The Press. — London, England, 1853-09-10 00:00:00

SEPTEMBER 10, 1853. ments were more limited also ; the circle which they were to irradiate was not too ex tensive for the light which they could emit. At their head. moreover, stood at least two great mother towns ; for it must be remem bered that the system operated not in super. veiling, but in emulating, the office ufa London or a Paris in Germany. not in having a multi tude of small lyceums. galleries, universities, academies, and courts scattered over the country, instead of one vast stationary collee tion, bat in having both kinds of organisation ut once. The effect of this was twofold first, it created for I ioezhe a reading public who un derstood the language in which ho wrote, be yond coilliparison more numerous than an author could have obtained in any other Euro pean state. In the second place, it secured to his works from the living generation an impar tial and cordial reception, such as ordinarily is received only from posterity. Madame do Staff l termed foreigners " a contemporary pus " terity." Nineteen twentieths of those whom Goethe directly addressed were foreigners in their absence of jealousy, with the important modification that they spoke the same lan guage, and that they were as proud to call him a German author as the remaining twentieth were to boast respectively that he was born at Frankfort, that he was educated at Leipsig, or that he dwelt at Saxe Weimar. People are en vious only of those who struggle with them for the honours or the prizes of the same circle, whether that circle be large or small. The second cause of Goethe's rapid aseendancy is also described by himself. The French, said he, are, by temperament, bad admirers ; the Germans, good. The political and social peenliarities to which we have ad verted go far to explain this fact. Of all the eminent writers of his day, Goethe was the best fitted to take advantage of it: A celebrated preacher tits invited to exer cise his eloquenee in the principal church of a German town which contained all the educa tional establishments for which many such towns are famous, and at least the usual num bar of pallid, cut husiastic, and bearded students. At the conclusion of an able and vigorous dis course a stranger asked one of a group of in telligent atulitors what he thought of the preacher,—whether. in fact, the latter justified his extensive reputation? "He seems," added the stranger, " to have produced no very great impression upon the congregation." " I should think not," was the reply. "He is an overrated man. There wits not one per son in church who could not comprehend every word he uttered." Goethe took care to give these "good ad wirers" a great deal which they could more cordially appreciate'. The third eireumstanee which facilitated his career was, that there was at that moment a general upheaving of mind in Germany, a reaction against French literature., a weariness of translated 111111 vieltrions education, and a determination to supply the intellectual wants of the nation from the ample fallow ground of its own intellectual resources. Goethe was admired, not so much because he was a great writer, hut because he was a great native writer, of whom Germany was proud. We need not add that, when once a whole nation identifies a portion of its glory with one writer, the rest of the world takes much of his fame upon trust, as awarded by the must coup potent authority, by those who best under stand his language and his spirit, and whose interest and honour it is not to nominate a literary representative of their powers, if be he not the best of his kind within the range of their choice. For nearly seventy years that he wrote and published unintermittedly, forty millions of people hung upon his words. In this prolonged and measureless outpouring of sentiment, opinion, and conjecture, he em ployed all recognised and some hitherto un known, or then obsolete, modes of writing all literary means and resources, every species of poetry, every form and variety of prose. The paper he consumed would alone outweigh one of the smaller pyramids of Egypt. He produced forty or fifty dramas, thirty five thou sand verses, and a greater number of prose works than could have proceeded from a tole rably large association or club of ordinary .writers during a whole generation. His mind ~ THE PRESS. was as Vt , rsatile as it was prolific. A fairy tale for children was as much in his line as the most abstruse metaphysics ; a mad drinking song flowed as naturally from his pea as the elegant criticisms of art, or the Most de s perate passions and the darkest terrors of tragedy. He introduces you into the heart of the sui tide, and treats of the elementary constituents of light. with the Sallie busy anti officious but serene intelligence. The author of " Faust " is the author not only of comedies but of bur lesque opens. And what is the sum of the result of so many labours ? If he be judged by what are esteemed his best produetions, he has left nothing whatever behind him which is not immeastintbly surpassed, in its kind, by hun dreds of well-known works, in some one 1110- dent language, or in several. There are novels infinitely better than his " Wilhelm Miester " orhis "Werther" odes, ballads, songs, compared with which the best he ever wrote, are valueless ; letters, essays, narratives, biographies, histori cal comments, with which it would make men of judgment and taste smile to put his in juxtaposition ; and, finally, tragedies with which, it is to be hoped, the world, if driven to a choice, would not part for the sake of "Faust." This is his opus magnum, the work with which he took more pains than with all his other in numerable works v ia together. The hero is a man of sublime learning and ineom parable genius, with aspirations after whatever is above or beyond humanity. His attain ments and ability reduce at. length a part of the invisible universe beneath his email)) ; and he immediately uses this tenifie power, as we might anticipate from so exalted a charac ter. He moves earth and hell to obtain some witches who dance undraped around him, and to enable him to seduce a happy village girl. For this end, for this grand consummation, the noblest mental toil, and the supposed ac quirements of the profoundest science, are seen in il•eration. The incidents are worthy of the design. The innocent girl poisons her mother, occasions the slaughter of her lover, flings awayherown virtue, murders her infant, goes raving mad, is executed, soars to heaven by a supernal award, and leaves Faust to death and damnation, in the power of his ac commodating but now importunate ally, Me phistopheles, the devil. It cannot he denied rt is an exceedingly deep tragedy. Black magic, seduction, duelling, matricide, infitnti side, suicide, church bells, the hymn of the last day, the familiar proceedings of demons, and eternal perdition, are robust materials. But such materials are in the reach of all per sons. Any cursing drover who knew how to write might collect the elements of as dark a drama. How would he use them ? 