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are the men and women working in the workshop; the Stewards who govern are also to remain in the workshop, thus defying specialisation and triumphantly vindicating self-government. This is true democracy: in our age a splendid anachronism, but perhaps an earnest of better things to come.

Such a movement within Trade Unionism is an exact counterpart of the rise, the decline, and the fall of State worship or of community worship. I have no doubt that it could itself be paralleled from many other cases in which the lack of any real general will and the consequent impossibility of any true self-government cause the creation of a personified institution resplendent with all the tyranny of institutions. It is a history which is in no sense confined to any one form of association. Worship of the community may well prove no less dangerous than worship of the State; and in so far as the diversity of the community comprises diverse institutions, the new danger may be even greater than the old. For one idol we raise up many; and submit the social, religious, and economic, as well as the political animal, to institutional despotism masquerading in the guise of self-government.

Idolatry and tyranny are ever with us; and we like them. They pander to our laziness and our instincts of submissiveness. Man, everywhere in chains, is none too eager to re-assert the freedom of his birth. Searching for self-government in political or in industrial society, he finds many selves to be governed and no self to govern; he believes that the quest overreaches his strength. Cheerfully, therefore, does he weld the warring selves into this and that abstraction, that society having selfhood may be self-governed. Is the search for selfgovernment to end in the tyranny of a personification? Shall we make a despotism and call it democracy?

BARBARA WOOTTON.

Art. 8.-A NEW LIFE OF GOETHE.

Life of Goethe. By P. Hume Brown, F.B.A., LL.D. Two vols. John Murray. 1920.

THE study of Goethe in England is mainly associated with two names. Carlyle was not the first to call attention to German literature, for William Taylor of Norwich was before him, and spirited translations by Coleridge and Scott were already on the market; but it was from his early essays and renderings and his life of Schiller that most cultivated Englishmen learned the significance of the Weimar circle and its illustrious chief. The young Scot proclaimed his momentous discovery of a new oracle when he himself was almost unknown; and the influence of the German sage grew with the growth of his interpreter's fame. A generation after Carlyle's essays, Lewes published a biography which for the first time reconstructed the personality and achievement of the greatest of German writers, and, revised for the last time in 1876, held its own in Germany no less than in England for half a century. The book, which was dedicated to Carlyle, 'who first taught England to appreciate Goethe,' possesses the sovereign merit of vivacity; and, though the faults are sufficiently obvious and the material incomplete, it contributed even more than the fragmentary appreciations of Carlyle to strengthening Goethe's hold on the intelligence of Victorian England. The man is too great and too good,' he wrote, to forfeit our love, because on some points he may incur blame'; and his readers, whether or no they shared the biographer's affection, responded to the appeal of an arresting personality and of a mind unique in range if not in originality.

As the 19th century drew to its close the star of Goethe rose as rapidly as that of Schiller paled, and an army of students commenced the patient researches which have now reached a stage where there is nothing but gleaning to be done. Some of the fruits are enshrined in the fourteen volumes of the English Goethe Society, the latest of which appeared in 1914; and among the contributions none are more interesting than those of Prof. Dowden, who for many years dallied with the

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project of a biography. But though the efforts of British scholars were of no mean value, the bulk of the work was naturally carried out by Germans; and the student, to whatever country he belongs, must live laborious days with the Goethe Jahrbuch' and the 'Schriften der Goethe Gesellschaft.' In 1887, Erich Schmidt discovered the pre-Weimar draft of Faust'; and only a year or two before the war the Theatralische Sendung,' or original form of Wilhelm Meister,' was recovered and published. An immense advance was rendered possible by the Weimar edition of Goethe's works, which began to appear in 1887, and, in addition to his literary and scientific writings, included thirteen volumes of diaries and fifty of correspondence. By the end of the century the time had arrived for a full-length portrait; and Bielschowsky's biography, the first volume of which appeared in 1896, and the second after his death in 1904, surpassed all previous attempts. The book ranks with Haym's 'Herder,' Erich Schmidt's 'Lessing,' and Justi's Winckelmann' among the classics of German literary biography; and it is hardly likely that it will be superseded within our lifetime. The briefer work of Georg Brandes, published in 1915, is unfortunately only available to readers of Danish.

