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Untitled Article
rather than a combination of unconnected images , like a picture of chaos formed of splendid colours . It has no object , nor evert characters ^ unless we consider to be persons two jacks-a-lanthorn * who shake gold from their—may we say body P—to pay the ferry * man , whose boat is nearly overset by their weight . Schlegel has entitled it a Golden Tale , and there is a magic in the style that
fascinates the reader . But since it is style , and nothing but style , that captivates , it was bold , not to say rash , in Mr . C . to venture on a translation , in a late number of Fraser ' s Magazine , with notes , that read very like satire on his previous writings . In the course of the dialogue a favourite theme is introduced , Die guten TVeiber , The good Women . We have here an insight
into Goethe ' s domestic psychological philosophy . The volume closes with what the author calls a Novelle , in the Italian , not English , sense of the word . It is rather a romantic anecdote or idyl in prose , than a tale . In grace of diction it emulates the sweetness of the few really beautiful serious tales of Boccaccio , such as « The Pot of basil , ' ' The Falcon , &c . With Vol . 16 commences a most important class of our author ' s
works , his three philosophical romances . Of Werter we have spoken already , vol . vi . p . 297 . We add but one remark . The two last generations of novel readers have been chiefly attracted to this book by its power over their feelings as a work of passion . Posterity will probably contemplate it in connexion with the political convulsions of the age that succeeded
its publication . Werter is not merely the hopeless lover , —he is the oppressed bourgeois ; he represents the class of persons wounded by the inequalities of rank , and unable to sustain the burthen of social existence ; his tragic fate points to the conflict then brooding in the great body of social life , which was so soon to sustain one of the severest shocks that the history of mankind records .
Annexed to Werter are Letters from Switzerland , which serve partially to solve a question that has been often put , — -Did Goethe mean to identify himself with Werter ? In the preface it is merely said that the letters are asserted to have been found among Werter ' s poems ^ and to have been written before he knew Charlotte . And he identifies himself with the writer in a remarkable
sentence , which , however , as far as we know , no one has yet remarked . At the Hospice of Usern , a priest having made a speech in praise of his Church , the letter-writer adds , How he would have wondered had a spirit revealed to him that he was addressing himself to a descendant of Frederick the Wise I * that must mean of Saxony : and , in 1779 , Goethe did travel in Switzerland with the Duke of Saxe-Weimar , a descendant of the Wise Frederic . In 1773 he had travelled thither with the two Counts Stolberg : and in these letters he refers to an earlier journey . This amounts to all the proof Buch a position is capable of receiving , Dut there is in there letters the Mine two-fold character
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Gvettei Worik . \\ %
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1833, page 115, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2608/page/47/
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