The Press. — London, England, 1853-09-17 00:00:00

474 the Kole end of life and object of worship, in our commercial community, Would be better pondered than it in likely to be by our author's political friendm : The tendency of the times is to reduce everything to one value ; genius, fitness, authority, eminence, sacen dancy, are all measured by things progress, as they are doing amongst us, then. will be no other quality left worth having, no other claim. If • man seeks to be a legislator, he obtains it by n lf he seeks to be an tultninistrator, the thing is achieved by money. He the plsee high ur how that is "ought, it is only to be obtained by money. England has put Ilindoatan fano. That country is covered over by a number of locusts called Englishmen, who, under pretence of ruling, fatten ton it. Every one of them have acquired that right by money. Under other n nents, in other countries, in other centuries, it was generally held that the best. claims and preparation for certain functions in life were fitness, ur talent, sue study, or experience. The most bar barous country never thought of appointing a man to the priestly °Mee because he could pay fur it. Neither did they think that the way to obtain good toddlers and gene rals was to make men pay for the right to exercise military talent. In England, dill most civilised of countries, we hove reversed that great mistake of the rimple and the uncivilised; we have discovered that money is the great measure of all thinge—the universal title. It is not merely our priesthood, our toddlers, our administrators, our judges, our legislators, and, consequently, o u r rulers, our 'tem and tour dignitaries, that become so for money, but even in our choice and establishment of the engineers and instruments in which skill ought to be the panunsoutat requisite, even then we prefer money to skill. Thus, if a gnat commercial company, with accumulated capital, associate to tit out a fleet et steamers for the supply of the means of transport throughout the glebe, it will instantly he allinutsd that the engines will be ordered from the best makers, the captain chosen from the best mariners, the engineer's Mum the most capable of their profession. Na such thing ; the building of the vessels themselves will be its the first place • job; the engines will b• procured of those masters who will give the engineer the largest bribe for ordering it of them ; ties c wlll be chosen hum amongst those whose friends wfll pay most, and there will not be an humble seigineer appointed who will test have been Noupelled to give his MIL or 4111. for his place. The result. et course, is, that the engine explodes instead of working ; that the captain steers upon shoals instead of into port; that the vessels gu periodically to the hotline, and never to their dentinat• ; and that the worship of libitum works its own merited punishment by destroying the whole enterprise, in which the vile metal was expended on the principle of money worship. Passages like this take the book out of the category of commonplace productions, but will not preserve it beyond the day. The political novel requires far other and higher qualifica tions than are possessed by this " dis tinguished writer," as he is dubbed by his publisher. JOHN WOLFGANO GOETHE. The Posner of Goethe. With a Sketch of his Life. By Edgar Alfred 13owring. London: John W. Parker and Son. Iloethe's Opinions, .fr. By Otto Wenckstern. London : John W. Parker mid Son. Is resuming our critique of Uoethe's writings, we notice that, besides his masterpiece of " Faust," which is as little designed to produce a beneficial impression as his other works, he left us that equally great specimen of his powers in prose, " The Sorrows of Werther," which exercised a marked influence on the rising generation. The young men of Ger many began to talk like Werther—to write like Werther—to dress like Werther—and to shoot themselves like Werther. It was the highest compliment these good judges and " good ad mirers " could pay to the author. It is now seventy-nine years since "Werther" appeared; and for the last half-century it has steadily declined in public favour. It is whining in sl►irit—cooked and perverted in tendency— unhealthy and unsound to the core. It could not last, with all the fostering assistance of 'panegyric ; it wanted intrinsic vitality. and it is now withering like a dead tree. It will long continue to figure in catalogues of its author's labours or prolusions, after it COIOWS to will readers. Goethe confessed that he wrote it to get rid of " the perilous stuff." as Ilidwer I.yt ton expressively translates it. which he felt within him. lie committed thus a prepense suicide on the dangerous part of his own mind; but when he perceived that the glowing story of Jerusalem s self-murder obtained so many practical imitators ►unong the ►omamtic youth of Germany, that all good people were shocked at this hideous scandal, and horrified at the moral consequences of the new novel, he com posed a clever comedy called " The Triumph of Sentimentalism," to arrest the mischief. THE PRESS. His works, if they add little that is real to human enlightenment—if they conduce but. little that is fairly appreciable towards human progress—contain, at least, the contribution of a word to the vocabulary of transcendentalism, and to the jargon of a certain school of critics, —a word which Goethe, indeed, did not invent, but which he raised into mysterious im portance—the word " alitheties." He found this word obscure, and he left it famous. Lucidity was not Goalie's chief care. He defines ;esthetics to mean the science of taste; and, as he freely applies testhetics to religion, it follows that he considered religion a matter of taste. Life, death, and immortality, are questions of more and less elegance. The early Christian martyrs were all out of the pale of hope; C/144111* remembered the main thing, and died ;esthetically with his mantle flowing gracefully around him. Goethe, with the aid of a Mlle. von Klettenberg, founded a new religion ; but unluckily it died before himself. if his own works show that taste was not the province in which, by pre-eminence, we would invite him to legislate for mankind, a diminutive book, called " Goethe's Opinions," by Otto Wenek stern—one of Goethe's most idolatrous ad mirers—is amply sufficient to prove how defi cient was the judgment of this eminent author —how self-repugnant were his views—how in cessantly he coutnulicts himself—how inter esting a guesser—and how weak and helpless a reasoner he was. We have already seen what is his proper rank in literature, whether his poetry or his prose be considered; and yet this is the man who surpassed—according to E. A. Bowriug, and Otto Wenckstern, and a hundred other questionable authorities—all