adoption of the reading bringit in the text on p. 48. But in fact there is very ample space between the i and 3 and the reading bringt which Priebsch obtained in 1894 with the help of a reagent, has now been placed beyond all doubt by the projection on a sheet of a photographic slide giving a remarkably clear picture of this portion of the MS., prepared from the facsimile itself by Mr Pittock, of University College, London, for the German Seminar library. Breul, as was to be clearly seen in the projection, has made the mistake of taking the second vertical stroke of the n for the down stroke of the g and the reason for this error of observation is probably in the ligature of the top of this downstroke on n with the horizontal bar of the A.S. open g (3) whose descending stroke is of course more to the right and can be distinguished, though more faintly, together with the very distinct tail loop. The is followed immediately by t and there is no space whatever for an i, nor is there any sign of a suprascript. Bringt therefore, is definitely established as the MS. reading, even though, as Koegel states, it is an Unform,' and it is probably a simple lapsus calami for bringit, possibly owing to the disturbing influence of the A.S. form bringð. The scribe unfamiliar with the language made more than this one mistake in the German part of this poem (cf. Pongs, Das Hildebrandslied, 1913, p. 137). As to the dialect of De Heinrico (North Middle Franconian, p. 102) it is worthy of note that a new article by W. von Unwerth in Paul und Braunes Beiträge, XLI, p. 312, strives to fix Thuringia as the original home. As to the date of the historic meeting of Otto and Henry, Breul accepts the hypothesis of Meyer and Seemüller, but indicates the possibility of contamination by reminiscence of the situation of 948 and rather provokingly quotes the opening stanzas of modern poems (cf. also pp. 76, 78, 82, 84, etc.) dealing with the subject of this latter meeting. For a new hypothesis concerning the author and his date of writing, cf. Unwerth, l.c., pp. 329 ff. Points of disagreement have been emphasized in this review but without any desire to belittle the valuable labour of love which Professor Breul has accomplished. All who take a genuine interest in the studies which, to quote the words of his preface, have sustained and consoled him during these hard times, will be grateful to him for his achievement and extend a cordial welcome to this very handsome volume. LIVERPOOL. W. E. COLLINSON. Herder, sa vie et son œuvre. Par A. BoSSERT. Paris: Hachette et Cie. 1916. 8vo. iv + 206 pp. Herder and Klopstock: a Comparative Study. By FREDERICK HENRY ADLER. New York: Stechert and Company. 1914. 8vo. 232 pp. Herder was one of the last German writers in the eighteenth century to become known in France. While all the greater authors, and even men like Rabener, Zachariä, Gessner and Gellert rapidly attracted attention, no translation of any of Herder's works, even fragmentary, appeared in France during his life-time. Even in the nineteenth century very little was translated, and the only critical works mentioned by Betz in his bibliography are Ch. Joret's Herder et la Renaissance littéraire en Allemagne au 18e siècle, Paris, 1875, and S. Karppe's Herder, précurseur de Darwin, Paris, 1902. G. Lanson's Manuel bibliographique brings us further than Betz, up to 1912, but mentions no further French books on Herder. On the other hand, there is the equally striking fact that Herder, in spite of his stay in France in 1769, when he visited the theatres and was introduced to many literary men, such as d'Alembert, Diderot, etc., remained unsympathetic towards, and, one might say, ignorant of French literature. This mutual lack of appreciation might have afforded M. Bossert a profitable subject of discussion-more profitable certainly than the theme of his half-apologetic, half-political Préface,' but the author of this new Herder-biography touches on little that is new or vital. He represents the older school of French criticism, light, elegant and an unkind reviewer might add-superficial. In a book of this kind slips are not of great moment, unless they are very glaring, as, for example, the statement that Goethe began his studies in Strassburg in the spring of 1771 (pp. 54, 61) or the somewhat less astonishing mistake (p. 44): Il [Herder] resta quinze jours à Copenhague, où il fit la connaissance de Lessing. Lessing's letter to Ebert of 3rd March, 1770 (Hempel, XXI, p. 349) shows that the place of meeting was Hamburg. It is perhaps unfair to compare this biography with the standard works of Haym and Kühnemann, but, on the other hand, if it cannot bear comparison, which it certainly cannot, and if it conveys no new information, which it also does not, the question of its superfluousness arises. Even if we take it as a short' life of Herder, there are important omissions; and many points, such as Kant's influence on Herder in Königsberg, the discussion of the Fragmente and the Kritische Wälder, are very summarily dealt with. Hardly