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HORE GERMANICA. No. XIX. GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN, A TRA-
GEDY, BY GOETHE,

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PROFLIGACY OF THE LONDON PERIODICAL PRESS. No. II.

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WONDERFUL PASSAGE IN THE LIFE OF MANSIE WAUCH, TAILOR,

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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD, NO. 17, PRINCE'S STREET, EDINBURGH;

AND T. CADELL, STRAND, LONDON;

To whom Communications (post paid) may be addressed.

SOL) ALSO BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM.

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Goetz von Berlichingen, a Tragedy, by Goethe."

THIS tragedy was a very early production of the author. It was his first appearance upon the stage ;-his first attempt to embody the result of those studies, which, from the dawn of his manhood, had occupied the largest portion of his intellect.

Never, perhaps, was the first dramatic work of any author more decidedly entitled to the praise of originality. Few, very few, mature works of any genius are more resplendently instinct with the spirit of energy. It is no wonder, therefore, that some signal errors of taste were, at the moment of its appearance, altogether overlookedthat it was hailed with all the enthusiasm of unchastised applause-that it covered its author with honour, at the time unrivalled-and that, from that day to this, the influence of its success may be read in broad and indelible characters all over the surface of the literature which it had reanimated. That such are the qualities, and that such were the effects of Goethe's first drama, we have, in a former paper of this series, had occasion to state generally. We now purpose to examine Goetz von Berlichingen somewhat more at length, and to give our readers some specimens of the materials of which it is constructed, and of the style in which it is composed, in order that they may judge for themselves, wheVOL. XVI.

ther the opinion we expressed was, or was not, one of exaggerated praise.

In order to judge of this piece, however, it is not a whit more necessary that we should examine itself, than that we should endeavour, in so far as is possible, to throw ourselves back into the time when it made its appearance. And, in truth, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves from this time into that. What were the most popular works of literature in those days,the works that exerted the widest influence-that enjoyed the most European reputation-that gave the tone of thought-that, by turns, echoed and dictated the feelings of the largest portions of society? There cannot be a question that these were the writings of VOLTAIRE, and his numerous followers, in France and out of France. The German literature of the period was, in spite of national pride and personal pique, saturated with the spirit of the great Revolutionary Cynic. In this spirit even WIELAND wrote poetry. The translator of Lucian changed but little of his character when he composed the beautiful cantos of his Oberon; there was more of the Princess of Babylon in them, than of the Midsummer Night's Dream. Herder, indeed, had followed the footsteps of Lessing, and the only really excellent criticism even of that time in Ge

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alike, and he warred equally against all. He hated the despotism of the French king, and he assaulted all European government. He despised the cruel mummeries of the half-heathenized Christianity he saw in operation immediately around him, and he declared war against the Bible. Through the feeble points of manners, he stabbed at the eternal foundations of morals ;— Pretence and Purity, Cunning and Wisdom, all were alike the objects thank God, not the victims of his impartial rancour.

many was hostile to the French school; but what were a few private scholars and professors, dispersed over the obscure and powerless states of Germany, when opposed to the influence of the only intellectual prince of whom Germany could boast, reigning in a capital upon which the eyes of all Europe were fixed, drawing around him everything that was most likely to adorn the monarchy he might be said to have created, and exerting all his immense influence, personal and regal, in favour of that literature, the spirit of which, although even his lynx eyes could not see it, was not less fixedly and irreconcilably at variance with his own interests and those of his crown, than with all the best and dearest interests of Germany, of Europe, of Christendom? The star of Frederick blazed an evil portent in the intellectual sky of Germany; its meteor-like splendour, though of" the earth earthy," was sufficient to dim for a time the more distant and scattered vessels of purer and more stedfast light.

Even the gigantic mind of Johnson, such are the effects of contemporary spleen, could not enter the lists against Voltaire, without denying the greatness of his genius. It is pitiable enough to perceive that this folly still lingers among some who ought to be above it; but what such people say now has certainly no influence upon the general feelings of men. Posterity is, as usual, just; and they who are in the best condition to render a reason for their aversion to Voltaire, are the readiest also to admit, that were nothing but mere power of intellect to be taken into account, there are but very few names on record among mankind, entitled to be placed upon a level with his. He had the daring to design and to commence a warfare, to which even LUTHER'S was but child's play; and he brought to its service a perseverance the most audacious and undaunted, and weapons and skill the most varied and the most exquisite that ever were exerted simultaneously for an unholy and an unhappy cause. That in the government of France, and the religion of Rome, he found many subjects of just reprehension, who can deny? But these merely furnished this Archimedes with a resting-place, from which to bend his myriad engines against the whole system and fabric of European thought. He hated all

