the little Duchy could boast not only of its energetic and healthy-minded young ruler, but of its high-souled Duchess Luise, with the miniature Court of the cultivated Anna Amalia close by at Tiefurt. With Wieland and Knebel in command, intellectual life could hardly stagnate; and when Goethe persuaded his master a few months after his arrival to appoint Herder, his revered friend and teacher of Strassburg days, to the vacant post of Court preacher, the character of Weimar as a centre of enlightenment was assured.

For a year or two Karl August, intoxicated with animal spirits, shocked his sedater subjects by his madcap pranks, in which Goethe joined with full zest. 'We were all young and merry then,' declared the poet long after, as he looked back on the joyous revels of Ilmenau. The veteran Klopstock was moved to a letter of reproachful warning, which provoked a curt request to mind his own business; for graver matters were not neglected. 'I am now immersed in Court and political business,' wrote Goethe two months after his arrival; and his responsibilities increased with the lapse of years. The story of his administrative career was first pieced together by Schöll, and is fully described in the present work. Beginning as Legationsrat, with a seat and vote in Council, he was named a Privy Councillor in 1779, after which business became his chief care. He devoted himself to his duties with an ardour which told on his health and spirits, and the strain grew still greater in 1782, when he was made President of the Council. He was now able to carry through a number of financial and agrarian reforms; but his success was limited by the extravagance of his master. He admonished the Duke both in prose and verse; but Karl August none the less ranks with Karl Friedrich of Baden, Ferdinand of Brunswick, and one or two other minor potentates among the best German princes of his time. Not long before his death Goethe remarked to Eckermann that in the fifty years of his reign there was not a day in which his master had not given thought to the welfare of his subjects.

Goethe's ten years' activity in the service of the State form an honourable chapter in his life; but the work was never congenial, and as the responsibilities Vol. 235.-No. 467.

accumulated the drudgery became intolerable. He could hardly have borne the burden but for the love of Frau von Stein, whose life is inseparable from his own for eleven years and to whom he sometimes wrote twice or thrice a day. After the breach she demanded her own letters back and destroyed them; and the Professor hints a doubt whether the poet's letters, meant only for her, ought ever to have been given to the world. Be that as it may, without them we should not know Goethe as we do. With the verdict that there is no more remarkable record of a man's relations to a woman we may all agree; but why are their relations described as a liaison? Frau von Stein was seven years his senior, the wife of an unloved husband, the mother of seven children, of delicate health and high moral principle; while Goethe remained throughout not only the intellectual comrade but the passionate lover.

'The course of their love did not run smooth, and, as it is presented to us from his side, we may doubt whether pain or pleasure was the predominant ingredient in it. Their relation to each other, as they both recognised, was an unnatural one, and neither was of a temperament that makes it easier. Frau von Stein paid the penalty of her own indiscretion. Worldly good sense might have counselled her as to the imprudence of a relation which could not run a natural course. She intermittently endeavoured to restrain the ardour of her youthful devotee, but, flattered by his worship of her, she came under a spell. Her conduct after their quarrel shows that she was not the "perfect woman nobly planned" Goethe's adoration represents her.'

Goethe set off for Italy in 1786. The principal object of my journey,' he subsequently told the Duke, was to cure myself of the physical and moral maladies which tortured me in Germany and ultimately made me useless, and to quench my ardent thirst after true art.' Next to the migration to Weimar, in 1775, the Italian journey is the most important event in his life. It closed his political activities and restored him to the creative sphere for which he was best fitted. It renewed his youth, introduced him to classical art, and furnished him with a wider perspective.

'What he saw and felt in Italy opened up to him a new

world of thought and feeling. It enabled him to estimate the comparative value of ancient and modern ideals, and thus to survey human effort as a whole and in its highest manifestations.'

It was also by far the happiest period of his life. On his return, after two years' absence, he looked at his old home with very different eyes. From the Eternal City to the toy capital was a far cry; and he soon discovered that his old friends were visibly bored by his enthusiasm for classical art.

'From Italy rich in form,' he complains, "I was flung back into formless Germany, to exchange a cheerful for a gloomy sky. My friends, instead of offering me comfort, drove me to despair. My ecstasies over objects, distant and hardly known, my complaints over what I had lost appeared to offend them. I missed all sympathy; no one understood my language.'

Worst of all, the most precious friendship of his life was at an end. Frau von Stein had concluded from his sudden flight that she had lost her place in his heart, and she wrote to tell him so. He denied it; but Rome and Naples were to prove formidable rivals. When they met again both knew that their friendship hung by a thread; and within a few months he took a step which turned coolness into angry resentment, and made her exclaim in the bitterness of her heart that a beautiful star had fallen from heaven.

