Goethe Studies

202 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY learned himself and with learned associates, making a statement about Shakespearean tragedy which a moment's recollection (or, if that fails, a few hours' reading) would tell him is true for Macbeth and perhaps Othello, dubious for Lear and Romeo, exactly false for Hamlet, and totally inapplicable to the Roman tragedies--one of which he prints in that very volume as the sole example of Shakespeare 's dramatic art. When a writer is betrayed by a love of symmetry and pattern into a demonstrable error like that, we may be wary of his even more sweeping Welt-und-heilgeschichtliche speculations which are in their nature unprovable and lose much of their point and attractiveness if supported by evidence or argument. What, for instance, is gained by jettisoning the idea of a "Renaissance" simply because it has been crudely presented in school histories and then accepting in toto the myth of "five centuries of uninterrupted humanism" in the Middle Ages--oddly brought to a close by men ealling themselves Humanists? Under this coating of fresh-as-paint faddishness, however, there is plenty of good substance. The discussion of the Romantic hero-prefigured in The Enchafed Flood-is a case in point; or, more briefly, this brilliant aperqu: If every revolution can be represented graphically by a symbolic figurethe Papal Revolution by a twin Warrior-Priest, the Lutheran by a Godfearing paterfamilias, the English by a country gentleman, the American by a pioneer, the French by an intellectual-then the contemporary symbol is a naked anonymous baby. It is for the baby's right to health, not for the freedom of any person or class to act or think-for a baby is not yet a person and cannot choose or think-that the revolution is being fought everywhere in one way or another. A baby has to be controlled, it has to be indoctrinated, it cannot be told more of the truth than it can profitably understand, so the present revolution is authoritarian and believes in censorship and propaganda. Since its values arc really derived from medi· cine, from a concept of health, it is hostile to any non-conformity, any deviation from the norm. It is precisely, therefore, the exceptional man, the man of talent~ the man who works alone, the man whom the French Revolution liberated and admired, who has become the object of greatest suspicion. GOETHE STUDIES' H. BOESCHENSTEIN Professor Vietor's two volumes on Goethe, one on the poet, the other on the thinker, place considerably more stress on achievement,·Goethe the Poet. By KARL VIETOR. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders and Company, Limited]. 1949. pp. x, 341. $6.75. Goethe the Thinker. By KARL VrihOR. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders and Company, Limited]. 1950. Pp. x, 212. $5.50. Goethe. By ALBERT SCHWEITZER. London: Adam and Charles Black [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited]. 1949. Pp. x, 84. $1.65. REVIEWS 203 on completed works or fragments of works, than on the process of achieving. They represent, among a score of serious Goethe studies published on the occasion of the recent bicentenary, the only attempt to discuss, as far as possible, Goethe's poetic creations and scientific writings with reference to some objective standard provided by the history of civilization. That this method works better for the pure scientist whose theories can thus be re-examined in the light of latest developments than it does for the poet goes without saying. Fortunately Goethe was no such pure scientist, and little is gained by culling the chaff away from his botanical, geological, meteorological, and other scientific endeavours because these find their deeper significance and their more than adequate justification in the growth of his whole being to which they so richly contributed. To do justice to the thinker, to a realm of mind transcending the precincts of scientific investigation, Vietor, after making an exhaustive survey of Goethe's interests in the natural sciences, salvaging what he can and pleading for consideration wherever it is needed (Goethe had no instruments, no mathematics, no real grounding in exact techniques and above all...