His grand error was, that he could not distinguish between the systems themselves, which he found in operation, and the adventitious absurdities which he found attached to these systems. He determined, therefore, instead of lopping off unseemly excrescences, to make root and branch work of it. He found all the bad things which he hated or despised existing amidst nations professing a certain religion, and accustomed to live under certain forms of government;—the fundamental principles of that religion, therefore, and the whole substructure of recollections and reverence on which these governments apparently rested their strength, were to be assailed with every art which his ingenuity could devise, and his pertinacity direct. His ambition was to effect a thorough revolution in the political and in the religious feelings and principles of the European mind; and it was no difficult matter for him, having once formed this audacious scheme, to perceive, that his first and great object must be to destroy altogether our respect for our own ancestors. The institutions which he abhorred were all derived from them. They were consecrated in the eyes of living men, by the belief that they had come down from the wise and the noble dead ;—our oracles were also our monuments.

An European antiquity was in his eyes the badge of all abomination. We moderns were treading blindly in the footsteps of generations which we ought altogether to despise. His business was to persuade us, that the mists of the dark ages were only beginning to be dispelled; that it was reserved for him and his contemporaries to have the glory of first beholding the real dawn of truth and light; and that nothing but bigotry and interest could possibly withstand the

influence of the blaze which his bold hand had been destined to reveal.

He was, among other things, at the pains to write a history of the whole world, with the express and single purpose of enforcing these new ideas. In this book, and in the more ponderous Dictionnaire Philosophique, there was no one institution subsisting anywhere among the peoples of Christendom which he did not assault through those in whom he supposed it to have originated, and by respect for the memory of whom he supposed it to be in any measure maintained. Everywhere he found or feigned some vile trick of interest or ignorance to come in place of some revered foundation of charity or wisdom. Priesthood, monarchy, nobility, were so many aliases for the domination of impudence, hypocrisy, and fraud. Dexterous was he in the management of his weapons, and deadly the extent to which his cruel paradox for a time prevailed. Plays and romances were written to insinuate the same poison into minds or moods of the most opposite descriptions, to blend it with the sympathies of the serious, as well as the mirth of the jocular. It was worked up in imposing forms for the would-be-wise-it was mixed in wine for men, and in milk for babes. The ambition of the proud in mind-the scorn of the unsatisfied evil-the secret yearnings of the luxurious for each of these elements he had his appropriate viand. He at once enlisted the bad passions on his side; and, by his skilfulness in the arts of deceit and pervers, he was enabled also to entrap beneath his banner not a little of what was meant to be good.

The massive intellect and the prodigious influence of Dr Johnson formed a rampart against the influx of these pernicious notions for which England can never cease to be grateful. Hume, Tory though he was, did more against us, than for us. Gibbon was Voltaire's partisan, as far as it was possible for a man of his personal virtue and great erudition to be so. Even Robertson stooped to be his apologist. Johnson alone stood firm, cased in the armour of knowledge, of wisdom, and of pride; and opposing a resistance which certainly would not have been the less effectual, had he conciliated, in some measure, the judgment of the lookerson, by confessing, instead of eternally

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deriding, the ingenuity and vigour of his Proteus antagonist.

This haughty opposition, however, was entirely a philosophical one, and that was not enough to set against a system which had not disdained to assault everything that is imaginative, through imagination itself, as well as through other channels. But others fortunately arose to supply that in which both the plans and the powers of Johnson were deficient. The publication of Percy's Reliques gave a new turn to the imaginative literature of England. That work certainly had great influence in Germany also. But its business there was not to originate, but to encourage; for, before its treasures were opened, the comprehensive genius of Goethe had already struck the kindred note by this very drama. If it had been otherwise, we had still been abundantly repaid; for a translation of Goetz von Berlichingen was the first publication of Sir Walter Scott; and it is not perhaps too much to say, that as but for Percy we might have had no Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, so, but for Goethe, the genius of the most successful author of our time might have taken some direction less fortunate, in every point of view, than that, the triumph of which is now before us.

The wise, no less than magnificent, design which Goethe too soon abandoned, and which the other great poet has so splendidly pursued, was the only one through which there could be any just hope of opposing, in the hearts of modern men, the influence of those new doctrines by which the revolutionary literature of France had appealed so powerfully to the self-love of its generation. The main-spring of this rival engine was a noble disbelief in the possibility of men's soon or easily losing all sympathy for those who had gone before them. Its object was the vindication of the past-not the vindication of its errors-not the denial of its evils-but the assertion of the fact that the old times had their good also -that our fathers were neither the fools nor the slaves it suited the audacity of living conceit to represent them -that we were sprung from noble and virtuous races, and ought to imitate their virtues and amend their errors, but not draw a broad line of separation between us and them-nor hug the flattering unction, that it was a

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