In the opening days of 1789, Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of a drunken advocate, visited Goethe to solicit his support for a brother. She worked in a flower factory, and the poet had noticed her before his Italian journey. In Italy he had renewed the dissipation of his youth, and on seeing her again he succumbed to the voluptuous charms of twenty-three. In November she was installed in his household, and on Christmas Day she bore him a son. The Duke stood godfather, and Herder baptised him; but the society of Weimar never forgave its most celebrated citizen, and Frau von Stein was foremost in her denunciation. The Professor writes with wisdom and feeling on the most distressing episode in the poet's life.

'As the years passed, Christiane gradually settled down in her unnatural situation; but her life was a long sacrifice which excites our warmest sympathy. Naturally cheerful and affectionate, she was debarred from all society in which she could have found herself at home. For the ladies of Weimar she was a jest, and with the exception of her sister and an aunt, domiciled in the back of the house with Goethe's permission, she does not appear to have had a single female acquaintance. And her feelings for Goethe were mixed with an awe which made impossible the full effusion of the heart. "Though he constantly treated her with considerate kindness, she was never allowed to forget her position.'

In 1806, in gratitude for her devotion during a dangerous illness, he made her his wife; but the tragedy inherent in the situation remained. It was the nemesis of his shrinking from the marriage bond that the man who fled from Friederike and Lili found himself fettered to Christiane; and his latest biographer is amply justified when he observes that nothing has so damaged his fame in the eyes of posterity. On the other hand, he refuses to join in the condemnation of the poet for his neglect to visit his delightful mother except at long intervals.

If the years following the Italian journey were darkened by the sundering of friendships and loss of respect, a new period of happiness and creative effort opened in 1794 when Goethe suddenly discovered that Schiller, then Professor of History at Jena, could supply him with the stimulus and comradeship of which he was sorely in need. The story of that historic friendship is enshrined in the correspondence published by the survivor, and its quickening influence led to what Goethe aptly described as his 'second spring.' Schiller had already sown his Romantic wild oats, and the demagogue of The Robbers' had grown into the philosopher of the 'Letters on Esthetic Education.' While Herder, the only other, commanding intellect of the Weimar circle, was estranged from his old friend by his own difficult temper, Schiller's attractive nature made an irresistible appeal. 'I lose in him the half of my existence,' wrote Goethe on hearing the news of his death in 1805. The Professor does not question the sincerity of his regrets, but he asks a question which will come to some of his readers with something of a shock.

'Was it fortunate for their relations that Schiller died when he did? There are some indications that there were possibilities of estrangement between them in the near future. Goethe was sometimes impatient at the insistency of Schiller's suggestions regarding his work, and this impatience would almost certainly have increased. It was significant, too, that during the later years he was showing a sympathy for certain youthful men of letters whom Schiller held in detestation. Moreover, as his past life had shown, it was a peculiarity of his temperament that new relations became sooner or later a necessity for him. From Merck, Lavater, Jacobi, and Frau von Stein he had in turn become alienated, and, though Schiller was far more to him than any of these, it is not improbable that even Schiller would have ceased to be to him what he had been. On Schiller's part we have clear evidence that latterly his position in Weimar and his relations to Goethe were not all he could have wished. If they had become estranged, the world would have been robbed of one of the noblest spectacles in literary history-genius and friendship working in perfect harmony towards the highest ends.'

The later years of Goethe's life, despite the everincreasing stream of celebrities and humbler pilgrims to Weimar, were in a sense lonely. Though his friendship with Zelter, far away at Berlin, was a perpetual comfort, and Ottilie, his daughter-in-law, brought sunshine and grandchildren into his home, his worthless son was a sore trial, and he never again experienced such enduring and fruitful association as with Schiller or Frau von Stein. He remained susceptible to the last, falling in love with Minna Herzlieb at fifty-seven, and with Frau von Willemer at sixty-five. Poor Christiane passed away in 1816 having earned her husband's love by long years of devoted service.

'That her loss went to his heart we cannot doubt, though it is difficult to imagine a more ill-assorted pair. That he was sorely tried at times by her unfitness to fill the place he had given her we know; and his uniform tenderness and consideration for her proved his essential goodness of heart.' Seven years later, at the age of seventy-four, he fell in love with Ulrike von Levetzow, a girl of nineteen, and informed his family of his approaching marriage; but to his intense regret her mother refused her consent.