GOETHE 12S co-operated in the plan most cordially. And so long as Schiller lived, their friendship was to each a great blessing. Their statues, representing them hand in hand, commemorate this friendship to this day. The closing books of " Wilhelm Meister" were written in Italy, and after Goethe's return,- and the book was published in 1 795. Goethe had long since outlived the extravagance of sentimentalism which overflowed in " Werther." He had himself ridiculed it in a little farce, much laughed at at the time. And if "Wilhelm Meister" were taken merely as a story, it would be found quite free from such extravagances. The story, however, is simply the framework for crit- icism on art, on literature, and especially for what may be called studies on edu- cation. The criticism on " Hamlet" has been called the best of the thousands upon thousands of which " Hamlet " has been the subject. No book of Goethe's has had, or has held, the interest of the great world of " general readers," as " Wil- helm Meister," " Faust " not excepted. " Hermann and Dorothea" appeared in 1797, and was one of the most serious of the efforts by which Goethe and Schiller both gave themselves to create a Ger- man drama worthy of the German people. In 1790 a new theatre had been built at Weimar, and Goethe became in fact the manager. He was not satisfied with writing plays to be performed there : he actually supervised the performances, and gave to the detail of such management much of his time for many years. So long as Schiller lived the two were closely connected in all such enterprises, and Goethe's practical connection with the theatre led him, perhaps, to at- tempt the dramatic form of composition more often than he would otherwise have done. In 1799 Walter Scott, then only twenty-five years of age, published in Edin- burgh his translation of " Goetz von Berlichingen." It must be remembered that all this time Goethe is pursuing his studies of Physical Science. His little book called " Morphologie," published in 1788, im- mediately after his return from Italy, is a simple, unaffected, practical, statement of the law of growth of plants, which, though suggested before, had quite es- caped the attention of the botanists of repute. When it was published, it seems to have been pushed aside as the fanciful dream of a poet. In truth, it is a book which might be given to-day to a learner, as one of the most elegant and simple illustrations of what is now meant by evolution in nature. From the humble re- sources of a common garden Goethe finds material to show how whorls of leaves appear as blossoms ; how calyx passes into corolla ; how leaves of the corolla be- come stamens and pistils. After a generation the botanists were willing enough to accept the statement, and Goethe lived long enough to see it accepted as the foundation of the Botanical Science of his time. The critics are apt to call " Faust " his greatest work. The first part was published in 1805, the second in 1831. Quite too much finesse has been wasted on endeavors to discover his purpose in the poem. It will live, not from any discovery of his purpose, but because of the intensity with which it presents the different characters. It will command and control men all the more, because
