Ancient Egypt in its Comparative Relations. By Reginald Stuart Poole, Corr. Inst. 45 . Notes from a German Village. By Professor W. Steadman Aldis 63 Mr. Herbert Spencer's Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion. By Dr. A. M. 74 They Were a Great People, Sir": A Contribution to some Vexed Questions in 93 A Speculation about Dreaming. By Dr. Radcliffe 104 Tunis. By A. Gallenga 116 Mr. Bence Jones' Story of his Experiences in Ireland. By the Rev. Father O'Leary 127 150 AUGUST, 1881. The Fields of Conflict between Faith and Unbelief. By the Rev. Professor 169 Byron, Goethe, and Mr. Matthew Arnold. By W. Hale White 179 Scottish, Shetlandic, and Germanic Water-Tales. By Karl Blind. I. 186 Mr. Herbert Spencer's Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion. By Dr. A. M. . The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. By J. M. Farrar 209 229 246 Are Reforms Possible under Mussulman Rule? By the Rev. Malcolm MacColl A Russian Social-Panslavist Programme, Drawn up in London. By C. Tondini de Lawn Tennis and its Players. By Lieut.-Colonel R. D. Osborn 326 SEPTEMBER, 1881. The Militant Type of Society. By Herbert Spencer 337 Ancient Egypt in its Comparative Relations. By Reginald Stuart Poole, Corr. Inst. Scottish, Shetlandic, and Germanic Water-Tales. By Karl Blind. II. Mr. Bence Jones' Answer to Opponents Examined. By the Rev. Father O'Leary The Industrial Type of Society. By Herbert Spencer Scottish, Shetlandic, and Germanic Water-Tales. By Karl Blind (Conclusion) 564 570 585 608 616 633 651 673 The New Development of the Brahmo Somaj. By William Knighton, LL.D. Naseby and Yorktown. By Goldwin Smith The Brahmo-Somaj versus “The New Dispensation." By Sophia Dobson Collet The Irish Question. By a Continental Observer Commonplace Fallacies Concerning Money. By Emile de Laveleye On Language as the Vehicle of Thought. By H. W. Challis Two Decades of Industry. By M. G. Mulhall Two Studies in Dante. By E. H. Plumptre, D.D. Evolution: Physical and Dialectic. By Professor Calderwood Old and New Canons of Poetical Criticism. By Alfred Austin A Missing Science. By W. H. Mallock Fair Trade and Free Trade: A Dialogue. By Sydney C. Buxton The Greek Text of the New Testament. By the Rev. William Sanday THE TWO FAUSTS. IT T is a rare thing in modern literature that the same story should be treated in two great poems; still rarer that both should be dramas, and each highly characteristic of the age that produced it. This is the case with the history of Doctor Faustus and his pact with the Evil One. Goethe's treatment of this tale is, to use an expression of Emerson, the high-water mark of modern German poetry. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that, important as are the other works of its author, with their intense intellectual passion and simple tenderness, their chaste sensuousness, their deep, quiet wisdom and sunny charm, and considerable as were the contributions of his contemporaries to the lasting possessions of mankind, the culture of our age would lose more by the want of Faust than by the destruction of every other poem. which the classical period of German poetry produced. It was among the earliest works that Goethe planned, and the last that he finished; and, as he himself was a man of all but universal culture, it is the expression of the highest effort as well as the noblest attainment of the period. Marlowe's Faustus is a play of a very different character. It is marked by depth and intensity rather than scope of genius, by concentrated passion rather than objective insight and just appreciation of the comparative value of the various elements of human life. It is the work of a young man, full of exuberant vigour, but of vigour not yet fully disciplined and subjected to a poetical purpose, as we afterwards see it in his Edward II. Yet in many respects it is hardly less remarkable than the German poem. It was the first word clearly spoken by the English drama; the first work that bore the unmistakable impress of that tragic power which was to find its highest embodiment in Lear and Macbeth, in Hamlet and Othello. Thus, while Goethe's Faust was the mature and final literary expression of the thought of an age, the Faustus of Marlowe was the prelude to "Those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still." But this contrast renders the identity of subject the more remarkable. What was there in the tale to attract poets so dissimilar, and to render it a fitting vehicle for so much of the noblest thought of each? We turn in vain to the earliest "Faust Book," which Marlowe may perhaps have known, for an answer. It is a singularly dull compilation. The one merit of the author is his matter-of-fact credulity, which, doubtless, induced him to write down every story pretty nearly as he heard it. His end is edification, and he displays throughout a very proper religious horror of, and perhaps a little unsanctified curiosity with respect to, the doings of the great conjuror. Of grace or humour, of fancy or sympathetic insight, no trace is to be found in his pages; nor are the narratives