nature proposes to carry out, we are ready to avail ourselves of his distinction between the "three ages of nature

:

"Fable gave it life; school has deprived it of soul; reason restores to it creative life."

Such verses as these are for modern philosophers like the texts of Port Royal; but they have the advantage over those of being more than little grammatical rules and of being expressed in noble artistic form.

IV

WERNER

THE plays of Werner, together with those of Schiller's youth, find an ever-increasing number of admirers among those who collect with ardour proofs of the realism and marked sensationalism which, in their belief, are proper to pure Germanic drama; but here too may be noted the vanity of applying to works of art considerations and deductions other than æsthetic.

Zacharias Werner, the man, is well known from his biography, and very easy to understand. He was vicious and dissolute, rolling himself furiously in the mud, like Ciacco, but at the same time exercised with anxiety for religious salvation. When he went to Rome for the latter purpose, he used to pass the morning on his knees in the churches, and the evening in altogether different localities. This trait represents him accurately. Parallèlement, something of the same kind is to be found in the case of the French poet Verlaine, save that one of the two parallels, the religious, was in the French poet fictitious, the result of careful search for literary blague and réclame, not uncommon in France, whereas in Werner's case both parallels were equally solid. For many years he wavered and vibrated from one to the other, until finally he broke through the parallelism and gave himself over entirely to the Church, becoming a penitent, a preacher of penitence, and a priest. What

was always lacking in him was the feeling for human nobility, fineness, internal delicacy; and here we do not refer to his ethical knowledge and sense of moral distinctions, of which he possessed a good supply, both as a German and as living at a period of great ethical and philosophical culture and also as a Catholic and a priest. He was eventually able to discover clearly the error into which he had fallen in attempting to place the ideal of salvation in Love-he had first sought salvation in a sect of reformed Freemasonry, then in Love, finally and resolutely in the Catholic Church. He proceeded to criticize the mistake he had made in confounding sensual love with caritas, to which it is diametrically opposed. He suggested bestowing the name Liebe upon Caritas, and upon sensual love the old German word Minne. But all this belonged to his intellectual side and did not suffice to change the real rhythm of his spirit. He was certainly destined to end in ecclesiastical Catholicism, for it had been given to him there to confess his sins, to express his contrition, to mortify and abase himself, and thus to obtain or to believe he had obtained absolution and salvation; but there it was not indispensable to become noble in spirit, which for him would probably have been an impossibility. His Weihe der Unkraft, written in 1814, after his definitive conversion, and in the midst of the Germanic patriotic movement, is a work of a very singular kind—a rough popular song, alternately violent and sarcastic in tone, or humble, confidential, and meek;-but confirming by its content that Werner was quite capable of rolling himself in the dust before people's eyes and of carrying out the most humiliating acts of penitence, but not of accomplishing in himself the

truly human redemption which gathers itself together in silence and feels the dignity of its new condition, where a watchful moral being has appeared in place of a blind sinner. One feels embarrassed in listening to his words, as though before a person whom one does not wish to blame, because he already blames himself sufficiently, yet whom there is no way of regarding with sympathy. Werner, dancing like a bear, tells the German people that he had once fought and driven the stranger away from the soil of the Fatherland:

"I well know that I am not worthy of showing myself to the people in your shining dance, as a bold standard-bearer; but however I may have erred and however much evil I may have done, my song has never done an injury to the honour of Germany."

One thinks on reading this that a person who feels unworthy of the nation to which he belongs does not possess the right of addressing it, and that the excuse of not having said anything against the Fatherland is of no avail when social behaviour has shown the individual in question to be unworthy.

"But away with these trifles, be they mine or others'; away with impotent feeling, now is the time to go direct to the point. The best sort of repentance is doing better; we prated as boys, but only if we live it in fact can the way of liberty be restored to us."

Certainly the best repentance is to "do better " but in order to do better one must "feel better,' that is, the delicate moral consciousness must have been aroused in us, and Werner rapidly passed over this, preferring to direct his exhortation and recommendation of humility to men who had not the same reasons

as he for limiting themselves to this attitude of resignation.

The artist, too, has evident characteristics and qualities in Werner: the quality of realistic representation, of vivacious dialogue, of a vivid style, which we admire in his plays, especially those preceding his conversion, and eminently so in the historical didactic play upon Luther, Die Weihe der Kraft. But the interior is feeble in the midst of so much dazzle, for where, indeed, could he ever have obtained strength? Certainly not in his fragile and insecure intellectual reflections upon reformed Freemasonry or in his erotic idealism. Nor could he obtain it in his sensual enjoyments, which, although numerous, were of a base and trivial sort, and were also limited and chilled by his utopian humanitarianism. Thus he was not even able fully to portray the troubled joys of spiritual sensuality, which sometimes rises to the level of poetry or opens a way for poetry, owing to the anguish which it bears within itself. In this respect, his life is like his art. Monks and mystics arise from sensual men, but only a comedian of the pulpit could come out of the sensuality of a Werner, striving to obliterate in himself sinful acts, themselves almost animal and external, with internal acts of devotion.

The only feeling that dominated in Werner and was capable of animating his dramatic talent was fear of the obscure vengeance suspended above the head of the sinner himself. He was haunted with dread of the punishment which would, in his belief, infallibly follow upon his sin as the work of a mysterious power, God or something else, and by the impossibility of avoiding expiation. Here, too, his life meets and unites with the logic of his art: his conversion arose