define. The modern novel had, as is well known, begun with that most revolutionary of English men of letters, Richardson. Richardson was the father, not only of the English novel, but of the European novel; and in Germany the intermediate steps between Richardson and Goethe are marked by works like Gellert's crude Life of the Swedish Countess von G**' and Wieland's 'Agathon,' the latter a book which Lessing recommended as the only novel of its time for the thinking man. The German family novel, under the influence of Rousseau, rapidly developed into the 'Kulturroman,' or the novel of education. Such was Agathon'; such too was, at bottom, 'Wilhelm Meister.' The subject of Goethe's romance is the education of a human soul; it is the history of a youth who, 'like Saul, the son of Kish, went out to seek his father's asses and found a kingdom,' Meister's asses being the art of the theatre, his kingdom the art of life. The scenery of 'Wilhelm Meister,' its personages, and its technique generally-however well drawn or ingeniously conceived-are all essentially of the eighteenth century. Even its morals, which still form a stumbling block for certain readers, are of the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth. If we are not prepared to accept this side of the romance with a historical sense of appreciation, we shall assuredly throw the book aside with as little understanding or sympathy as did De Quincey or Wordsworth.

But there is another side to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.' It became the starting point for the modern German novel; it influenced, in a way to which English and French fiction can afford no parallel, the entire later development of imaginative prose in Germany. There must thus be something germinative, something modern, in Wilhelm Meister,' something, in other words, of the nineteenth century. And for this we have not far to seek. The secret of Wilhelm Meister's' modernity is its holy earnestness'; it might bear as its motto the words, 'Gedenke zu leben!' (Think to live') or the song of the youths over Mignon's bier: 'Travel, travel back into life! Take with you this holy earnestness; for earnestness alone makes life eternity!' In this romance Goethe plumbs the depths of human life and lays bare the springs of human conduct in a manner never before attempted in a work of fiction. Or, to put it in another way, we find in Wilhelm Meister' that same intensifying of the functions of literature and art, in relation to human life, which, a few years later, gave such extraordinary force to the outburst of romanticism. The educational novel of the past, from which 'Meister' had sprung, took life lightly,

or, at least, superficially; it did not penetrate much beneath the surface, and, so far as the hero's development was concerned, it busied itself solely with his talents. 'Wilhelm Meister' goes further and deeper; it preaches, as the true end of life, the education of character and the development of the genius that lies dormant in every one. Know what thou canst work at!' was the practical solution of the problem of life which Carlyle drew from its pages; and Sir John Seeley enlarges admirably upon the same idea:

The lesson of the book,' he says, 'is that we should give unity to our lives by devoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and that the pursuit is assigned to us by Nature through the capacities she has given us. It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleasure that of the satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different in each individual. His system treats every man as a genius, for it regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which it claims the same sort of tender consideration that is conceded to genius.'

'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre' again is largely a novel about art, the art of the theatre; but it was by no means the first art novel. In French eighteenth-century fiction the theatre plays a considerable rôle, and in Germany both Heinse and Moritz had written art novels before Goethe. But here again it is the earnest spirit of Wilhelm Meister' which divides it sharply from its predecessors. To the eighteenth century—even to Goethe's Werther'-art was mainly an ornament to life, something with which to pass idle hours; or, if that generation did take art seriously, it regarded it as strictly subordinate to moral aims. In Goethe's novel there shines for the first time, bright and clear, one of the guiding principles of romanticism -the canon that art is holy, that instead of being subsidiary to life it must become one with life. Thus Gautier's l'art pour l'art goes back, if not directly, at least in spirit, to 'Wilhelm Meister.' Hence, too, the sarcasm with which throughout the novel Goethe treats those great levellers in art and literature with whom romanticism has always lived in enmity, the dilettante and the amateur. In one of those penetrating criticisms which form the most precious part of his correspondence with Goethe, Schiller has summed up the novel in a sentence. 'Wilhelm,' he said, 'passes from a void and undefined ideal to a definite active life, but without losing in the process his idealising faculty.' This is the whole romantic philosophy of life in a nutshell. As a solution to a problem which became more and more pressing as the eighteenth century advanced, namely, the reconciliation of the real with

the ideal, Goethe's Meister '-this 'Odyssey of culture,' as Hettner finely calls it-represents a culminating point in the movement of that century; but the fact that Goethe has effected this reconciliation by a blending, a fusion, of the real and the ideal, makes Wilhelm Meister' a romantic novel, a novel of the nineteenth century. We may consequently say that in this novel, as in no other of his works, Goethe stands on the boundary line between two epochs.

