returned to Frankfort; he left Wetzlar in the midst of his perturbations there, leaving a note for Lotte and Albert, who had shared and suffered with him; he set out for Italy for a long sojourn, without warning any of his friends, even Frau von Stein, though it had been by no means a sudden decision. This was the initial, and, one would think, sufficient, cause of his quarrel with Frau von Stein, who resented his want of confidence in her. But the thing was native in him, a trick constantly repeated. It sprang from his ruling desire to be his own master and from his knowledge that he could satisfy that desire only by following very special courses of behaviour. In his early years he called himself a chameleon. The truth of the charge is demonstrated by the ease with which he fell successively under different influences, now Behrisch, now Herder, now Merck, and by the way in which his youthful letters and professions accommodate themselves to the taste of his several correspondents. He was determined to make his own decisions, to be himself; but he knew that he was not strong enough to withstand the influence of his friends, if ever he should admit them too far into his life. The only safety for his mental independence lay in withdrawing himself. It This is the secret of that mask of ice-like inflexibility and self-sufficiency which the later Goethe assumed and which terrified all beholders. covered an impressionable, feminine spirit, only too ready to obey the will of any person who could get at it. Goethe came at last to live alone because he could not share his life with any one and remain himself. Even with Schiller, during the whole course of that long and impressive connection, the note of reserve is more evident than the note of intimacy. It is true that the freedom of their intellectual intercourse was complete; ideas flowed between them without check or hesitation, and the mind of each was fully opened to the other. But it was only his mind that Goethe opened to his friend, He showed towards him none of the irrational, affectionate, spontaneous impulses which prove that the inward springs of the spirit are loosened. This element in Goethe's character governed the whole of his work, the whole of his thought. It limited his knowledge of life, and it restrained him, after his earliest years, from ever throwing himself into his work with that complete self-forgetfulness which is necessary if the last degree of excellence is to be obtained. He could not wholly forget himself in anything, save with peril to his painfully won, precariously maintained mental balance. He never underwent, in life or in art, that salutary experience of surrender to something stronger than himself-simply because whenever he encountered something stronger than himself he ran away from it. It is this which makes him so noticeably avoid the element of tragedy in his poetry, which turns the catastrophe of Tasso into no more than a painful breach of good manners. It is this instinctive shrinking from unpleasant and unmanageable fact which betrays him into his occasional turns of fatuity, as when he gives for his sole reflection on the profoundly disturbing affair of Lili the remark that "it was a strange decision of the high powers which dispose of us that, in the course of my wonderful existence, I should experience also what it feels like to be betrothed." To a man capable of that thought we do not turn in our moments of deepest feeling either for counsel or for comfort. Goethe knew a great deal about life, but he preserved himself for eighty-three years from any too close experience of it. He is the observer seated on the water's edge whose keen sight penetrates very far down into the depths; but he is necessarily without the more poignant, if more restricted, knowledge of the man who has fallen in, who knows from immediate experience that water is wet and what it feels like to drown. And yet, after all, when one has considered that mind and that work, how natural it is to turn back on oneself and exclaim, with Arnold, “My voice shall never be joined to those which decry Goethe." "Goethe's profound, imperturbable naturalism, says Arnold again, " is absolutely fatal to all routine thinking; he puts the standard once for all inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favour of it being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, But is it so ? Is it so to me?"" And in truth the first business of criticism is to find out what things are, and what they are worth, rather than to complain because they are not something else. That I should so naturally say this is in itself evidence that Goethe has lived, evidence of years spent under his guidance. He did his work, he made his contribution to our thought, he has his place in the history of humanity, even if these things should be discovered not to be quite what they have been supposed. Perhaps one of the ways of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole is not to see it too close. If one keeps far enough away from it, its vibrations cannot impair the steadiness of the observation. Goethe had a wide and shallow mind. His knowledge of humanity is excelled in every particular aspect by some one; but only very rarely has so great a range of knowledge been held in a single mind. His disinclination to engage himself too firmly in anything assisted the constant shifting of his point of view, from romantic to classic, and back to romantic again, from Christian to pagan and back again to Christianity, so that in the end he had at least sampled almost every possible mode of thought. We do not go to him, as I have said, for help in distress, but we can go to him for as much as any detached observer can tell us of something we are about to experience. No one who has allowed himself to feel fully the influence of Goethe's mind will ever look at the world again in quite the same way. We have only to guard against the two extremes, one of which is regarding him as an all-adequate guide to life while the other lies in casting him aside as soon as he proves in any particular case not to be adequate. The Poetry of Mr. Walter de la Mare' THE poetry of Mr. de la Mare is fortunate in being almost universally admired, equally by the idolaters and by the enemies of tradition, by the reading public at large as well as, in a very special way, by the members of his own calling. And so far it has not done what often, after a time, obscures the beauty of an original style and brings it, if only passingly, into disrepute: it has not yet raised up a flock of too faithful imitators. It remains unique and unvulgarised, the sole contemporary flower of a strain in its predecessors, clearly novel, yet clearly continuing a tradition in English poetry. The forerunners of Mr. de la Mare are, chiefly, Coleridge and Poe, and, beyond them and in a somewhat different way, Christina Rossetti. His superficial, and, I suspect, conscious resemblance to the third of these is the greatest. Which of them wrote: "Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream"? And which wrote: "There came a pedlar to an evening house; Many of the poems in Songs of Childhood, Mr. de la Mare's first book, have distinct affinities with Goblin Market and Maiden-Song, and throughout 1 Poems, 1901 to 1918. Two volumes. (Constable.) |