of no
one country or nationality. The first and also the greatest artist of
the revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches its
highest expression in _Faust_. The passion for freedom, for the complete
experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere
words--this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make
his bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, the
insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly
satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which
possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil
are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely
critical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never be
satisfied, will never say to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist zu
schoen.' For the drama of _Faust_ is not a drama of damnation, but of
redemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conception
pass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the great
tragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world of
ideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomes
human through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert the
tragedy.

If Goethe represents the great humane conceptions of the revolution most
profoundly, Wordsworth comes very near him in the depth of his knowledge
of humanity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life and
nature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the great
romantic artists of France are governed by the same sense of nature and
love and the spiritual, and in Victor Hugo this reaches a level only
just below that of Goethe himself.

* * * * *

You must not misunderstand me, nationality has real meaning, it has
something akin, but distantly, to personality; but in the main it
affects the more superficial aspects of art. In painting and sculpture
the European artists use a language which we can all understand, imagine
life and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And,
though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causes
a difficulty in recognizing the unity which lies behind the difference,
yet the moment we begin to overcome that difficulty we find ourselves in
a world intelligible, familiar, moving to us all; and intelligible just
in proportion to the greatness of the artist.

It is id