A complete life! A life of strenuous toil! At home and abroad, in Italy and Sicily, at Ilmenau and

or speech, he was always at work. A man of rigid

habits; no lolling or lounging.

"He showed me," says an elegant easy-chair which he had

Eckermann," an elegant bought to-day at auction. But,' said he, 'I shall never or rarely use it; all indolent habits are against my nature. You see in my chamber no sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a leaning place for my head to be added. If surrounded by tasteful furniture, my thoughts are arrested; I am placed in an agreeable but passive state. Unless we are accustomed to them from early youth, splendid chambers and elegant furniture had better be left to people without thoughts."" This in his eighty-second year!

A widely diffused prejudice regarding the personal character of Goethe refuses to credit him with any moral worth accordant with his bodily and mental gifts. It figures him a libertine, heartless, loveless, bad. I do not envy the mental condition of those who can rest in the belief that a really great poet can be a bad man. Be assured that the fruits of genius have never grown, and will never grow, in such a soil. Of all great poets Byron might seem at first glance to constitute an exception to this I venture to call it

law of Nature. Yet hear what Walter Scott, a sufficient judge, said of Byron :

"The errors of Lord Byron arose neither from depravity of heart for nature had not committed the anomaly of uniting to such extraordinary talents an imperfect moral sense nor from feelings dead to the admiration of virtue. No man had ever a kinder heart for sympathy, or a more open hand for the relief of distress; and no mind was ever more formed for enthusiastic admiration of noble actions."

The case of Goethe requires no appeal to general principles. It only requires that the charges against him be fairly investigated; that he be tried by documentary evidence, and by the testimony of competent witnesses. The mistake is made of confusing breaches of conventional decorum with essential depravity.

That Goethe was faulty in many ways may be freely conceded. But surely there is a wide difference between not being faultless and being definitely bad. To call a man bad is to say that the evil in him preponderates over the good. In the case of Goethe the balance was greatly the other way. It has been said that he abused the confidence reposed in him by women; that he encouraged affection which he did not reciprocate for artistic purposes. The charge is utterly groundless; and in the case of Bettine has been refuted by irrefragable proof. To say that he was wanting in love, heartless, cold, is ridiculously false. Yet the charge is

constantly reiterated in the face of facts, - reiterated with undoubting assurance and a certain complacency which seems to say, "Thank God! we are not as this man was." There is a satisfaction which some people feel in spotting their man, - Burns drank; Coleridge took opium; Byron was a rake; Goethe was cold: by these marks we know them. The poet found it necessary, as I have said, in later years, under social pressure, for the sake of the work which was given him to do, to fortify himself with a mail of reserve. And this, indeed, contrasted strangely with his former abandon, and with the customary gush of German sentimentality. It was common then for Germans who had known each other by report, and were mutually attracted, when first they met, to fall on each other's necks and kiss and weep. Goethe, as a young man, had indulged such fervors; but in old age he had lost this effusiveness, or saw fit to restrain himself outwardly, while his kindly nature still glowed with its pristine fires. He wrote to Frau von Stein, "I may truly say that my innermost condition does not correspond to my outward behavior.” Hence the charge of coldness. Say that Mount Ætna is cold do we not see the snow on its sides?

But he was unpatriotic; he occupied himself with poetry, and did not cry out while his country was in the death-throes so it seemed of the struggle with

France! But what should he have done? What could

he have done? What would his single arm or declamation have availed? No man more than Goethe longed for the rehabilitation of Germany. In his own way he wrought for that end; he could work effectually in no other. That enigmatical composition, the "Märchen," according to the latest interpretation, indicates how, in Goethe's view, that end was to be accomplished. To one who considers the relation of ideas to events, it will not seem extravagant when I say that to Goethe, more than to any one individual, Germany is indebted for her emancipation, independence, and present political regeneration.1

1 [The following interpretation of the "Märchen" is condensed from a later portion of this essay, and used here as a foot-note for the light it throws upon Goethe's political career.]

In the summer of 1795 Goethe composed for Schiller's new maga zine, "Die Horen," a prose poem known in German literature as Das Märchen, "The Tale;" as if it were the only one, or the one which more than another deserves that appellation. . . .

Goethe gave this essay to the public as a riddle which would probably be unintelligible at the time, but which might perhaps find an interpreter after many days, when the hints contained in it should be verified. Since its first appearance commentators have exercised their ingenuity upon it, perceiving it to be allegorical, but until recently without success. . . . I follow Dr. Herman's Baumgart's lead in the exposition which I now offer.

"The Tale ""

is a prophetic vision of the destinies of Germany,— an allegorical foreshowing at the close of the eighteenth century of what Germany was yet to become, and has in great part already become. A position is predicted for her like that which she occupied from the time of Charles the Great to the time of Charles V., — a period during which the Holy Roman Empire of Germany was the leading secular power in Western Europe. That time had gone by. Since the middle of the sixteenth century Germany had declined, and at the date of

It is true, his writings contain no declamations against tyrants, and no tirades in favor of liberty. He believed that oppression existed only through ignorance and blindness, and these he was all his life long seeking to remove. He believed that true liberty is attainable only through mental illumination, and that he was all his life long seeking to promote.

He was no agitator, no revolutionist; he had no faith in violent measures. Human welfare, he judged, is not to be advanced in that way; is less dependent on forms of polity than on the life within. But if the test of patriotism is the service rendered to one's country, who more patriotic than he? Lucky for us and the world. that he persisted to serve her in his own way, and not as the agitators claimed that he should. It was clear to him then, and must be clear to us now, that he

this writing (1795) had nearly reached her darkest day. Disintegrated, torn by conflicting interests, pecked by petty rival princes, despairing of her own future, it seemed impossible that she should ever again become a power among the nations. Goethe felt this; he felt it as profoundly as any German of his day . . . and he characteristically went into himself and studied the situation. The result was this wonderful composition, - "Das Märchen." He perceived that Germany must die to be born again. She did die, and is born again. He had the sagacity to foresee the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, - - an event which took place eleven years later, in 1806. The Empire is figured by the composite statue of the fourth King in the subterranean Temple, which crumbles to pieces when that Temple, representing Germany's past, emerges and stands above ground by the River. The resurrection of the Temple and its stand by the River is the dénouement of the Tale. And that signifies, allegorically, the rehabilitation of Germany.