own sleep and his own tears, and an extra will, subject to the command of the third eye, ready to rescue the ordinary will from the intricacies of human emotion. Shakespeare's knowledge of life was, I should think, less drawn from constant vigilance and presence of mind in the passing moment (to which I imagine him to have abandoned himself far more completely than Goethe), and more derived from the power of memory and imagination to reproduce past impressions. However this may be, Shakespeare has himself sketched less perhaps this cool presence of mind itself, than the effect which it produces on other men, in his picture of Octavius Cæsar. Cæsar's cool self-possessed eye for every emergency, and for the right use of human instruments, and its paralysing effect on Antony's more attaching and passionate character, is a striking example of what Goethe would have called the "dæmonic" element in human affairs-the element that fascinates men by at once standing out clear and quite independent of their support, and yet indicating the power to read them off, and detect for them their own needs and uses. There is always in this kind of magnetic power something repulsive at first; but if the repulsion be overcome, the attraction becomes stronger than ever; there is a resistance while the mind of the disciple is striving to keep its independence and conscious of the spell, an intense devotion after he has once relinquished it, and consented to be a satellite. So the soothsayer tells Antony,

"Thy demon, that's thy spirit which keeps thee, is
Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,

Where Cæsar's is not; but near him, thy angel
Becomes a fear, as being overpowered; therefore
Make space enough between you."

And Goethe, who had, as he says, himself experienced the force of this blind fascination in the Duke of Weimar's influence over him, as well as wielded it in no slight degree, tells Eckermann (himself a captive), "The higher a man stands, the more he is liable to this dæmonic influence; and he must take constant care that his guiding will be not diverted by it from the straight way. . . This is just the difficult point, for our better nature stoutly to sustain itself, and yield to the dæmonic no more than is reasonable."

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In Goethe himself this fascinating power existed as strongly as it is well possible to conceive in a man whose whole intellectual nature was of the sympathetic and contemplative, rather than of the practical cast, -who had no occasion to use men except as literary material, and who, while he stood out independent of them, and could at will shake off from his feet the dust of long association, yet felt with them as one who understood their nature and had entered into their experience. Goethe's sympathetic and genial insight into man would have been a pure embarrassment to a practical coldtempered tool - seeker like Napoleon, who never deciphered men through sympathy, but always by an instinctive tact for detecting masterly and workmanlike instruments. And vice versa, the imperturbable self-possession and Napoleonic sang froid of judgment that underlay in Goethe all storms of superficial emotion, were no little embarrassment to him in many of his literary moods. They prevented him, we think, from ever becoming a great dramatist. He could never lose himself sufficiently in his creations : yet they assuredly secured for him his command of those minutely-accurate observations of life with

which all his later prose works and his conversations are so thickly studded.

converse.

You can see that men of strong nature did not submit themselves to Goethe's magnetic influence without a struggle. Schiller, at first intensely repelled from him, was only gradually subdued, though thoroughly and strangely magnetised into idolatry by personal Herder's keen and caustic nature vibrated to the last between the intense repulsion he felt for Goethe's completely unmoral genius, the poet's impartial sympathy for good and evil alike, — and the irresistible attraction which his personal influence exerted. Only those could thoroughly cling to Goethe from the first who were not conscious of having any strong intellectual independence to maintain. Women, who love nothing so much as a completely independent self-sustained nature, especially if joined with thorough insight into themselves, were fascinated at once. Wieland, who had no intellectual ground to fight for, surrendered without terms. But no man of eminent ability and a different school of thought seemed to approach him without some sense that, if exposed constantly to his immediate influence, he would have to choose between fascination and aversion. Hence his very few intimate male friends: scarcely any man, at all able to enter into his mind and share his deeper interests, was likely to be found who could go so completely into captivity to his modes of thought; and, tolerant as he was, the centrifugal force of his mind threw off, to a certain respectful distance, all that the attractive force was not able to appropriate as part of itself.

There has been a very similar effect produced by his writings on those even who did not know the man. Novalis fluttered round them, repeatedly ex

pressing his aversion, like a moth round a candle. They invariably repel, at first, English readers with English views of life and duty. As the characteristic atmosphere of the man distils into your life, you find the magnetic force coming strongly over you;-you are as a man mesmerised; you feel his calm independence of so much on which you helplessly lean, combined with his thorough insight into that desire of yours to lean, drawing you irresistibly towards the invisible intellectual centre at which such independent strength and such genial breadth of thought were possible. And yet you feel that you would be in many and various ways lowered in your own eyes if you could think completely as he thought and act as he acted. It becomes a difficult problem, in the presence of so much genius, and beneath so fascinating an eye, "for our better nature stoutly to sustain itself and yield to the dæmonic no more than is reasonable."

Let me attempt to contribute to the solution of this difficulty by some account and criticism of Goethe's life and genius in connection with that personal character which so subtly penetrates all he has written. Carlyle mistook completely when he said. that Goethe, like Shakespeare, leaves little trace of himself in his creations. To a careful eye this is not even true of Shakespeare, though Shakespeare leaves no immediate stamp of himself, and critical inference alone can discern him in his works; but far less is it true of Goethe. A rarified self no doubt it isa highly-distilled gaseous essence; but everywhere, penetrating all he writes, there is the ethereal atmosphere which travelled about with Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Mr. Lewes's volumes give us a very able and interesting biography, a book, indeed, of permanent

value; the incidents illustrating character, though not quite exhausting his materials, are disposed with skill, and the artistic criticism, while thoroughly appreciating Goethe's transcendent poetical genius, is independent, sensible, and English. From his moral criticism of Goethe, and sometimes, though not so frequently, from the poetical, I very widely dissent, and hope to give the grounds of my dissent. Something more too might have been done in the way of defining his individual position both as a poet and as a man. But it is impossible to deny Mr. Lewes high merit for the candour of his biography. Where Goethe has been most censured, he gives all the facts without reserve; and he does not go into any helpless captivity to the poet and artist. He gives his readers the elements for forming their own moral judgments, and he has shaken off from his feet the ponderous rubbish of the German scholiasts. Herr Düntzer and his colleagues are skilfully used in Mr. Lewes's book; but they are also skilfully ignored. Mr. Lewes has not submitted himself to Carlyle's somewhat undiscriminating, strained, and lashed-up furor of adoration for every word that the German sage let drop. There is, by the way, nothing more remarkably illustrative of Goethe's "dæmonic" influence than Carlyle's worship of him. Except in his permanent unfailing self-possession, Goethe lacked almost all the personal qualities which usually fascinate that great writer's eye. And accordingly there runs through Carlyle's essays on Goethe a tone of arduous admiration,-a helpless desire to fix on some characteristic which he could infinitely admire,-betraying that he was in subjection to the "eyes behind the book," not to the thing which is said in it. There was nothing of the rugged thrusting power of