suade him that the author meant to create anything more than an amusing tale. It seems to him, aside from its dulness, (and his feelings were sincere enough) merely depraved and vicious.

The first of the two articles is an attack on the 'puffing' of Goethe's name in England and a criticism of Carlyle's translation. Goethe himself De Quincey calls 'an old vagabond'. Except for a remark on the style, for which he professes no respect,' his criticism of the book is found in the second paper. We shall treat this paper at length because it is typical of De Quincey's method in many cases, and will throw as much light as any other upon some of his habits of mind.

He begins boldly as an "eidoloclast", is secretly delighted that Goethe's coterie in London is so small, and expresses his pity for them. Catching his cue from a remark of Carlyle's in the preface, "Many, it is to be feared will insist on judging Meister by the common rule", De Quincey says that there is no rule with regard to the novel "but the golden rule of good sense and just feeling". It seems incredible that De Quincey should think Carlyle was referring to canons of art and style. But such is the case. "We cannot allow" he writes, "that our criticism shall be forestalled by any pretence that we are opposing mechanic rules which do not and cannot exist .... Good sense is the principle and fountain of all just composition . . . Next, we presume, that

was

1 London Magazine, vol. X, 192: "He is no great master, nor ever reputed a master, of the idiomatic wealth of his own language". This is one of the remarks which make it seem probable that De Quincey really knew very little of Goethe at first hand.

ROITY

of his sentiments and the passions he attributes to his heroes, heroines and pattern people". With these as guiding principles De Quincey arranges what he calls a "Gallery of Female Portraits", and ends with a "History of Mr. Meister's Affairs of the Heart". What his fancy and humor make out of these one can easily imagine. Philina is the "lover of all MANkind". The episodes. between Wilhelm and the countess or Wilhelm and Theresa are treated as scenes in a farce or something worse. But his sense of the ludicrous finds fullest play in the description of the death of the harper. After a picture of the elaborate preparation for a German suicide, laudanum, almond-milk and what not, the critic quotes: "He raised it to his month; but he shuddered when it reached his lips; he set it down untasted; went out to walk once more across the garden. O fie, fie!" comments De Quincey, "this is sad work: 'walking across the garden' and 'shuddering' and 'doing nothing', as Macmorris (Henry V) says, 'when by Chrish there is work to be done and throats to be cut'." His humor runs riot in the description of Augustin's end, the elaboration of details, the long delays. "In conversing with a friend we took a bet that, for all his throat was cut, he would talk again and talk very well too . . . . . His throat is cut; and still, as Macmorris would be confounded to hear, 'by Chrish there is nothing done': for a doctor mends it again (p. 283), and at p. 284 we win our bet . He talks down to the very last line of p. 284; in which line, by the way, is the very last word he is known to have uttered . .. Now then, having heard the ‘last word of dying Mignonette, (so De Quincey nick-names Mignon's father) the reader fondly conceives that certainly Mignonette is dead. Mit nichten, as they say in Germany,

by no means. Mignonette is not dead, nor like to be for one day . . . . . His throat is mended by the surgeon; but having once conceived a German theory that it was impossible for him to live .. he undoes all that

the doctor has done, tears away the bandages and bleeds to death. Mignonette is dead, dead as a doornail we believe; though we have still some doubts, whether he will not again be mended and reappear in some future novel We have Mr. Goethe's word for it, however, that Mignonette is dead

But be that

if not the

as it may, nothing is so remarkable as the extreme length of time which it took to do the trick. boldest, the longest suicide on record."

It was of course inevitable that De Quincey should laugh at Wilhelm's sentiment. He refuses to consider it seriously at all, calls him a fool and passes on. He points out also the awkward machinery of the denouement, and such scenes as that in which Aurelia cuts Wilhelm's hand with the dagger, scenes that seem capricious and strained. But his deepest antipathy is for the atmosphere in which the characters move; for this world of "passions" and "affairs of the heart", for such episodes as Wilhelm's affair with the countess, or that which caused Laertes' hatred of women. With De Quincey it goes so far that the circumstances of Mignon's birth destroy all interest in the child. He regards her history as "the most unequivocal evidence of depraved taste and defective sensibility". Goethe cannot rely, he says "on the grand high-road sensibilities of human nature;" he is "always travelling into by-paths of unnatural and unhallowed interest, in order to rouse his own feelings, orig. inally feeble, and long before the date of this work grown torpid from artificial excitement". This sentence

s probably the last thing one would say of Goethe. Even the names in Wilhelm Meister such as Jarno, and others ending in a or o, are "a sufficient evidence of Goethe's capriciousness and fantastic search after oddity".

De Quincey's review destroys itself by its very extravagance; and yet it can hardly be thrown aside as altogether valueless. He is certainly right in some degree as regards the handling of the piece. One would hardly say that the strength of Wilhelm Meister lies in its management of event and incident. However clearly Goethe has conceived the characters, he often resorts to most complicated situations, and a symbolism which, in its detail and development, is far from direct or clear; only when the whole is seen at a distance, in its largest outlines, the grandeur of its plan appears. It was perfectly natural too for De Quincey to find a lack of dignity and nobility in Goethe's treatment of passion.

But De Quincey did not see far enough. The episodes are not the purposeless things De Quincey supposed; they are valuable in a symbolic way, in a way that De Quincey was unable to understand. The in affair of the Count, the meeting with Theresa, her own strange history; these have the greatest importance in the development of Wilhelm. But as mere events, as things in themselves, they must have seemed uncalled for to one reading the book as a novel. Incidents of this kind. are almost the only means used to develop the course of the story. Whatever Goethe's richness and invention. in other respects, he has conceived almost no other kind of situation; it is easy to see how De Quincey, from his utter misunderstanding of the deeper purpose of the book, would have been repelled by it.

As a whole, however, the review is one of the

weakest pieces of criticism one could read. De Quincey treats his subject with mere contempt, with neither taste nor earnestness. Of the meaning of the scenes, whose arrangement and shifting, whose actors and dialogues he laughs over so glibly, De Quincey knows nothing. That the real harmony of the piece is an inner one, that its plan is of the intellect and spirit, he has no idea. De Quincey takes the scenes of Wilhelm Meister as ideal scenes, its characters, to use his own words as "pattern people". He does not see that they were never intended to be "pattern people"; that Goethe understood their weaknesses far more truly than many of his critics have done; that the real secret of the book is the development from weakness and uncertainty to a higher freedom and knowledge.

Carlyle called De Quincey's paper "a very vulgar and brutish review"; but it rankled in him nevertheless. Wilson in Noctes Ambrosianae refers to it in his usual style of raillery :

O'Doherty: "Well, the Germanic faction is getting on. Have you seen the last London Magazine? How bitter they are on the poor Wilhelm Meister."

North: "What are they saying?"

O'Doherty: "Oh, abusing the Germans uphill and down dale."

North "I should have thought my friend Opium would have kept them from this particular piece of non

sense." 1

It is the opinion of Professor Masson that De Quincey omitted the first of the two papers from his collected works, not only because he wished to avoid an attack

1 Blackwood's Magazine, Aug. 1824; the date is wrongly given by Alford as June, 1824.