubtful women in unrelieved badness. Mariana is better than our fears, and her pitiful end excites our commiseration. Aurelia is not an exalted character, but she makes an end not altogether ignoble; and Philina, whom we had almost despaired of, turns out very well, for Philina. It is impossible not to smile when we find her in the predicament she has derided in Madame Melina. We may add that Serlo, whose vocation is evidently play-acting, though William's is not, after a certain amount of skirmishing, marries decently the young girl of the company whom he has been deluding, apparently, to her ruin. On the other hand, Lothario, whom we are expected, it would seem, to admire as a lofty character, we find casting a loving glance back to the beginning of his gay career, as evidenced in an episode entirely Goethean, at the moment when he is desiring above all things else to marry Theresa. Truly we have in Goethe's great work a gordian knot, a hopeless entanglement of threads good and evil.

The worst charge we have to bring against Goethe is that which we have just glanced at, that he is incapable of bringing before us, in her habit as she lives, a natural, innocent, large-minded girl. That which was to Scott a turn of the hand, that which was to Schiller a native air, is somehow beyond him. Even in "Her

mann and Dorothea" we have felt this, for Dorothea, when she enters in person into the story, is doctrinaire, almost to the point of repelling sympathy. And all the elaborate apparatus which leads up to the introduction of Natalie does not make her much more than a lay figure. The greatest blemish, however, in "William Meister," to our thinking, does not concern any woman of Goethe's own creation. It is found in the explanation of Ophelia's singing licentious songs in her madness, which he puts into the mouth of William. The criticism on "Hamlet" may be the best thing in "William Meister;" to the individual reader it is of course valuable, according as he has thought out for himself or not the Hamlet question. But the passage concerning Ophelia, if we understand Goethe's language, which seems sufficiently explicit, we have a right to protest against, as conveying a wanton insult, we had almost said, to the most ideal of Shakespeare's women. So far as regards our admiration of Goethe, the worst of this passage is that it is so much like him, — Goethe was not only incapable of creating an Ophelia, he was incapable of apprehending one when created. We have only to read Lady Martin's exquisite fancies as to Ophelia's thus singing (though the explanation that most obviously suggests itself is quite sufficient) to realize how far apart may be two interpretations of one and the same point in Shakespeare.

Of "William Meister's Travels " we might repeat what we have said of the second part of "Faust," that if Goethe's unqualified admirers can make little of it, it is not surprising that others should share the opinion. As for travels, it might occur to us that there is as much of traveling in the "Apprenticeship ;" and as for William, the hero of the "Travels," if hero there be, is not William, but Felix, his son. Speaking again out of the unaided light of nature, and putting aside, for the moment, a deference to critical opinion, we should say that the book is made up of the odds and ends of a literary workshop, put together with the very slightest regard to continuity or coherency. When a thread of connection is supplied for the short stories which make up so much of the bulk of the work, it is sometimes to more grotesque result than if there were none; the cord is so slight for the holding of the weight attached thereto. Certainly there is a background to all this, a background of which the theme is education. We have glanced before at a certain tenderness for children as being one of Goethe's best characteristics; but his views on edu