anything is said about the Volkslieder, and the Cid is disposed of in nine lines of feeble generalisation. The last point is typical and significant. The Cid and its sources have been investigated by Mönnich and Vögelin, and we should expect a biographer to refer to the fact, if not to summarize the result of these investigations. The little facts of a man's family and official life are interesting enough-and Bossert supplies these-but the serious student has profounder interests. Even in a small book a greater effort might have been made to reveal and illuminate the soul and mind of Herder, that strange individuality with so many diverse gifts and such curious weaknesses and antipathies. With Haym and Kühnemann already in the field, this was the most important task that a biographer of Herder could set himself. The book has neither index nor bibliography. Dr Adler's work confines itself to a strictly limited field. The First Part deals, in three chapters, with the personal relations of Klopstock and Herder, and with Herder's knowledge and appreciation of Klopstock's writings, particularly the Messiah and the lyrical poems. In the Second Part, consisting of three chapters entitled 'The Conception of the Poet,' 'Religious Views' and 'Patriotic Endeavours,' the author shows how important new ideas, appearing first in Klopstock, were taken up by Herder and expressed in his writings. A supplementary chapter, "Treatment of Poetical Language,' seeks to prove the close relation on the one hand between the poetical language of Klopstock and his predecessors, the Pietists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and on the other between the intellectual worlds of Klopstock and of Herder. In this last chapter the author is on slippery ground, where generalisations are very dangerous. Can we, for example, take Schönaich, when he speaks in his Neue Aesthetik as the mouthpiece of Gottsched's school and attacks the new poetry of Klopstock, as a criterion of normal poetical usage and conclude that the words he objects to are an absolute innovation' of Klopstock's? Surely Schönaich had to score his points somehow! And are not many of the words he objected to (Adler, pp. 157, 180, 186, 196) the common stock-in-trade of all poetry, from the use of which by any author at a definite time no certain conclusions can be drawn? Examples are the words: Abend, blitzen, dämmern, Donner, dunkel, Frühling, golden, hell, Mutter, Natur, Sonne, ruhen, weinen, Thränen. It seems questionable, again, whether Dr Adler does not exaggerate the ultimate influence of Klopstock and Herder on German politics. Difference of opinion may well arise here, but the last sentence on p. 147 seems to us to go too far: 'Although the ultimate problem of political organization was left for the great minds of the nineteenth century to solve, and unification did not become an accomplished fact till 1871, we can safely say that such a result would have been impossible without the noble endeavours of such great men as Herder and Klopstock.' Turning to the rest of the book, we have nothing but praise for the first five chapters, where the author pursues his investigation with a convincing thoroughness and soundness of judgment which do credit to his training and are productive of important new results. Here and there a word might be altered: 'holy shudder' (p. 76) is not English; Erzählungen' (p. 100) is narrative rather than prose'; 'obsolute' (p. 151) is a misprint for 'absolute'; and 'ein genialer Orientaler' is not a genial Oriental.' These, however, are very minor points in an excellent piece of work, which the student of German will find both interesting and stimulating. ABERDEEN. JOHN LEES. Copenhagen: Wolfgang Goethe. Af GEORG BRANDES. 2 Vols. More than ten years ago, in the course of a review article on Dr Brandes, I ventured the criticism that in all the twelve huge volumes of his Collected Works, he had strangely little to say about Goethe. Dr Brandes wrote me at that time: You have done me some injustice with respect to Goethe. I have written half a score of essays about him, more than about any other man. When I omitted all these from my Collected Writings, it was merely because they are some day to form a larger book and because there was no room for them. No one have I worshipped as I have worshipped Goethe ("Ingen har jeg dyrket som Goethe"). The present volumes are clearly the fulfilment of that intention. Dr Brandes takes upon himself here the task of reconciling the idolisation of Goethe by the Germans with the 'coolness towards the poet, which is so frequently to be observed in France and England.' 