Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/497

 Reviews and Notes 493 mation is communicated even to students in undergraduate courses. The rest of "Schiller" consists of references to Der Graf von Habsburg and the Thirty Years' War, and some quota- tions from the Centenary Poem. Or take "Wieland": two pages and two lines, but a whole page is devoted to determining the amount of political and similar satire in Die Abderiten. This for a specimen (p. 93): "The wheels of justice turned just as slowly at Abdera, it seems, as they did in Wetzlar, for Wie- land compares their movement with the course of a snail," etc. It is plain, then, that the author has read the work, that he has marked all the passages that seem to have a bearing on his subject, and that he is kind enough to communicate them to us in print. No harm is done, certainly not. But what possible profit can accrue to us from a two-page treatment of Goethe's Gb'tz of the character of the following (p. 110): "In Act 4, in the Rathaus scene, Gotz again shows love for the Emperor, and in Act 5 (Hauptmanns Zelt) he laments the fact that the gypsy robbers are the only ones who protect the Emperor's subjects," etc., etc. A number of references to Dichtung und Wahrheit and a few other writings follow, not including Reinecke Fuchs. More ambitious is only the treatment of Faust, where an attempt is made to prove an influence of Hans Sachs upon the song of Frosch in Auerbachs Keller. From this it is con- cluded that "satirical treatment of the Empire, then, is one of the several interests which Goethe carried over from Part I to Part II." If these intentions, the author continues, came after all to naught, it is due to the fact that when Goethe at last set to work on Faust II, the Holy Roman Empire was gone, so that he had to substitute, in an imperial frame, as it were, a picture of Germany in 1820-30. The conclusions seem quite acceptable whatever we may think of the premises. Unfortunately, however, this type of discussion has no influence upon the rest of the study, for as soon as Faust is finished the enumerations begin again. In fairness to the author it may be said that his treatment of the subject is not quite so trite in the earlier parts of the book, yet our impression as a whole will hardly be altered by this fact. On p. 88 we read in regard to the time of Goethe that "latter- day students of the period have frequently . . . pointed out isolated cases of satirical comment. A connected study of the subject, however, has never been undertaken." Query, is the study before us intended to supply the want? For what the book lacks, and the chapter on Goethe and his contemporaries more than any other, is exactly this: connection. The author defends his method in the Preface, claiming that his monograph belongs to that "extensive" type of literary criticism in which "one cannot, within reasonable scope, achieve any great degree