Though Bielschowsky may be read in an American translation, there was abundant room for an English biography which should incorporate the discoveries and test the conclusions of two generations of scholarship; and no one could have trained himself more carefully for his formidable task than the late Prof. Hume Brown, the author of the standard 'History of Scotland' and of scholarly biographies of Knox and Buchanan. While Scottish history was the occupation of his official life, his leisure was dedicated to Goethe. 'Goethe was his favourite teacher as well as his favourite poet,' writes Lord Haldane in a Prefatory Note, ' and his ambition was to try to make the greatness of the man clear to the Anglo-Saxon world. It was our practice to go to Germany annually to collect materials, and this we did each year from 1898 to 1912 inclusive. We spent our time mainly in Weimar, Ilmenau, Jena, Wetzlar, and Göttingen. There was hardly a book or an article which the Professor did not possess, and we spent much time

each autumn in Scotland going over his manuscript as it grew in his hands.' The first part was published in 1913 as The Youth of Goethe,' and the whole work was finished before the author's death in the winter of 1918, except for a chapter on the Second Part of Faust.' The missing link has been supplied by Lord Haldane himself, to whom and to his sister Miss Haldane the biographer entrusted the publication of his book. The Early Life' now forms the first part of the completed work; and in these well-printed volumes we at last possess a maturely considered biography, fully abreast of the scholarship of the age and not unworthy of its majestic theme.

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The Professor brought to his task the spirit of caution for which Scotsmen are renowned; and the first impression which the book makes on the reader is one of critical detachment. To pass from the eloquence and enthusiasm of Bielschowsky to the frank censures and measured eulogies of the Edinburgh scholar is like a douche of cold water. But though we may sometimes sigh for a little more warmth and colour in the picture, we gradually gain such confidence in our guide that his praises, when they come, seem charged with special authority. For readers who know Goethe's early life through the golden haze of 'Dichtung und Wahrheit' it must be something of a shock to read the unvarnished narrative based, among other sources, on the recently published correspondence with Behrisch. The young student set out for Leipsic at the age of sixteen, and returned to Frankfurt three years later prematurely aged by dissipation. He had been wounded in a duel, he had drunk more than was good for him, and with Käthchen Schönkopf he had entered on a series of enslavements to passing passions from which he was never for long to escape. It was with the feelings of a shipwrecked seaman, he tells us, that he found himself under his father's roof; but he characteristically adds that he had nothing specially with which to reproach himself. The 'Sesenheim idyll' of the Strassburg period gave birth to some immortal poetry and to the most touching pages in his autobiography; but the story of Friederike leaves none the less an unpleasant taste in the mouth. From the first he never intended marriage. That he had

pangs of self-reproach for the part he had played may be accepted on his own evidence; but alike from temperament and deliberate consideration of the facts of life he was incapable of the contrition which troubles human life to its depths. Yet it is well to remember the ideas then current in Germany regarding the relations between love and marriage. In his seventy-fourth year Goethe himself said, 'Love is something ideal, marriage is something real, and never with impunity do we exchange the ideal for the real.' The severest of moralists, Kant, was of the same opinion. The word conjugium itself implies that two married people are yoked together, and to be thus yoked cannot be called bliss.' It was in a world where such opinions were entertained by men of the highest character and intelligence that Goethe made his irresponsible addresses to the successive objects of his passion. That the Lotte episode did not develop into tragedy was due to the self-control of the lady and her betrothed, not to the hot-blooded young law student in sleepy old Wetzlar. In Lili Schönemann he found for the first time a woman of his own rank-indeed his social superior. In the eyes of the world there was nothing to prevent the engagement ripening into marriage; but no sooner had he given his pledge than his instinctive repugnance to binding ties reasserted itself, and he broke off the relationship without formal leavetaking.

At the very moment when the breach with Lili made it desirable for Goethe to leave Frankfurt came the invitation from the young Karl August to visit him at Weimar. The two young men had attracted each other at first sight, and the burgher's son was flattered by the invitation of a Duke to become his friend and guest. Little did either the ruler or the poet imagine that their co-operation was to endure for half a century and to carry the name of the little Thuringian capital all over the world. 'Goethe's coming,' declares Prof. Hume Brown, was an event in the annals of human culture. For Germany it marks an epoch in her national development, and for humanity at large it was to make Weimar one of the intellectual shrines at which it will continue to pay homage for all time.' At a time when many of the German Courts were sunk in sloth and immorality,

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