MR. SCHUTZ WILSON'S LITERARY STUDIES.* UNDER the rather disconnected series
of headings which introduce the volume before us, Mr. &hiitz Wilson has provided his readers with matter as undeniably interesting as it is various. The French Revolution has clearly been to him a matter of the closest inquiry, and in his essays on the Conciergerie, and on the works of Carlyle and Taine, he goes over the well-worn ground again in the true spirit of research and comparison. He is himself too evidently on the side of the French historian in regarding the work of the Terror as simply the doing of a handful of fiends, to be quite a fair judge of Carlyle's more mystic and elaborate point of view; but he sets a great value upon the Scotchman's work, and in his comparison between him and Goethe appears to us to place the former upon altogether too high a pedestal, treating the two as having won for themselves an almost equal name in letters. The com- parison appears to us untenable. Goethe's distinct place among the demigods gives him the fair right to mate with a Shakespeare—Mr. Wilson in one place rather gracefully writes of him as "the Shakespeare "—or with a Dante only. Carlyle's is at the best an inferior post to theirs altogether, though on the other hand it is scarcely fair to expect from him the same large and healthy views of life and nature which the German poet enjoyed. Such a martyr to constant ill-health was not to be blamed for the want of that high spirit of enjoyment which was the secret of all that Goethe thought and did, not always too well. For Goethe was the very favourite of fortune. Magnificently handsome, of comfortable means, of superb physique, and undoubted health, with an absolute command of all the fields of literature in verse and prose, he lived every day of his life to the last, and was able to feel at the end that in finishing the second part of his Faust, he had just in time accomplished the one remaining desire of his heart, and had no work in life left to do but to leave it. It was a wonderful career apart from the beauty of his work, and we are never tired of dwelling on its large felicities; while with Carlyle we cannot quite get rid of a feeling that he somehow fidgeted himself into greatness. Entertainingly and truly enough does Mr. Wilson bring out the difference of the attitude of the two towards the drama. Mr. Wilson has himself a deep sense of the lofty value of true dramatic work, and forcibly brings before us what Goethe did for it in his management of the Weimar Theatre, where, though not careless of the ordinary meeds of success, he made it his business to give his audiences "the plays which they ought to like and enjoy" in a form to secure them their enjoyment. To hit the golden mean between boring and spoiling them was an object worth the aim, and to do so he gave everybody a chance. His serene greatness was above rivalry and resentment, and when he brought forward the works of the Schlegels, who hated and envied him, he stood up himself in his seat to call for silence when the audience showed themselves inclined to jeer Frederic Schlegel's Alarcos. The Schlegels were amongst those who tried to make a rival to Goethe of the Spaniard Calderon, whose Magico Prodigioso, in contrast to Faust, becomes in this book the subject of an interesting essay. But little is really known of Calderon in England. His career suggests to us a good deal of Ben Joneon and Shirley, though not of Shake- speare, and hardly of Massinger ; but the curious manner of Calderon's treatment of a theme kindred to Faust, side by side with Goethe's masterpiece, is made painfully conspicuous by the comparison. But say what we will of Calderon or Carlyle, such
• IVetory and Critierm Leinq Studies on Oinsiergerie, Wawa Cavell°. Wallenstein. Calderon, Carlyle, gotths, Faust, Tains. By H. &ha! z
London: T. Fisher 1Jawin.
a comparison is not equitable. Carlyle bad far too much of the merely critical spirit to set him among the demigods "who carp not, neither do they nag." Compare with Goethe's mastery of dramatic work, Carlyle's moan over Shakespeare :— " Alas ! Shakespeare had to write for 'the Globe playhouse,' his great soul had to crush itself as it could into that and no other mould." The great soul did it pretty well, and leaves with us but little regret, except that any responsible man could be found to write of him like that—or to say as Emerson said, that the beat poet "led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement." Profane ! —what a miserable expression ! And what an outlook for the good and for the improvement of the unhappy "public," when Shakespeare is not to be permitted to work for them. What was he to write P Hymns ? What was he to do ? Find fault ? It is a curious and striking fact that for the coming season three of Shakespeare's playa are announced for production in London, and three for translation in Paris. In their secret hearts, what would Carlyle or Emerson have done to gain that ? It is probable that Carlyle's sneers at Shakespeare's work were in no slight degree actuated by the consciousness that his own writing was eminently volcanic, and that he belonged essentially to the uneasy class of the unacted dramatists. We really think that, remarkable writer as he was, it is far too much to say, as Mr. Wilson says, that "Goethe and Carlyle are literary stars of the first magnitude. As writers they are entirely lofty, and wholly wonderful ; and behind their work we find two noble men." But we must say that his own book goes as far as a book well can go to prove the absolute fallacy of the comparison. Very fine in its way, moreover, and more still in the great German's favour, is the contrast drawn between their attitude on the mysteries of faith. We doubt if Goethe's position on that is really well known to the world, or that it is remembered of him that he wrote that "So soon as one has understood, and absorbed into oneself the pure doctrine and love of Christ, one feels oneself great and free as man." As for Carlyle, his odd theories cannot be better illustrated than by his remark that "Sansculotism" was of divine origin. "One other thing thou mayest understand of it—that it, too, came from God ; for has it not been?" As Mr. Wilson truly observes, so has murder.
Carlyle is a kind of link in this attractive volume between the two subjects of Goethe and the French Revolution, of which it is mainly composed. In dealing with the latter our essayist is as obviously opposed to the theories of Carlyle as he is in the former case. He seems all: through, when dealing with the Sage, to be struggling against a certain suppressed sense of rebellion against what the great man might himself have described as windbaggery, which is apt to possess the best of men when contending with some of his pages. And it is with a certain perceptible satisfaction that he tells us that Taine, of whose qualities as a historian he speaks with the highest praise, never in all his work and researches makes any allu- sion to Carlyle at all, passing him by as simply no authority upon the Revolution whatever. And, historically speaking, we take that to be very nearly the fact. "Patriotism consorts not with thieving and felony," grandly pronounces Carlyle, and Taine appears to take much the same view from quite another standpoint. The patriots of Carlyle were the thieves and felons of M. Paine, and Mr. Wilson is careful to point out how far the men who shaped and led the Revolution were from thinking with Carlyle. We need not again follow any of our guides into the details of the most painful of stories. But we are able to feel even fresh sorrow and admiration for the suffering and heroism, both of Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland, the two absolutely opposite representatives of the two camps, whose community of fate shows in itself the promiscuous futility of the whole dread carnival. And lesser stories of a moving kind we have many, especially those of Gosnay and Egle, which Mr. Wilson's readers will study with interest. But we doubt if he does not estimate Robespierre a little too low in the scale of comparison, if comparison there be, between him and his associates, Danton and Marat. The fact on which he himself insists, that the Terror ended with Robespierre's fall, whereas the end of the other two had not even served to stay it, is surely in itself absolutely conclusive of what M. Taine does not appear quite to hold, that Robespierre really was what tradition has agreed to make of him, the representative figure of the awful period. The paper upon " Wallenstein " is very interesting, and suggests curious parallels, in the identical treatment which Wallenstein and Bismarck received at the hands of ungrateful Sovereigns, between the different cir- cumstances of different days. We are glad that assassins have not been sent to despatch the Chancellor at Friedrichsruhe. The story of a mighty soldier, mightier for Schiller's play, is brought before us vividly again.
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