11,. would use them as Shakspeare would not. There is a great instrument of popukrity in " Faust," an instrument which Goethe never forgot to employ in any of his imaginative pro ductions : it is the exposure of the littleness of great characters ; it consists in exhibiting extntordinary persons to the mass in those lights in which they not only resemble the mass, but in which they flatter, by example, the vilest instincts of fallen humanity. The real poet's mission is different : he sees the bright and the noble parts of the meanest things, and shows the spirit that is in the clay. Goethe had an eye for the earthy en cumbrances which clog the spirit. Here for the present we must close, reserving until next week sonic remarks on Goethe's other works. The Story of Mont Wane. IV Albert Smith - - London : Bogue. HALE the world already knows " The S'ory of Mont Blanc " as told by Albert Smith at the panorama in the Egyptian-hall, and for the accommodation of the other half he has pub lished this book ; and really we should say the bitter method of making public his exploits must be much more agreeable to him ; for to go on indefinitely—he has repeated it already five hundred times we believe—as he promises to do, telling the same story by word of mouth, must be rather tiresome. This little volume, however, does more than repeat the account of his own ascent : it gives a bistory of the Valley 451 of Chantouni from the earliest time; relates the. heroic- adventure of poor Bedmat. who, de serted by his brother guides. and frostbitten in the fret, trod the virgin summit of M o nt Blanc in 1186. Then follows De Satemsure's suceessful attempt in the following year, the patiiculers of which are given at full length. as he appears to have been the first and last setentthe observer upon the mountain-top. arious persons, chiefly foreigners, including the wife of one of the guides, safely ascended the mountain until the year D 420, when Dr. Hamel made his disastrous expedition, in which three guides were hurried by an Ma lanche into the unknown depths of a erevass. Since then the rage to ascend Mont m ane n o , gone On increasing, the danger, perhaps, giving the adventure a relish. In analysing the list of the forty-four persons who have. ascended since that time we find that Britons earry of the palm of daring. twenty-seven out of that number being of our nation. The first lady. however, who lead the pluck to make the me eent was a Freneliwoman, Mlle. Heurlethe d'Angeville, who when on the top made one of the guides lift her upon his shoulder, that she might be able' to boast of having been higher than any o n e else. The account of the ascent made by the author, in company with Messieurs West, Floyd. and Philips. is by far the most graphic and minute yet written. Albert Smith appears from Ins earliest years to have. hail an ambition to scale Mont Mime. In his Way hood he tells us he got hold of 114. Saumsure's narrative, which so fired hint that h e con . strueted a peepshow of the m o untain. lie little dreamt then what auriferous diggings he would find on the old mountain top, in the shape of his panorama, to which he is so sueeessful a showman. We say showmen bemuse he accepts the designation with a boldness which takes from it all its sting; in deed, in acting, if we may so 14-1.111 it, in an illustrated page of physical geography, he does no more than Charles Kean when he con deseends to hang some Assyrian %laws absent himself to berm a sort of moving foreground to his picture of ancient Nineveh. To return to the book, however, we. minuet help entering our protest against some of the woodcuts. Wee are not at all convinced of the integrity of "The. Crevice in the. Glacier du Tacconay:' where the. guide has to cut hand and foot holes up a perpendicular surface of ice. and to as cend at the. same time; whilst the " Sealing the Mur de la Cote" as depicted, or even as set forth in the text, we positively disbelieve. This part of the journey is described as "all " almost perpendicular wall of ice four or five " hundred feet high ;" yet ur this terrific hie wall the. travellers are depleted as picking their way like. SO Many flies, their only hold upon the smooth, " alineeest perpendicular our "face . " being the footholds cut by the adzes of the guides. Up this surface Albert Smith, generally " bewitched." more than half asleep, and bothered much in his own mind about " two bedsteads and the King of Prussia," managed to creep without foutalip, for slsy such would have been certnite destruction. We are. tempted to ask after such an achievement, what our friend Albert Smith might not ac complish if he only has the good fortune to have his wits about him" Apart from these manifest exaggerations, the book is au exceedingly interesting one, and shows that the author is an acute observer, beetle of mental as well as of physical phenomene. Edmund Burke's First Principles. Selected by the Rev. Robert Montgomery, A.M. Lon don : Routledge and Co. Tins is a well-printed volume of extracts from Burke's writings, intended to exhibit "the first principles " of his philosophy. The de sign of the selection is happier than its execu tion. To systematise the extracts as Burke's " first principles" they should be classified under general beads, and the parts of his works from which they have been chosen should be expressly indiated. In 114104 two small volumes of a similar kind. but better arranged, were published. In his comments and essay . Mr. Montgomery makes several slips. He occupies flair pages with testimonies to Butke's s .:rout " men oppoodtuliiru in their 1 1 ; 1'