fitted, I should indicate the English for oratory, the French for conversation, the Italian for song, and the Spanish for love—that is, the expression of the tender passion.
More than one generation has passed away since that which first wept over the sufferings of the youthful Werther (1774), or imitated his eccentricities. It is a work of true genius, instinct with profound pathos and energic passion. We have two or three translations; but all are more or less inadequate, and this may account for the comparative oblivion into which it has fallen.
There is one little point in Wilhelm Meister (1795) which may be worthy of mention, as it exhibits Goethe, who, it will be remembered, was educated for the bar, as an original and accurate observer of medical symptoms. He states that his father was attacked by right hemiplegia, and describes, in a clear and simple manner, how this was accompanied by aphasia, or loss of the proper use of speech. Now this is interesting, inasmuch as we have no description of the phenomenon by a medical author before 1836, in Trousseau's Clinical Medicine (Sydenham Society), and Reynolds's System of Medicine, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 454. I need not say that Wilhelm Meister, with its exquisite creation of Mignon, is known to us by the powerful version of Carlyle.
In the drama of Egmont occurs the character of "Clara," than which exists no more lovely example of the constancy and devotion of woman. The Iphigenia auf Tauris is a classical production, refreshing to the vexed spirit as a Greek statue. It has been pronounced almost worthy of Sophocles himself; but fine as it undoubtedly is, it must be held inferior, alike in theme and treatment, to the Samson Agonistes of Milton,—the most successful attempt of a modern, according to Goethe himself, to catch life from the breath of the antique spirit. Those who are curious to see how it reads in Greek may turn to the masterly version of Theodore Koch, or those parts of it which have been translated by Professor Hermann of Leipsic.
An evergreen favourite is Hermann and Dorothea (1797), an idyllic epos of truly Homeric character, written after the ancient models in hexameters, full of pastoral beauty and axiomatic wisdom. Then there is the Wahlverwandschaften (1809), a romance of great beauty and power, but, perhaps to some minds, dangerous in theory; Cellini (1803), in its Italianized German;[1] Dichtung und Wahrheit, a biopathography of intense interest; ballads, songs and minor poems, exhibiting elegance, facility and consummate finish; and lastly, his correspondence with Lavater, Schiller, Von Bernsdorff, Zeller, Schultz, and Bettina von Arnim, geborene Brentano,—embodying a vast amount of literature and criticism.
In English, we have Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe; the various essays of Thomas Carlyle; Eckermann's Conversations; and the masterly and exhaustive life by the late G. H. Lewes. Reference may also be made with profit to the Critical Essays and Literary Notes of the late Bayard Taylor (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1880, 8vo). Here especially are two chapters on Weimar, in which are graphic sketches of the still surviving members of the circle of which Goethe was once the centre. The admirable Lectures on Goethe of Hermann Grimm had not appeared when these essays were originally printed; but the essential estimate of Goethe's moral character by the two men will not be found to
- ↑ Translated into English by the late John Oxenford. (H. G. Bohn, 1848, 8vo.)
