Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/390

 Contemporary life and national history were thus alike expanding the horizon of the literary artist beyond Parisian limits. Types of individuality, of social life, not admissible within the purlieus of the Parisian theatre, were receiving attention; nay, the very idea of the stage as a great moral agent (Schiller's favourite idea) showed the rise of a social spirit totally at variance with Parisian taste. We might illustrate the rise of this new spirit in such type-characters as Saladin the Mussulman, Nathan the Jew, and the Christian Knight-Templar in Lessing's Nathan; but we prefer to turn to the work of a greater than Lessing.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at Frankfurt am Main on the 28th of August, 1749, was no believer in social Utopias such as the author of the Contrat Social might imagine in his State of Nature; but none the less was his a real voice from the new social spirit of European life. If the instruments to which he looked for the propagation of new doctrines—brotherhoods of men of high character and training as described in Wilhelm Meister—remind us of the bard-clans which appear at the rude beginnings of literary culture, his appreciation of Hans Sachs’ Poetical Mission, and his abstract or allegorical personages in Faust, display deep sympathy with that corporate side of human life which since the days of the Mysteries had been almost ignored in literature. The "Prologue for the Theatre," in this latter famous piece, which, especially in the often unread Second Part, contains all the elements of the early European drama—sacred personages, allegory, mixture of comedy and tragedy, disregard of the unities—con-