acquired in their practical application: I may have fancied metaphors continuing to lurk, with a sort of sly meaning, in phrases originally metaphorical, but to which custom has affixed a certain application; and the low familiarity of the language given to Mephistopheles is, of course, not unlikely to create mistakes of this sort. I am not aware of the existence of such mistakes, yet I cannot but apprehend the possibility of them.

It has sometimes happened that I felt as puzzled as Goethe's German commentators; and I am not quite sure that I have not in such cases rather sought to express some thought lying at the root as it were of the entire discussion, than succeeded in expressing any thing which they-or rather any one of them, for they seldom agree may tell us is Goethe's meaning. I have now and then, when they differed from each other, ventured to differ from all; and when I have seemed to myself to see the meaning lying before me on the surface, have hesitated to break it up for the purpose of digging into some supposed mine beneath.

The satire against the German critics and metaphysicians, which occurs in the Walpurgis Night, will be as intelligible here as in Germany. The boundaries of the human mind are every where the same. The same riddles have perplexed schoolman

a

and sophist,—have been the subject of satire alike to Aristophanes and Erasmus. The German metaphysicians defy satire; and the sentences which Goethe gives to his Idealist and Realist are an unexaggerated statement of their respective doctrines. The individuals whom he has glanced at, are not in all cases remembered even in Germany; and Goethe avoided answering questions on the subject. The jokes themselves are of the same kind as Johnson's proof of man's free agency by walking across a room, -one of those practical jests of which Aristophanes is full, which prove or disprove nothing. In the Walpurgis Night, the author of "The Joys of Werter" parody on the "Sorrows"—is thus placed, criticising with a reviewer's seriousness the extravagance of the witch dances; vehemently denying the power, nay the existence, of Spirits, while he seeks to regulate their movements, and is the only person who appears quite in earnest through the whole scene. The "Golden Bridal," in the same way, gives some verses in which it is probable that Goethe was thinking of Fichte or Schelling; and others, which it would require a worthless acquaintance with the heroes of the German Dunciad,—if there be such a register of those whom Goethe and Schiller regarded as enemies, to explain particularly. The humour sometimes consists in making the cant terms of the

different schools of infidel philosophy with which Germany has been infested jingle into rhyme. I have not thought myself at liberty to abridge any part of the work. In this strange scene, omission or alteration would seem to me even less allowable than in any other passage, as it is manifest that the crowd of images has been whirled together, with intended reference to the purpose of distracting Faustus from the recollection of Margaret, and thus preparing for the catastrophe which immediately follows: and so consummate are the artifices of arrangement in this elaborate poem the object is at the same time attained, and was, we know, designed by the poet, of deceiving, by the multiplicity and variety of the matter thus flung before it, the reader's mind into the belief of a considerable interval having passed between the time when we left Margaret fainting in the cathedral, and that in which we meet her in the prison. But it is fit to say that any deep meaning is not to be sought in rubbish of the kind; a playful turn of expression, a droll rhyme, a trifling pun, any thing and every thing were welcome in what Goethe called his Walpurgis sack. "For thirty years," said he to Falk, "the critics have been sorely vexed and tormented in spirit by the broomsticks on the Blocksberg, and the Cat's dialogue in the Witch's

kitchen, which occurs in Faust. And all the interpreting and allegorizing of this dramatic humoristic extravaganza have never thoroughly prospered. Really people should learn, when they are young, to make and to take a joke, and to throw away scraps as scraps."* The critics supplied keys enough for every sentence which was given a hundred meanings, and Goethe appears to have regarded their notes and comments as the principal part of the

amusement.

I have given in my notes but few extracts from the German commentaries on Faust: no one who has looked into the sources of information open to the English reader, can be ignorant of the spirit in which they are written, and of the feeling with which Goethe regarded the hierophants who could "tell him his dream and the interpretation thereof." Every word is made a mystery of. The poet, whom his admirers of the higher forms regard as little less than inspired, has revealed something which has been a secret from all others of mankind; or in his very silence and forbearance from speech, there is mystery; and all this in the passages which, to the unassisted reader, are seemingly of no other importance than as they carry on the story.

Mr.

* Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe, vol. i. p. 114.

Landor has, after three centuries, revealed the hidden purpose of Don Quixote, and the Italian poets have yet more lately found interpreters to allegorize what seemed to be love-sonnets into dreams of imaginary republics. Of such fancyings there is no end: and unhappily it has so often happened that the vanity of the poet has listened to those who would spiritualize his songs, that such interpretations are not absolutely devoid of plausibility-nay, of something like authority. I own I should with great hesitation listen to a poet, some years after the publication of his work, endeavouring to persuade himself or others that what we had admired as some joyous creation of romance was, in serious truth, nothing but the phantom of a dead theology. I am ill disposed to listen to such theories, and I am quite sure that they have seldom been of much use to the poet. Tasso had fortunately completed his poem before he began to invent the justifying allegory; and his second poem on the same subject, in which he was, with full consciousness of the double purpose, relating a story of chivalrous adventure, and at the same time evolving a system of philosophy, "in which should be exhibited, under the mask of various princes and soldiers, the natural man, consisting of soul and body," could scarcely have been other than the failure which it turned out to be. I do not