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whom I owe this felicity , and that I can contemplate these privileges only with humility . For I am in no danger of becoming proud of my own powers and faculties , since I have so clearly seen what monster may be generated in every human bosom which is not guarded by a higher power / There are besides two highly romantic and deeply pathetic individuals—Mignon , the mysterious child rescued by Wilhelm from a company of strolling rope-dancers , who , having bound herself by an oath to the Virgin not to reveal the country of her birth , betrays her history in wondrous songs . The * Kennst du das Land ' has been imitated by Lord Byron , in his well known
Know ' st thou the land where the citrons bloom . ' Sir Walter Scott has acknowledged that he took from MignQn the first ideaof the Finella , in his ' Peveril of the Peak . Creatures of imagination were at no time among the happiest of Sir Walter ' s productions . This is a most unsuccessful , indeed very unpleasant * imitation . The other romantic being , a crazed harper , sings songs of equal pathos , but his personal appearance and history are painful
almost beyond the limits set by taste to pathos . The lover of the pathetic and the wildly romantic would have all his requisites fulfilled were these ingredients more closely connected with the main incident of the novel . But that which , after all , constitutes the undisputed charm of the work is the profusion of moral and psychologic disquisition , in which no romance that we know can at all compare with it ; as in its directly philosophical purpose , there is but one
that at all rivals it , the earliest as well as the greatest of all works of prose fiction , the very popular but ill understood Don Quixote-These being its merits , it will be asked what are the demerits
which have excluded it from that generally favourable reception which the talents of the author might have certainly secured it ? These we must in candour advert to : first , the female characters , which are , nevertheless , at the same time the object of the most enthusiastic applause . Goethe ' s peculiar turn of mind led him to omit no variety of female charm and attraction . In this gallery of beauties . Marianne and Philine stand towards Natalie and
Therese in the relation which the Pandemos ^ in the tolerant mythology of the Greeks , bore to the Urania—and each of these was Venus . They were the earthly and the heavenly . If Goethe , like the philologists of the 16 th century , had adopted a Greek motto , it would probably have been iras $£ os a . ya&os—Every c jod is good . And as the greatest of his poetical predecessors has said , * There is
a soul of goodness in things evil , ' Goethe has , in the course of his long life , and in this work especially , delighted in the exhibition of that beautiful soul in those evil things . Now there is a class of excellent , but anxious and timid persons , to whom this appears a perilous achievement . They believe that in so doing , good and evil are in danger of being confounded . We leave others to ap « -
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Goethe ' * Works . 187
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1833, page 187, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2610/page/43/
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