all human affairs naught, that with the exception of the being which exists by itself, there is no beauty except in that which is not." She means in our illusions. Julie dissects feelings, and reasons in high-flown language. In contrast with her how naïve and natural is the vigorous Charlotte! Think of the latter, for instance, in the famous scene where she is cutting bread and butter for her little sisters and brothers. If she offends it is not by declamation, but by a touch of sentimentality, as, for instance, in the scene where her thoughts and Werther's meet, when, looking out into the rain through the wet window-pane, she utters the word: "Klopstock!"

From St. Preux to Werther the advance is equally great In the former there was, as his name implies, some reminiscence of the ideal knight. It is Goethe, the poet of the modern era, who finally disposes of this ideal. In his heroes, physical courage, which never fails in its effect on naïve readers, is almost too much ignored. It is so in the case of Wilhelm Meister and Faust. And Werther too is no knight, but a thinking and feeling microcosm. From his limited point in space he embraces the whole of existence, and the trouble in his soul is the trouble which heralds and accompanies the birth of a new era. His most enduring mood is one of limitless longing. He belongs to an age of anticipation and inauguration, not to one of abandonment and despair. We shall see his antithesis in Chateaubriand's René. The main source of Werther's unhappiness is to be found in the disparity between the limitations of society and the infinity of the heart. In early days the heroes of literature were kings and princes; their worldly position harmonised with their spiritual greatness; the contrast between desire and power was unknown. And even after literature had widened its bounds, it still admitted only those whose birth and wealth raised them above the low toils and troubles of life. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe indicates the cause. "O thrice happy," he cries, "are they who are placed by birth on the heights of humanity, and who have never dwelt in, have never even travelled through, the valley of humiliation in which so many an honest soul spends a miserable life. They have scarcely entered existence before they step on board a ship to take the great common journey; they profit by every favourable breath of wind, while the others, left to their own resources, swim painfully after, deriving but small benefit from the favouring breeze, and often sink when their strength is exhausted to a miserable death beneath the waves." Here we have one of the blessings of life, namely, wealth, praised in eloquent terms, and what may be said of wealth, the lowest in order of life's outward advantages, may be said with still more reason of all the other external forms of happiness and power.

It is at the change of the century that we first come upon this strange incongruity, a personality who is a sort of god and ruler in the spiritual world, whose capacity of feeling is such that by means of it he draws into his own life the whole life of the universe, the demand of whose heart is a demand for omnipotence (for omnipotence he must have in order to transform the cold, hard world into a world after his own heart), and who, along with all this, is—what? A Secretary of Legation, perhaps, like Werther, with a few hundred thalers a year, a man who is so needy that he is glad when the Hereditary Prince makes him a present of twenty-five ducats, who is confined half the day to his office, who is debarred from all except bourgeois society, and looks for the fulfilment of all his desires of happiness in the possession of a girl who is carried off from under his nose by a commonplace prig. Would he cultivate a talent, there are obstacles in his way; would he gratify a desire, some conventional rule restrains him; in his longing to follow his ardent impulses, to quench his burning spiritual thirst, he passionately stretches out his hands, but society peremptorily says: No. It seemed as if there were a great and terrible discord between the individual and the general condition of things, between heart and reason, between the laws of passion and those of society. The impression that this was so had taken deep hold of that generation. It appeared to them that there was something wrong with the great machinery of existence, and that it would soon collapse. Nor was it long before they heard the crash, before that time came when all barriers were broken down and all forms done away with; when the established order was overthrown and distinctions of class suddenly disappeared; when the air was filled with the smoke of gunpowder and the notes of the "Marseillaise" when the ancient boundaries of kingdoms were changed and re-changed, kings were dethroned and beheaded, and the religion of a thousand years was abolished; when a Corsican lieutenant of artillery proclaimed himself the heir of the Revolution and declared all careers open to the man of talent, the son of a French innkeeper ascended the throne of Naples, and a quondam grenadier grasped the sceptres of Sweden and Norway.

It is the longing and the vague unrest of anticipation that distinguish Werther. A revolution lies between him and the next great type, the Frenchman, René. In René the poetry of prophecy is superseded by that of disillusionment. In place of pre-revolutionary discontent we have anti-revolutionary dissatisfaction. All those great changes had been powerless to bring man's actual condition into harmony with the cravings of his spirit. The struggle for the human rights of the individual appeared to have resulted solely in a new tyranny. Once again we meet the young man of the age in literature. How changed he is! The fresh colour has gone from his cheek, the ingenuousness from his mind; his forehead is lined, his life is empty, his hand is clenched. Expelled from a society which he anathematises because he can find no place in it, he roams through a new world, through primeval forests inhabited by savage tribes. A new element, not to be found in Werther, has entered into his soul—the element of melancholy. Werther declares again and again that nothing is so obnoxious to him as ill-humour and despondency; he is unhappy, but never melancholy. René, on the other hand, is lost in an idle grief which he is unable to control. He is heavy-hearted and misanthropical. He is a transition figure, standing midway between Goethe's Werther and Byron's Giaour and Corsair.