escaped from the
contagion. Like his fellow-poets, he passed through the crisis of the
_Sturm und Drang_. But it seems as if he had only known it in order to
give to his experiences a final artistic expression. He communicated
the "Wertherian malady" to a whole generation, but he himself emerged
triumphant and unscathed. The hurricane which wrecked so many powerful
intellects spared his own. After the Italian journey he never ceased
by example and precept to recommend harmony and balance, and he became
so completely the perfect type of intellectual and artistic sanity
that the world has forgotten the Bohemian days of Frankfurt and
Leipzig, the merry days of Weimar, the repulsive vulgarity of his
drunken mistress and wife, the degradation of his son, and has agreed
only to contemplate the Olympian majesty of Weimar. Whether the repose
and sanity of Goethe were unmixed virtues, or whether they were partly
the result of indifference, of impassivity or selfishness, is another
question. Certain it is that there is no other trait in Goethe's
personality which has done more to raise him in the esteem of
posterity. He has proved to the world that internal discord and
distraction and morbid exaltation are not the necessary appanage of
genius, and that, on the contrary, the most powerful genius is also
the most sane, the most balanced, the most self-possessed, the most
harmonious.

III.

Without going here into the purely formal and artistic qualities of
Goethe's works, there is one fact which, perhaps more than any other,
impressed itself on the imagination of the world, and that is the
realization of his own personality, the achievement of his own
destiny. Of all his poems, the rarest and most perfect is the poem of
his life. Hitherto no such life had ever been allotted to a favourite
of the Muses. He seemed to have received a bountiful abundance of all
the gifts of the fairies--superb health, comfort, and wealth, the love
of an adoring mother and sister, the loyalty of illustrious friends,
the favour of Princes, the homage of women, and the admiration of
men. To him was opened every province of human activity. He exhausted
every form of enjoyment. His life until the end was like the unfolding
of a glorious version of a happy dream. At eighty years of age he
remained the one surviving giant of the golden age of German
literature. In his lifetime he was considered by Europe, as well as by
Germany, as the most glorious exemp