BOOKS.

A DUCHESS OF SASE-WEIMA_R.*

A CENTURY and a half ago the Governments of Germany were not all dominated by the counsels of perfection which seem to guide them now. In some of the States wealth, learning, and manners had been dilapidated by misrule and ill- luck, and such was the position of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. It was the merit of the Duchess Anna Amelia, a Princess of the house of Brunswick, that during the nineteen years of the Regency thrown upon her by her husband's early death she so administered that when her son, Karl August, attained his place as Sovereign, the Duchy had taken a new departure in prosperity, while there was a beginning of the intellectual development which made Weimar another Ferrara or Urbino, and brought the city the name of " the German Athens." Anna Amalia's present biographer is an expert in German topics. and she has an excellent narrative faculty; but she quotes her numerous authorities to excess, and at times slips into familiarities of schoolroom style. Her account of the historic vicissitudes of Thuringia requires correction, and she spells " Geheimrath " with a superflous central " e." Then she gives her heroine a wrong title, calling her at the head of the five hundred and sixty-eight pages of the book "a Grand Duchess," which she was not. Saxe-Weimar did not attain the higher ducal dignity till 1815-16, a fact corroborated by the inscrip- tions of a couple of photographs (Vol. II., pp. 551-52). Worse still, the authoress of Corinne and L' Allemagne, above all women, is robbed by a slip of her French nationality. We read : Some of the best conversationalists of the nineteenth century were Germans or Russians, notably Madame de Steel and Madame de Krudener."

Anna Amalie was born in 1739 ; Regent from 1758 to 1775, her death was in 1807. Arriving in 1756 in "that desert Weimar, half village, half capital," as Herder put it, she found poverty and disorder prevalent. Official peculation was general, taxes were crushing, the treasury was empty, education (except at the University of Jena) was at the lowest ebb, there were no hospitals or asylums, the theatre was in decay, the ducal resi- dence was tumbling to ruins, the streets of Weimar were as dangerous at night from pitfalls, insufficient illumination, and " hooligans " as those of another Metropolis now, while society was in a rude, disintegrated phase. When the widow of nineteen assumed the Regency she at once determined— so our authorities assert—to change all that, so that her little State should become a feature of the age. Laying before her Council an Order conveying her intention to see for herself into all matters of business, domestic and foreign, the encountered stiff official resistance, on which she quickly put down her foot with a vigour worthy of a niece of Frederick the Great. Helped by the Minister Greiner, the enlightened female autocrat pushed on reform in various directions, effecting, in particular, savings in her personal expenditure, which gave her funds for the improvement of the public library and the city gymnasium, and for the purchase of works of art. On Anna Amalia's administrative activities the authoress is somewhat conjectural, but is more detailed and trustworthy in describing her heroine's personal characteristics and her achievements in the social sphere. The Duchess induced the Court set (which must have been a vanishing quantity as to numbers I) to substitute music, charades, and other elegant diversions for the low games and horse-play which disgraced the palace, thus opening the road to the higher aspirations which in the Weimar of that day were totally extinct. Anna Amalie was almost up to the Girton level. She was a fair Latin scholar, read Aristophanes with Wieland as coach, wrote operettas, acted, filled volumes with her Gedanken or " reflections," addressing the while a voluminous correspondence to all sorts and conditions of men. The illustrious Grimm went so far as to call " the wonderful Duchess" a living "representation of the goddess Minerva, who has taken a human form amongst the romantic woods of Thuringia," and he added that language failed " to give an idea of the homage, the reverence, and the love excited by this wonderful Princess." As a counterblast to the sehwarmerei of • -41 Grata Duchsas • the //ifs of Amu' - Audis, Ducheu of Saxe- Weimar. Eisenach., and the Classical Circle of Weimar. • By Prances Gerard. With 42 Illoatzattons and Portraits. 2 vols. London: Hxdolunson sad Co. Pie. nat.] .

the favoured correspondent of so many Kings and Queens, we must record the fact that, according to one of Anna Amalia's

beet friends, her democratic spirit drove the Weimar "smart set" to complain that she " overstepped the rigid limit which separates the classes, and that knowledge and talents were a better passport to her favour than old lineage or rank," a divagation from the plain path of Royal duty on which hardly any European Sovereign, male or female, would dare to enter in the year 1902. The ill-humour of the malcontents would have been doubled if they could have read the letters of a sub- sequent date addressed by the Duchess in terms of perfect equality to Goethe's mother, who, as wife of a Frankfort " Patrizier "— i.e., high-class burgher — was in no sense " hoffithig," or a proper associate for persons of their kidney.

With her son Karl August the Regent was not so suc- cessful as with her subjects. The boy was so full of talent that no less a person than his relative, " Alter Fritz," said that " of all the Princes he had seen Karl gave the greatest promise." But the little chap was self-willed, rough, over- frolicsome, and his head was turned by flattery ; his tutors, amongst whom was Wieland, managed him badly; so that he fell short of his mother's ideal of an embryo Sovereign. " Karl's indomitable will " brought him into constant collision with the Duchess, a difficulty which mainly died out when "the rising sun" was introduced into the Council, and was afterwards despatched on a modified version of "the grand tour," which included a journey vid the Maine

to Carlaruhe and Paris. His juvenile imagination having been excited by The Sorrows of Werther and Gots von Berlichingen, he contrived when at Frankfort to meet Goethe, thus laying the foundations of a friendship which in the year

following brought about the poet's settlement in Weimar on Karl August's invitation. Realising at Carlaruhe a long- cherished hope of his mother, the Duke rushed into an engagement with Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was hardly suited by temperament and antecedents for her new position, which, as she complained, involved life in a house without a kitchen. The husband was fiery, unreserved, free- and-easy, humorous if not rude, addicted to potations and revels, and to teasing the maids of honour, as well as to other questionable pastimes in which Goethe was a willing second. The beautiful wife's mother-in-law called her " a lump of ice " : she was self-contained, prim, and a strict devotee of an ultra-aristocratic code of Court etiquette.

