a right to expect. Meanwhile it does seem to me that sneers at his title, and epigrams on his star, come with a very bad grace from a nation which is laughed at for nothing more frequently than for its inordinate love of titles. Nor are Englishmen so remarkable for their indifference to rank, and entire freedom from snobbishness," as to make them the fittest censors of this weakness in a Goethe.

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CHAPTER III.

ELECTIVE AFFINITIES.

AMONG the Jena friends whom Goethe saw with constant pleasure was Frommann, the bookseller, in whose family there was an adopted child, by name Minna Herzlieb, strangely interesting to us as the original of Ottilie in the Wahlverwandtschaften. As a child she had been at great pet of Goethe's; growing into womanhood, she exercised a fascination over him which his reason in vain resisted. The disparity of years was great: but how frequently are young girls found bestowing the bloom of their affections on men old enough to be their fathers! and how frequently are men at an advanced age found trembling with the passion of youth! In the Sonnets addressed to her, and in the novel of Elective Affinities, may be read the fervor of his passion, and the strength with which he resisted. Speaking of this novel, he says: 'No one can fail to recognize in it a deep passionate wound which shrinks from being closed by healing, a heart which dreads to be cured . . . . In it, as in a burialurn, I have deposited with deep emotion many a sad experience. The 3d of October, 1809 (when the publication was completed) set me free from the work; but the feelings it embodies can never quite depart from me.' If we knew as much of the circumstances out of which grew the Elective Affinities as we do of those out of

which grew Werther, we should find his experience as clearly embodied in this novel as it is in Werther; but conjecture in such cases being perilous, I will not venture beyond the facts which have been placed at my disposal; and may only add, therefore, that the growing attachment. was seen with pain and dismay, for no good issue could be found. At length it was resolved to send Minna to school, and this absolute separation saved them both.

It is very curious to read Die Wahlverwandtschaften by the light of this history, and to see in it not only the sources of its inspiration, but the way in which Goethe dramatizes the two halves of his own character. † Eduard and Charlotte loved each other in' youth. Circumstances separated them; and each made a mariage de convenance from which, after a time, they were released by death. The widower and the widow, now free to choose, naturally determine on fulfilling the dream of their youth. They marry. At the opening of the story we see them placidly happy. Although a few quiet touches make us aware of a certain organic disparity between them, not enough to create unhappiness, but enough to prevent perfect sympathy, the keenest eye would detect no signs which threatened the enduring stability of their happiness. Eduard has a friend, almost a brother, always called The Captain,' whom he invites to come and live with them. Charlotte has strongly opposed this at first, having a dim presentiment of evil; but she yields, the more so as she desires that her adopted daughter, Ottilie, should now be taken from school, and come to live with them.

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Thus are the four actors in the drama brought together on the stage; and no sooner are they brought together,

* In the novel, Ottilie also is sent back to school.

† See what was formerly said on this point, vol. i. pp. 224, 225.

than the natural elective affinities of their natures come into play. Charlotte and the Captain are drawn together; Eduard and Ottilie are drawn together. This is shown to be as inevitable as the chemical combinations which are made to illustrate it. A real episode in the tragedy of life is before us; felt to be inevitable; felt to be terrible; felt also to present a dilemma to the moral judgment, on which two parties will pronounce two opposite opinions.

Those critics who reason about human life, and consequently about Art from the abstract point of view, who, disregarding fact and necessity, treat human nature as a chess-board on which any moves may be made which the player chooses, the player himself being considered an impersonal agent untroubled by rashness, incapable of overlooking what is palpable to the bystanders, those critics, I say, will unhesitatingly pronounce the situation an immoral situation, which the poet should not have presented, and which in real life would at once have been put an end to by the stern idea of Duty.

Others, again, whose philosophy is evolved from life as it is, not as it might be; who accept its wondrous complexity of impulses, and demand that Art should represent reality look upon this situation as terribly true, and although tragic, by no means immoral; for the tragedy lies in the collision of Passion and Duty,- of Impulse on the one hand, and on the other, of Social Law. Suppose Charlotte and Eduard unmarried, and these affinities' would have been simple impulses to marriage. But the fact of Marriage stands as a barrier to the impulses: the collision is inevitable.

The divergence of opinion, here indicated, must necessarily exist among the two great classes of readers. Accordingly in Germany and in England the novel is alternately pronounced immoral and profoundly moral. I do not think

is either the one or the other. When critics rail at it, and declare it saps the whole foundation of marriage, and when crítics enthusiastically declare it is profoundly moral because it sets the sacredness of marriage in so clear a light, I see that both have drawn certain general conclusions from an individual case; but I do not see that they have done more than put their interpretations on what the author had no intention of being interpreted at all. Every work of Art has its moral, says Hegel; but the moral depends on him that draws it. Both the conclusion against marriage, and the conclusion in favor of marriage, may therefore be drawn from this novel; and yet neither conclusion be correct, except as the private interpretation of the reader. Goethe was an Artist, not an Advocate; he painted a true picture, and because he painted it truly, he necessarily presented it in a form which would permit men to draw from it those opposite conclusions which the reality itself would permit. Suppose the story actually to have passed before our eyes, the judgments passed on it even by those thoroughly acquainted with all the facts, would have been diametrically opposite. It is not difficult to write a story carrying the moral legible in every page; and if the writer's object be primarily that of illustrating a plain moral, he need not trouble himself about truth of character. And for this reason: he employs character as a means to an end, he does not make the delineation of character his end; his purpose is didactic, not artistic. Quite otherwise is the artist's purpose and practice: for him human life is the end and aim for him the primary object is character, which is, as all know, of a mingled woof, good and evil, virtue and weakness, truth and falsehood, woven inextricably together.

Those who object to such pictures, and think that truth