writers, ancient or modern. He was at once a second Plato, and a second Shakspeare—a second Plato without a system, without the " golden style " ! Pedestr i an and " salop "—it is his countrymen who say it—in his language, confused and eternally self-convicted of contra diction in his theories, he who, in the midst of the light of Christianity, groped about for what alchemy, Miss Klettenberg, and mytho logy could teach, is the revived impersonation of that divine and immortal Greek who, de prived linked of the advantage of revelation, has yet, fiar thousands of years, excited the wonder of the wisest by his philosophy, and the despair of the most eloquent by his words. And Shakspeare ! if nine-tenths of what Shak mpeare wrote were destroyed, the remaining tenth would be cheaply preserved to the world at the cost of all Goethe's works together. and of all that such a mind could have produced, had it laboured, not for seventy, but for seventy times seventy, years. When we read that " Goethe was the embodiment of all human progress:" when we read of " adhering to Nae Uoethian language, for the sake ,t' preserving the tloethian meaning, and being worthy if the Goethian era," we recognise in such expressions the most helpless form of literary imbecility—the very hysterics of criti- cism—tho sobbings and idiotey of admirers quite incapable of comparison or judgment, and far beyond the reach of calm reasoning. Goethe, though not the founder, was among the founders of modern German literature. Gottsched, Hegel, Schelling, Herder, Ernesti, Gellert, and Klopstoek, were before him in their labours ; and do such names count for nothing ? Among his contemporaries, besides those mentioned, were Schiller (a fax higher genius), the Schlegels, Richter, Musaeus, Oriesbateh, Paulus, Fichte, and Humboldt—all his countrymen. During the same long era, Montesquieu ' Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, Cuvier, Mme. de Stab', Château briaml, and others, figured in France. In these islands the principal names reeal two very different generations of our literature. For—take them at random—David Hume, Richardson. Smollett, Johnson, War burton, Collins, Akenside, Gray. Chesterfield, Dyer, Watson, Mason, and Young ; Crabbe, Burke, Anima, Goldsmith, Bunts, Cowper. Scott, Miss Edgeworth, the Balthus. Southey. Wordsworth, Moore and Byron. Campbell and Rogers, and the illustrious mime t,f Bulwer Lytton, bring us to our own day. Goethe. Cuvier, anal Sir Walter Scott. died in the SIMI' year : all three holding renowned names among those of the various celebrated men we have mentioned. The stupendous amount SATURDAY, of what Goethe has left written; the fact that he was one of the earliest labourers in that literary vineyard which had but just been reopened in his country ; and then a merit, which is certainly his, of having regarded literature with great reverence, and of having given conscientious and scrupulous pains to the discharge of what he deemed his mission (though we think he viewed that mission too " (esthetically," held it as too independent, too much apart from the great ends and duties of life), ensure him deservedly a high place in the remembrance of posterity. In an artistic sense, he had more circumspection, more re gard for a certain predominating propriety of place, and time, and manners, in his cuncep Lion, than most writers whom we can call to mind. His " Herman and Dorothea" is de signed to be pastoral, and it has an eminently pastoral character ; " Iphigenia and Tauris is integrally classic; " Giitz " is of a Gothic spirit which cannot be mistaken ; and all that he meant for Oriental poetry is, we are told, Oriental, undeniably, in its entire temper and tendency. None but a singularly placid, re collected mind could have successfully at tempted undertakings so versatile. And Goethe was cautious in maintaining this artistic serenity undisturbed. The troubled water reflects nothing. The mirror of his wail was not to be dimmed by any event. When his friend Schiller had breathed his last, Goethe refused to look on the face of the dead—he would not be agitated. When his own son died, he immediately commenced his theory if colours. He would remedy distraction by a study which demanded and absorbed at tention. He pursued knowledge, and loved the very image of it to the last. His learning was great, his industry indefati gable ; his ambition was placid in its nature, but boundless in its aims. His knowledge of human nature, in the inclinations and tempta tions which are its portion, was deep ; but not his knowledge of its victories, or of its noble ness. His egotism he carried into all his writings ; but he could carry it—it hindered him not in the movements of his mind. In this, unlike Byron, all whose heroes are him self, Goethe's heroes are not all Goethe the man ; but they all have a withered hand, or some incurable touch, from Goethe the poet. His attainments were gigantic, and the range of his capacity was almost without limits ; but his influence on his admirers is not elevating, not ameliorating. And this marvellous mind has been well termed, in figurative language of no ordinary force and sublimity, " a great cupola, liyhted from below." The London Quarterly Review. No. I. London : Partridge and Oakey. QUARTERLIES multiply so fast that we can hardly keep account of them, or understand what principles they are specially desigmed to represent. Each religious sect seems bent on having an organ which, by its presumed weight of metal, may compensate for the infre quency of its discharge ; and we suppose the time is not far off when there will be one of these heavy gnus at least to every "ism." The pre sent issue proceeds we believe from the Wes leyan body. It is a creditable production— grave in tone, earnest in argument, enlight ened in general east of thought, and full charged with information. Equipped rap-ti p►ied fin• spiritual combat, it fights secularise► (which our fathers called infidelity) with one hand and ultramontism (of old termed Popery) with the other. It aims rather at soundness than novelty ; so is profuse in details (each article seeming intended for an encyclopedia treatise), but chary of independent views, or of those rare things in our periodical liters• ture,--original ideas. Plain, sensible, deco rous, fluent, well got up, it is just such a I►ub lication as we might expect to proceed from a select I►arty of the respectable fraternity one is accnsteu,r►l to see on the platform at a Wes leyan► festival. The liceent of the conventicle 110 W and then reminds one of the distinctive principles of " the eouuexior►... first artiele elaborately discusses the present state of the Christian populations of the Turkish empire. In European Turkey it is estimated that there are about 1100,000