BOOKENDS

Dr. BOYD in this volume has assembled and collected all the scattered references made by Goethe to English literature. As is well known, Goethe's knowledge of Shakespere was immense, and his appreciation remained, as Dr. Boyd says, "undiminished to the end." In his last conversation with Eckerman on Sunday, the eleventh of March, 1332, he declared Shakspere to be the greatest name in the world's literature.

Consistently an Anglophile--though he referred to the English as being "without intelligence"--Goethe read avidly English anuthors with whom many English critics have been unfamiliar, and Dr. Boyd quotes his opinions of them, especially of the minor seventeenth centuary poets. In view of Goethe's scientific interests, on the other hand, it is perhaps not strange that he read and admired Thomas Sprat's "History of the Royal Society."

Byron, of course, received an inordinate amount of praise. That Goethe placed him among English poets second only to Shakspere has always seemed to poste rity a critical aberration. Euphorian, in the second "Faust," is supposed to represent Byron; and what could be higher tribute? But in Byron, it seemed to Goethe, classicism and romanticism has been fused.

Scott and Carlyle translated Goethe for the English reading world. And Goethe admired Scott, but "it cannot be said that he ever expressed any great admiration for Carlyle as an original writer," though he thought him an excellent translator. The correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle is, to be sure, great: but one is inclined to agree with Dr. Boyd that Goethe's attitude toward Carlyle is that of most great men towards their more eager, not to say blatant, disciples.

It is gratifying to an American that Goethe mentions such books as Washington Irving's, "Sketch-Book" and Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiography ," for example, though his death in 1832 naturally deprived him of any possible acquaintance with the more important books of the nineteenth centuary American literature. One can imagine with amusement Goethe's reception of Walt Whitman. He might very well have been disturbed in his Olympian calm by reading "Leaves of Grass."

Dr. Boyd, who is a reader in German at Oxford, has produced a book, which may to the layman seem some what pedautic, but which is of value to English criticism and to the Scholarship on Goethe.