TWO BOOKS ON GOETHE.* Two new books about Goethe claim
the attention of the reading publics : Goethe : the Man and his Character, by Joseph McCabe ; and Goethe and his Woman Friends, by Mary Caroline Crawford. Not many lives of Goethe have been written in English. " The English reader has, to-day," says Mr. McCabe, " a, choice of two biographies : a new edition of that written half-a-century ago by G. H. Lewes, and an excellent translation of Bielschowsky's more recent and more authoritative work." It is with Goethe as a man that Mr. McCabe is dealing. Ho writes, as ho admits primarily, for those who have but a small acquaintance with Goethe's works, and he gives "only such brief notices of his earlier, and the chief of his later, works as may be needed to follow the broad development of his artistic genius." Our author has, we think, attempted the impossible. Goethe without his works is Goethe without his genius. Mr. McCabe has written an inter- esting book, but the portrait he has drawn of a supremely grest man does not live. Nevertheless, as we have said, the story of Goethe's loves and of his hobbies, his provincial politics, and his amateur science make good reading. The reader gets a vivid impression of the masterly manner in which Goethe used a world which it was not part of his ideal to serve. The great German is an eternal answer to the common notion that supreme genius is not self-conscious. His emotions fed the furnace out of which came his poetry. His love affairs produced his lyrics. He would send a poem to the object of his passion—and a second copy to a newspaper upon the same day.
Mr. McCabe's book is not, he tells us, a " mere compendium of the things that are usually said about Goethe." He begins at once to form theories of his own. Every biographer has sought some explanation of the fact that, while Goethe was apparently devoted to the most charming, witty, and tender of mothers,he seldom visited her during the last thirty years of her life, though they lived within a hundred miles of each other, and though she adored him and treasured the smallest details which reached her from others of his life and doings. His latest biographer boldly declares that her son did not care for her—disliked her, indeed, and blamed her for an unhappy childhood. This theory, to our mind, contradicts the whole tenor of Goethe's own autobiography. Goethe had little reserve: had he not told the public he would have told his friends that he disliked the "Fran Aja," to whom, on the contrary, he attributed his own gift of happiness and power of romance (Lust su fabudiren). It is impossible to make any theory which will explain Goethe. He seemed to understand everything. How much he had felt no one knows. It is certain that neither love nor religion, while he had a deep comprehension of both, affected him as they affect other men. He stood aside from humanity. This is not Mr. McCabe's conclusion, we think, but it is the impression left by his book as by every record of Goethe's life.
It was said about Goethe by the late Mr. Hutton that, apart from his genius and his greatness, there ran through his character " a thin vein of trash." This thin vein Miss Mary Caroline Crawford has industriously developed.
The history of Goethe's amours is very light reading indeed. Yet the book is not badly made. We put it down with a sense that we have been in very varied company and well amused. We have cut bread-and-butter
* (1) Goethe : the Man and his Character. By Joseph McCabe. Illustrated. London : Evoleigh Nash. [16s. net.]—(2) Goethe and his Woman Friends. By Mary Caroline Crawford. Illustrated. London, T. Fisher Unwin, [lOs. 6d. net.J
with Lotte Buff, and seen love in the guise of philosophy in the courtly home of Charlotte von Stein, accompanied Lili Schonemann, the banker's daughter, to her dearly loved balls, and visited Christian in Goethe's Garten- haus. What is the chief use of genius? a wag might ask himself as he runs his eye down these pages of gossip. The only answer suggested by the book is, it is a complete excuse for immorality.
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