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so completely rejected by England - the translation of his work met with such hopeless want of encouragement, that I am perhaps wrong to waste a line upon it; but the bold style in which his trenchant accusations are made, and the assumption of a certain manliness as the momentum to his sarcasms, have given his attacks on Goethe a circulation independent of his book. To me he appears radically incompetent to appreciate a poet. I should as soon think of asking the first stalwart Kentish farmer for his opinion on the Parthenon. The farmer would doubtless utter some energetic sentences expressing his sense of its triviality; but the coarse energy of his language would not supply the place of knowledge, feeling, and taste; nor does the coarse energy of Menzel's style supply those deficiencies of nature and education which incapacitate him for the perception of Art.

The paradox still remains, then, in spite of Menzel : a great poet destitute of the feelings which poetry incarnates a man destitute of soul giving expression to all the emotions he has not a man who wrote "Werther," "Egmont," "Faust," "Hermann und Dorothea," and "Meister," yet knew not the joys and sorrows of his kind; will any one defend that paradox ?1 Not only that paradox, but this still more inexplicable one, that all who knew Goethe, whether they were his peers or his servants, loved him only as lovable natures can be loved. Children, women, clerks, professors, poets, princes-all loved him. Even Herder, bitter against every one, spoke of him with a reverence which astonished Schiller, who writes: "He is by many besides Herder named with a species of devotion,

1 I remember once, as we were walking along Piccadilly, talking about the infamous "Büchlein von Goethe," Carlyle stopped suddenly, and with his peculiar look and emphasis, said, "Yes, it is the wild cry of amazement on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not a spooney too! Here is a godlike intellect, and yet you see he is not an idiot! Not in the least a spooney!”

and still more loved as a man than admired as an author. Herder says he has a clear, universal mind, the truest and deepest feeling, and the greatest purity of heart."1 Men might learn so much from his works, had not the notion of his coldness and indifference disturbed their judgment. "In no line," says Carlyle, "does he speak with asperity of any man, scarcely of anything. He knows the good and loves it; he knows the bad and hateful and rejects it; but in neither case with violence. His love is calm and active; his rejection implied rather than pronounced."

And Schiller, when he came to appreciate by daily intercourse the qualities of his great friend, thus wrote of him: "It is not the greatness of his intellect which binds me to him. If he were not as a man more admirable than any I have ever known, I should only marvel at his genius from the distance. But I can truly say that in the six years I have lived with him, I have never for one moment been deceived in his character. He has a high truth and integrity, and is thoroughly in earnest for the Right and the Good; hence all hypocrites and phrase makers are uncomfortable in his presence." And the man, of whom Schiller could think thus, is believed by many to have been a selfish egotist," wanting in the higher moral feelings!"

But so it is in life: a rumour, originating perhaps in thoughtless ignorance, and circulated by malice, gains credence in the face of probability, and then no amount of evidence suffices to dissipate it. There is an atmosphere round certain names, a halo of glory or a halo of infamy; and men are aware of the halo without seeking to ascertain its origin. Every public man is in some respects mythical; and fables are believed in spite of all the contradictions of evidence. It is useless to hope that men will pause to inquire into the truth of what they hear said of another, before accept1" Briefw. mit Körner, i. p. 136.

ing and repeating it; but with respect to Goethe, who has now been more than forty years in his grave, one may hope that evidence so strong as these pages furnish will be held more worthy of credence than anything which gossip or ignorance, misconception or partisanship, has put forth without proof.

Book the Fifth

1779 to 1793

"Wenn sich der Most auch ganz absurd gebärdet, Es giebt zuletzt doch noch 'nen Wein."

"Von jener Macht, die alle Wesen bindet,

Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet."

"Postquam me experientia docuit, omnia, quæ in communi vita frequenter occurrunt, vana et futilia esse: quum viderem omnia, a quibus et quæ timebam, nihil neque boni neque mali in se habere, nisi quatenus ab iis animus movebatur; constitui tandem inquirere, an aliquid daretur quod verum bonum et sui communicabile esset, et a quo solo rejectis ceteris omnibus animus afficeretur; imo an aliquid daretur, quo invento et acquisito continua ac summa in æternum fruerer lætitia." SPINOZA.

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