healthy-mindedness as never to
have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals,
still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his
own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape
is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as
well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed
the hollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the
best you can say is, "Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!"
Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very
vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success?
If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that! But take the
happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out
of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals
in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the
achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the
world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself
to be found wanting.

When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this
wise, how must it be with less successful men? {135}

"I will say nothing," writes Goethe in 1824, "against the course of my
existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and
I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four
weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock
that must be raised up again forever."

What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther?
Yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an
absolute failure.

"I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and
carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last Judgment: I
will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be
at rest."--And having a necklace of white agates in his hand at the
time he added: "O God, grant that it may come without delay. I would
readily eat up this necklace to-day, for the Judgment to come
to-morrow."--The Electress Dowager, one day when Luther was dining with
her, said to him: "Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to come."
"Madam," replied he, "rather than live forty years more, I would give
up my chance of Paradise."

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew
it with our blunders, our