masculine bravado which saves him from priggishness, assures the mischievous reader that his suspicion is an unjust one; and to agree that the writer whose utmost posing as a teacher is in the modest hope that his readers will find the beneficial mingled with the agreeable, has the best of it in the comparison.

Instead of that development of Natalie, Theresa, and the countess, by which this group might have counterbalanced in interest and hold upon the reader that of Mariana, Aurelia, and Philina, Goethe has given us the "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," these confessions forming the bridge, as it were, from the earlier part of his work to the later. These confessions, the critics tell us, are based upon the Reliquien of Fräulein Klettenberg, a friend of Goethe's early manhood. We have no fault to find with the fair saint, unless it is a touch of spiritual pride. But we should much prefer our pietism by itself, and our romance by itself, with such lesson as naturally attaches thereto. In connection with the fair saint there is introduced an uncle, the guardian in their childhood of Natalie and the countess, with Lothario and the volatile Friedrich. This uncle is a connoisseur of art, and his view of life is balanced against the fair saint's pietism. The uncle, we are told, stands for Goethe himself. Certainly it would seem true that in William we have not a little of Goethe, and something, one must think, in Jarno, as well as in Lothario, all his writings, as Goethe himself tells us, "forming part of one great confession." Yet this most introspective of writers it is, whom we are required to place with Dante and Shakespeare, as forming a triad in modern literature.

"William Meister," alas! is one of those books which steadily diminish in interest to the close. It is painful to have to acknowledge that William loses his hold upon us as he passes from his mistaken to his true vocation, from his false view of life to his genuine and just one. Any interest that we may have felt in Natalie is quite dissipated by the time we are at last presented to her; and it is entirely in keeping that William, who ever since his glimpse of Natalie upon the mountain has dreamed of her and her only, except when his fancy has reverted to Mariana, should seem not unwilling, before the interview with Natalie is brought about, to accept Theresa. That there is stuff in the concluding portion of the book for any number of full-fledged romances does not help the matter much, for it only illustrates how entirely unselective Goethe's art is. What we chiefly deplore is his subsequent handling of the exquisite theme of Mignon and the harper.

more un-Shakespearian. And it is curious that the further we remove from the theatre and the play-actors, the more we have of this theatric quality. We are most outraged by the parade over the dead Mignon; but the climax of absurdity is reached in the secret tower, when the sort of society which has all along been tracking William down, with a view to drawing him from his false to his true vocation, has it all its own way. Of William personally, the best and strongest thing is his ready assumption of the obligation of paternity, as soon as he has reason to believe that Felix is his son; but we fail to see how the oracular voice in the tower can establish the conviction, which has wavered after Mariana's dying attestation, and the complete circumstantial evidence of the old Barbara.

We cannot leave "William Meister's Apprenticeship" without observing, as a certain offset to our dissatisfaction with Natalie as crown of the work and ornament of William's true vocation, that we find in Goethe a just discrimination, a certain quality of his defects, so to say, in its way admirable. If Natalie is a failure, if Theresa, excellent housewife and stewardess as she is, is so much only, he at least does not leave his doubtful women in unrelieved badness. Mariana is better than our fears, and her pitiful end excites our commiseration. Aurelia is not an exalted character, but she makes an end not altogether ignoble; and Philina, whom we had almost despaired of, turns out very well, for Philina. It is impossible not to smile when we find her in the predicament she has derided in Madame Melina. We may add that Serlo, whose vocation is evidently play-acting, though William's is not, after a certain amount of skirmishing, marries decently the young girl of the company whom he has been deluding, apparently, to her ruin. On the other hand, Lothario, whom we are expected, it would seem, to admire as a lofty character, we find casting a loving glance back to the beginning of his gay career, as evidenced in an episode entirely Goethean, at the moment when he is desiring above all things else to marry Theresa. Truly we have in Goethe's great work a gordian knot, a hopeless entanglement of threads good and evil.

The worst charge we have to bring against Goethe is that which we have just glanced at, — that he is incapable of bringing before us, in her habit as she lives, a natural, innocent, large-minded girl. That which was to Scott a turn of the hand, that which was to Schiller a native air, is somehow beyond him. Even in "Her

cation are perhaps a little too fantastic for widespread application. For the rest, the remnant of our interest in Lothario and Natalie is dissipated hopelessly. Lothario, who after his own youthful travels has settled down on his estates, emphasizing his intention to remain there by the assertion that "here, or nowhere, is America," sets out again, presumably for an establishment in Pennsylvania. With him goes Natalie, who is doubtless weary of waiting for such an abstraction in the way of lover as William. In place of Natalie, we have a certain Hersilie, a copy of Natalie in fainter outlines, who comes into possession of the key to a certain casket, which casket, found by Felix, has been preserved by his father; from all which we may perhaps gather that Hersilie is to represent the undeserved blessing, to be exchanged for nothing in the world beside, which at the end of the "Apprenticeship William assured us that he had found in Natalie. But our interest in Hersilie does not induce us to attempt to solve the enigma. Still less are we able to say whether the strange being Makarie, whose life is somehow associated with the movements of the planetary bodies of our solar system, and who at the time of our making her acquaintance is somewhere between the orbits of Mars and of Jupiter, whether Makarie represents merely a weird play of fancy, or whether there is wrapped up in her some transcendent mystery. When we encounter Philina, scissors in hand, preparing trousseaux for some of the walking ladies who so confuse the stage of Goethe's narration, we scarcely know whether to find it amusing or depressing. We had hoped, and indeed taken for granted, that marriage would steady her; but we should prefer to remember her as Philina.

The best thing, as we think, in the "Travels," the really fresh and strong portion, is that which brings before us the life in the Swiss mountains, the spinning and the weaving, and the sketch of how this little life takes hold of the great world's activity; and the best of the short stories is that with which the book opens, in which we have a sort of transcript of the holy family of Scripture, and in which the characterization of Joseph, and the description of his abode and labors, are alike delightful. On a small canvas Goethe's hand is often strong and true; on a broader and larger it wavers, and he loses himself.

From a consideration of Goethe's most famous work both in poetry and in prose, he would seem to have been a man of beginnings, incapable of rounding out a perfect and symmetrical whole.