THE FAUST-IDEA.—A little sempstress is seduced and plunged into despair: a great scholar of all the four Faculties is the evil-doer. That cannot have happened in the ordinary course, surely? No, certainly not! Without the aid of the devil incarnate, the great scholar would never have achieved the deed.—Is this really destined to be the greatest German “tragic idea,” as one hears it said among Germans?—But for Goethe even this idea was too terrible. His kind heart could not avoid placing the little sempstress, “the good soul that forgot itself but once,” near to the saints, after her involuntary death. Even the great scholar, “the good man” with “the dark impulse,” is brought into heaven in the nick of time, by a trick which is played upon the devil at the decisive moment. In heaven the lovers find themselves again. Goethe once said that his nature was too conciliatory for really tragic subjects. 125. ARE THERE “GERMAN CLASSICS”?—Sainte-Beuve observes somewhere that the word “classic” does not suit the genius of certain literatures. For instance, nobody could talk seriously of “German classics.”—What do our German publishers, who are about to add fifty more to the fifty German classics we are told to accept, say to that? Does it not almost seem as if one need only have been dead for the last thirty years, and lie a lawful prey to the public,(21) in order to hear suddenly and unexpectedly the trumpet of resurrection as a “Classic”? And this in an age and a nation where at least five out of the six great fathers of its literature are undoubtedly antiquated or becoming antiquated—without there being any need for the age or the nation to be ashamed of this. For those writers have given way before the strength of our time—let that be considered in all fairness!—Goethe, as I have indicated, I do not include. He belongs to a higher species than “national literatures”: hence life, revival, and decay do not enter into the reckoning in his relations with his countrymen. He lived and now lives but for the few; for the majority he is nothing but a flourish of vanity which is trumpeted from time to time across the border into foreign ears. Goethe, not merely a great and good man, but a _culture_, is in German history an interlude without a sequel. Who, for instance, would be able to point to any trace of Goethe’s influence in German politics of the last seventy years (whereas the influence, certainly of Schiller, and perhaps of Lessing, can be traced in the political world)? But what of those five others? Klopstock, in a most honourable way, became out of date even in his own lifetime, and so completely that the meditative book of his later years, _The Republic of Learning_, has never been taken seriously from that day to this. Herder’s misfortune was that his writings were always either new or antiquated. Thus for stronger and more subtle minds (like Lichtenberg) even Herder’s masterpiece, his _Ideas for the History of Mankind_, was in a way