GR

FROM ON GERMANY'

GOETHE

OETHE might represent the whole body of German literature: not but that there are in it other writers superior to him in some respects, but in himself alone he unites all that distinguishes the German genius; and no one is as remarkable as he for the kind of imagination which the Italians, the English, and the French do not at all possess.

When one succeeds in making Goethe talk he is admirable: his eloquence is rich with thought; his gayety is full of grace and of wisdom; his imagination is excited by external objects as was that of ancient artists; and none the less his reason has only too completely the full development of our own times. Nothing disturbs the strength of his brain; and the irregularities of his very nature his ill-humor, his embarrassment, his constraint — pass like clouds beneath the summit of the mountain to which his genius has attained.

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Goethe has no longer that contagious ardor which was the inspiration of 'Werther'; but the warmth of his thought still suffices to vivify his writings. One feels that he is no longer touched by life, that he paints it from a distance: he attaches more value now to the pictures he presents to us than to the emotions he himself experiences; time has made of him only a spectator. When he still played an active part in scenes of passion,— when his own heart suffered,- his writings produced a more vivid impression.

As one always believes in the ideal of one's own abilities, Goethe maintains at present that the author should be calm even when he composes a passionate work, and that the artist must preserve his composure if he would act most strongly on the imagination of his readers. Perhaps he would not have held this opinion in his early youth; perhaps then he was possessed by his genius instead of being the master of it; perhaps he felt then that since what is sublime and what is divine exist but momentarily in the heart of man, the poet is inferior to the inspiration that animates him, and that he cannot criticize it without destroying it.

In first seeing him, one is astonished in finding something of coldness and of stiffness in the author of 'Werther'; but when he

NAPOLEON RECEIVING A DEPUTATION FROM

THE ARMY, AFTER HIS CORONATION.

Photogravure from a painting in the Museum at Versailles.