However, attachment finally succeeded to indifference : the Royal pair grew into a fairly attached couple, and when Karl August's Sturm and Drang period was over

he developed into a capable ruler, whose guiding thought was the promotion of the welfare of his people. Goethe's verdicts on the Duke ranged, under the influence of circumstances and dates, from harsh condemnations of his bosom friend's follies and extravagance, to boundless eulogies on his exceptional capacities and aspirations. In his old age the poet spoke thus to Eckermann

" Karl August was born a great man ; he had a compound nature, and had he lived in the Attic days the Greeks would have said that he had a mixture of god and man and demon. Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, and Karl August have a family resemblance, in so far that no one could oppose them. . . . . . Everything that I undertook under his direction [i.e., as Minister of State] succeeded, so that in cases where I could not see my road clearly, I had only to consult him, and he instantly hit upon the way to ensure success, and I seldom knew him to fail."

The " Wednesdays " of the lovely Duchess Louise, het mother-in-law's "Fridays," and the Saturday breakfasts a /a Rogers and Monckton Milner of the dwarfed, ugly, but witty

Fritulein von Gochausen are brightly described in this book. The Dowager's round-table was the resort of a little galaxy of scholar-like women who held their own — so books allege—in keen encounters of learning and wit with Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Herder, Jean Paul Richter, behind whom shone other intellectual lights of no feeble magnitude. The guests at these feasts of reason included Charlotte von Stein, the neglected wife of the ducal Master of the Ceremonies, whose notorious relations with Goethe were maintained in their original fervour for ten years.

Admitting the " general laxity " of the local morals, as tc which, however, Weimar did not reach the " infamous

record" of some other German cities, our authoress bowdlerises this page of her narrative by arguments which

we fear will not convince readers of the great poet's diaries.

An interesting feature of Anna Amalia's career is her devo- tion to the drama. As not unusual in those days, the Weimar stage troop consisted of unpaid amateurs, and their perform- ances were open gratis. Goethe managed and acted, the com- pany including the Duke, his brother Constantine, the Duchess, Frau von Stein, with various high official personages. These aristocratic Thespians played in the capital, or on the open-air boards arranged by the Duchess at the umbrageous country seats of Ettersburg and Tiefurt. In the end, a new theatre was built by a speculative grandee, and the amateurs were extinguished by a troop of professional comedians, whose performances appear to have suited the Thuringian " ground- lings." All this, and the story of Goethe's " friendship " with the beautiful actress and singer, Corona Schroter, who appears to have settled down in Weimar in order to be near the uni- versal magnet, is interesting reading. But Goethe's serious activities in association with Schiller are barely named. The author of William Tell is practically dropped out of the record, and the writer seems unaware that under the in- fluence of dramas like the realistic Egmont and the idealising Wallenstein there grew up in Germany a new school of dramatic and histrionic art. The lady has, however, dis- covered that Goethe's primary period of residence in "the modern Athens "—i.e., the ten years between his arrival and his first journey to Rome—was "a blank as far as literary progress was concerned." It so happens that during this dead time Goethe had worked at some of his great dramas, amongst them Iphigenia, as this text and a photograph of Corona and himself in costume prove in detail. To the pre-Roman period further belongs Torquato Tasso : this play is just mentioned in the book, yet we are not informed that its dramatis personae partly symbolise Karl August, the Duchess Louise, Charlotte von Stein, and the poet himself.

When the young Frankfort plebeian was ennobled and given a paid Ministerial post, the palatial coteries raged furiously : a member of the ducal Administration asked Anna Amalia if old public servants were "to walk after this Talmo Goethe." By degrees it was seen that the poet's gigantic personality was not wanting the stuff of which capable bureaucrats are made. The authoress does not approach the poet's official life, so that we are not told that it was by Goethe's advice that the Duke of Weimar gave vigorous support to Frederick the Great's anti-Austrian Piirstenbund of 1785. He was hardly an accomplice in the startling quasi-revo- lntionary constitutional developments, and patronage of the Burschenschaft, which brought Karl August into serious conflict with the Diet of Frankfort after the Congress of Vienna. As to Goethe's " angel Louise," when Napoleon forced his way into her palace ball after the catastrophe of Jena, and treated her to a specimen of his black- guardly Corsican manners, she faced him with a courage and dignity which surpassed the similar performance of her Prussian namesake at Tilsit, and drew from the invader the remark :—" There is a woman whom even our two hundred cannon could not frighten." The sufferings of body and mind imposed on Anna Amalia by the war, in which her son had a Prussian command, shortened her life; she got no comfort from Goethe, who shut himself up in the house on the Fmuen Platz, and did not allow such rubbish as battles and war contributions to disturb his Olympian calm. With the end came "a sorrow's crown of sorrow " in the shape of the forced absence of her beloved son. Very gratifying is the assurance that "although ninety-four years have elapsed since Anna Amalia passed away, her memory is still fresh in the capital which she loved so well."