'Goethe philology,' he says, 'so well justified on German soil, has elsewhere had an effect of frightfulness. The learned terrorism which finds it culpable to refuse attention, even admiration, to anything whatever that Goethe wrote, has stung non-German readers and scholars to adverse criticism. Possibly we might draw a further inference from the publication of this work in the midst of these unhappy times, that Dr Brandes would have his countrymen not confuse the modern Prussian and his appalling materialism and barbarism with the great people whose heritage is the High German tongue, a people which, in the eighteenth century, had so little in common with its northern hybrid neighbour that it could produce the most humanely European of the great poets of the world. The problem Dr Brandes sets himself is: What is Goethe? What can he be to-day to non-Germans, to the important minority of spiritually endowed men and women without national and religious prejudices, who have not language in common with him, nor the boundless reverence towards him which is a natural consequence of common speech and nationality, but who are attracted by genuine greatness and do not shrink from the small, but necessary effort to get into intimate touch with him?' As, however, is almost inevitable in those who busy themselves with Goethe, our author is so carried away by the enthralling interest of his theme, that he forgets to tell us what this or that work or side of the poet's activity means or ought to mean to us non-Germans. The Danes already possess one of the best lives of Goethe written outside Germany, that by P. Hansen and Raphael Meyer, published in 1906; but Brandes' book is a much more personal and original work than this. He has approached Goethe in a way peculiarly his own: there is less of the German traditional criticism here, and a more individual and subjective note. He has not, it is true, attempted to re-create Goethe, as he re-created our own Shakespeare: no doubt, mainly because there are too many documented facts about Goethe's life to leave room for speculative reconstruction on any large scale. But he has avoided the mere repetition of the things everyone else feels it his duty to say about Goethe. He throws light on points that have hitherto been overlooked, and with the fine artistic sense, which has never deserted him since, in studies like that on Schack Staffeldt, he set up a new model for the critical essay, he has distributed light and shade, thrown into relief here, into shadow there, in order to bring about just the effect and impression he aims at producing. One might, indeed, say that the most characteristic feature of this criticism of Goethe is the attention which is given to points in Goethe's life and work which have hitherto been ignored. By bringing into prominence picturesque little facts which had escaped more learned and ponderous biographers, Brandes often invests arid biographical tracts for there are such even in Goethe's life-with an unexpected interest. He deals with Goethe's minor works with unusual fulness, while the important works do not always tempt him proportionately. He is, for instance, an enthusiastic admirer of the Urfaust, but perfunctory in his treatment of the First Part of Faust. He looks at Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre from what is, in many respects, a new angle-the Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele are lucidly analysed-whereas he has too much to say about the often trivial stories which form the padding of the Wanderjahre, and nothing at all about the ethical and religious ideas behind that work. On Werther he is disappointingly meagre, while on Die Wahlverwandtschaften he has, as might be expected in a writer who has followed with such close interest the development of psychological fiction, a great deal to tell us that is fresh. Goethe's friends and entourage are dealt with in great detail. Lenz, Klinger, Jacobi, for instance: also Frau von Stein, who seems to be a particular béte noire of the author's-' no one ever treated Goethe worse than Frau von Stein'-and the Weimar circle generally. On Schiller he has done me the honour of adopting certain unorthodox views which I put forward in a little book on that poet, published some ten years ago; but, coming upon these now in the cold print of another tongue, feel that they might with advantage have been modified just a little in. the direction of German orthodoxy. Dr Brandes finds room for a chapter on Goethe in France, based on Professor Baldensperger's work, and one on Goethe in England, which, unfortunately, is meagre and inaccurate. Carlyle did not translate Schiller's Thirty Years' War, and it is far from just to describe his essay on the Death of Goethe in the New Monthly Magazine as 'nothing but a mediocre funeral oration.' Brandes lays stress in conclusion on Goethe's power of creating living men and women as the crowning virtue of his genius: and he rightly claims that his women are usually better than his men. 'Goethe,' to to quote his concluding words, has in a supreme degree the formmoulding power ("skikkelsedannende Evne"): he can create human beings of the clay of art and give them life: and he has at the same time the gift of the scientific investigator; he explains the Universe, the existence of the world. He has revealed to men that in the Eden of Art and Science, the trees of life and of knowledge are merely one.' J. G. ROBERTSON. LONDON. |