he has collected in themselves of any great value. The only passages that strike the reader are the broken and distorted fragments of earlier legends; the only incidents that move him are those which the later poets have lighted up with the fire of their genius, and which, therefore, shine with a lustre not their own. It was not then to literary skill that the extraordinary popularity the story once enjoyed was due; indeed, the earliest book in which it is treated is merely a record of that popularity, and owes what small interest it possesses, apart from the light it throws upon the poems of Marlowe and Goethe, to the fact that it seems to be a pretty accurate report of the tales that lived upon the lips of the German peasantry during the age of the Reformation. These tales had grown as, in an earlier period, the legends of the saints had grown, and spread through the whole of the north of Europe as these had spread through Christendom, because they were the embodiment and imaginative expression of feelings that were then all but universal. Nor is it difficult to realize, even in our own day, what these feelings were. The age of medieval Christianity had passed away. It almost seemed as if it had spent its last strength in the greatest of all its intellectual efforts the grand poem in which Dante summoned the Christian world before the bar of its own ideal, judged it by the laws it had for centuries undoubtingly accepted, and found it so terribly wanting. But even while that poet was chanting the dirge of a dead system of thought and feeling, the greatest of his contemporaries, Petrarch, was singing the cradle song of a new-born age. When we look back to the Renaissance, across the toilful centuries that divide us from it, it almost seems as if it had been the world's one holiday "Since the sad last pilgrim left the dark mid shrine" of the earlier gods. Behind it lay the school-time of the Middle Ages, in which the human mind had been trained to great subtilty and to an extraordinary aptitude in the practice of many of the arts-a time. when an unquestioning obedience had been enforced, but which yet permitted a boyish fondness for romance and fairy tales, and many hours of dreamy and mystical idealism. Before it lay the sober business of our modern life, with its well-weighed purposes and nice adjustment of means to ends. But between the two periods there is an interval in which mankind was free to rejoice in its youth, when action. was delight, and strength, skill, and beauty were loved for their own sake. It was a period of the wildest excess, it is true, but it was also one of self-asserting vigour, when the spirit of man took possession of the earth and felt that it was his to use and to enjoy. Well might the children of that age believe that the winter was indeed over and gone, since, wherever the breath of the new springtide came, it awakened such a blossoming of art and poetry as the world has never since beheld. Yet, deeply as the spirit of the new age was opposed to that of the old, no hostility was at first visible between them. The most advanced thinkers were generally disposed to ignore rather than to combat the principles on which the religious system of their fathers had rested. The highest dignitaries of the Church were proud of being numbered among the leaders of the new movement; and art, while growing more and more heathen from day to day, was still employed in decorating the chapels of the saints and building the tombs of the martyrs, so that it scemed as if Christianity were doomed quietly to pass, as classical paganism had done, from a living faith into a beautiful dream, which might still supply the noblest subjects for sculpture, painting, and poetry, but which could no longer mould the lives and purposes of thinking men. The old creed, however, was still silently cherished by many faithful hearts, and the facts on which it had insisted still remained unexplained and inexplicable to every apostle of the new gospel of the joyousness of life. The pain, the sickness, the sorrow lay therea dark shadow across the golden sunshine of earth, which might be forgotten in the flush of youthful pleasure and healthy action, but which must become ever more distinctly and appallingly visible as the years passed by. Nay, the keener our enjoyment of beauty becomes, the more bitter must be our regret at its inevitable decay. The greatest poets of the Renaissance had always felt this. Chaucer concludes his "Canterbury Tales" with a sermon and a prayer, and Boccaccio prefaces the most light-hearted of all story-books with a picture of the plague. Some reassertion of the Christian ideal was, therefore, necessary, if the glad chorus was not to die into a wail of hopeless lamentation. But it must always be remembered that this was the real meaning of the Reformation. It was less as a liberator than as a lawgiver, less to set men free than to recall them to obedience, that Luther came, and his influence in this respect has been as great on those who retained as on those who rejected the doctrines which he attacked. From thence |