The relation in which Goethe stood to the Romantic School has never received adequate treatment from his biographers; it forms now almost the only large chapter in Goethe's life which has still to be written. Every one who has hitherto approached the subject has apparently felt a difficulty in reconciling Goethe, the friend of Schiller, with Goethe, the friend of a group of writers who stood in direct antagonism to Schiller. In most cases this difficulty has been solved as Goethe himself solved it when, late in life, he published his 'Correspondence with Schiller,' namely, by bringing his friendship with the latter into prominence at the expense of that with the members of the Romantic School. The Goethe Society in Weimar has, however, recently issued a volume of Goethe's correspondence with the Romanticists which helps to correct this false impression. These letters show, in fact, that Goethe's friendship with these men was by no means, as Schiller thought, merely a literary affair; in the case of the Schlegels and Schelling, at least, it was a hearty personal intimacy. Goethe had no better public-and he knew it-than these high-souled young enthusiasts who, in the last years of the century, bound themselves together as the Romantic School. Caroline Schlegel loved and understood Goethe as no one else, certainly as no other woman, of her time; Wilhelm Schlegel's reviews in the Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen,' in the early nineties, were the beginning of a true appreciation of the works of Goethe's riper period; and Friedrich Schlegel showed a finer understanding for the growth of Goethe's mind than any other critic of his generation. We do not, of course, wish to imply that these writers took a place in Goethe's affections similar in any respect to that which Schiller at this time held, but they had unquestionably an understanding for a side of Goethe's genius which was only imperfectly revealed to Schiller. We may say,' wrote the late Victor Hehn, in his suggestive, if occasionally one-sided, volume of essays on Goethe, that only after the appearance of the Romanticists was Goethe raised from the mediocre position which he had hitherto occupied to the high pinnacle, overlooking and towering above everything, which

was his due.' A glance into the writings of the Romanticists at this time shows an unconditional admiration of Goethe on the part of these young critics. Goethe's poetry,' according to Friedrich Schlegel, was the dawn of true art and pure beauty'; 'Goethe,' said Novalis, 'is now the true Stadtholder of the poetic spirit upon earth'; and Wilhelm Schlegel, in his Berlin lectures, in the first years of the century, repeats again and again the refrain that Goethe is the founder of a new poetic dynasty in Germany.

Thus it might be said that for at least eight years, namely, from 1796 to 1804, Goethe was the head of the Romantic School. For these young critics, poets, and philosophers, his works were an inexhaustible mine; they not only imitated Goethe, but sought and found in his writings proofs to justify all their theories. 'Wilhelm Meister' became the foundation stone of the romantic novel; indeed, it would be hard to say what kind of novels the Romanticists would have produced had Goethe's romance never been written. Even if they had not found its fundamental ideas so completely in harmony with their own, the wealth of poetry in Wilhelm Meister,' figures like Mignon and the Harper, the yearning for the Land wo die Citronen blüh'n,' would of necessity have struck sympathetic chords in the hearts of this new generation, which laid such store by the supremacy of fantasy' in poetry, and drew such hard and fast lines between the genuinely poetic and the merely rhetorical. Still dearer to the Romanticists was Goethe's lyric poetry, for in it they found realised that union of the soul with nature which they themselves strove after. Verses like An den Mond,' or 'Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh'' are, in the expression of this oneness of nature and spirit, more genuinely romantic than the whole romantic lyric from Novalis to Eichendorff and Heine.

Ultimately, however, a point was reached beyond which Goethe could not follow the Romantic School. He was too much a child of his century to give his approval to the extravagances to which it soon gave birth. When, for instance, the Romanticists set up the Middle Ages as something higher and more spiritual than the ancient world; when they depreciated Protestantism, with its active personal ideals, in favour of Catholicism; when they worshipped Calderon as the greatest of poets, Goethe felt that the parting of the ways had come. reply to these tendencies was 'Winckelmann and his Time,' which appeared in the year of Schiller's death. In the same year a coolness sprang up between Goethe and the Schlegels, which a little later turned to bitterness, and for the remainder of

His

his life Goethe was manifestly unjust towards them. In 1829 he made the significant remark to Eckermann: Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke' ('Classicism. I call health, and Romanticism sickness'). To Goethe's clear and sane mind, Romanticism had become 'sickly,' and he was not altogether wrong; but it is also worth while to remember that the history of modern art has more to tell of the quickening influence of the Schlegels' aesthetic theories, however extravagant they are, than of the belated Classicism which Goethe set forth in his art review, Die Propyläen.' There was, however, one Romanticist with whom he stood on terms of close intimacy until the very close of his life, and that was the philosopher Schelling. Of all the friends of Goethe's later years, none has a better claim to be regarded as Schiller's successor in his affections than Schelling. The strong Spinozistic trend in Goethe's mind, a trend due to the influence which F. H. Jacobi had had upon him in early days, made him particularly receptive to the romantic Nature-Philosophy, and thus Schelling's ideas at once found a sympathetic hearing. Indeed, none of the Romanticists has left a deeper influence on Goethe's writings and whole method of thought than he. This is especially noticeable in Goethe's later scientific work; and we need hardly point out that in his scientific work as a whole, it is the romantic rather than the classic Goethe who triumphs. Goethe's method as a man of science was organic, philosophical, poetic: anything rather than precise and mathematical. Here lay the source of its strength as well as of its weakness: on the one hand, it enabled Goethe to establish his theory of plant metamorphosis and to discover the intermaxillary bone in man, and thereby to be one of the pioneers of Darwinism and modern biology; but, on the other hand, it was also responsible for his unfortunate theory of colours.

We cannot here penetrate further into this interesting field of investigation, which has been opened up by the publication of the collected correspondence of Goethe with the Romanticists, but we have perhaps said enough to indicate how much importance must be attached to a clear understanding of Goethe's relations to the romantic movement. Here, if anywhere, lies the secret of his modernity. In so far as Goethe was classic, as a thinker, as an artist, as a literary and moral force, he belonged to the eighteenth century; but the Goethe who has exerted the most abiding influence upon the nineteenth century, the Goethe who still, at its close, is a vital intellectual force, is the Goethe of Romanticism.

This view is, in great measure, corroborated by the attitude