he as a
poet and a thinker--for that he is great both as a poet and as a thinker
cannot be denied.

Goethe describes his own philosophy as the philosophy of action. He
believed in impulse, in inspiration, in action, rather than in
reflexion, analysis and logic. 'Reflect not!' he makes Iphigenie
exclaim--'Reflect not! Grant freely, as thou feel'st!' And in one of his
Epigrams he says:

Yes, that's the right way,
When we cannot say
How we think. True thought
Comes as a gift, unsought.

Such theory of inspiration is thoroughly Greek, reminding one of
Plato's 'muse-inspired madman' and of what Sophocles is related to have
said to Aeschylus; 'Thou, Aeschylus, always dost the right thing--but
unconsciously ([Greek: all' ouk eidos ge]).' Thus it was also with
Goethe. All intellectual hobbies and shibboleths, all this endless
wearisome discussion and dissection and analysis and criticism and
bandying about of _opinion_, which is the very life-breath of modern
intellectual existence and modern journalistic literature, Goethe
rejected, as Plato had done in his _Phaedrus_, where he makes Socrates
call such things 'rotten soul-fodder.'

'The whole! The whole!' was Goethe's frequent exclamation--'life!
action! being!--the living whole, not the dead parts!' He was for ever
decrying mere thought, mere intellect, mere cleverness. And yet of all
moderns what greater intellect, what greater thinker, can we name than
Goethe himself? Seldom, perhaps never, has there existed a mortal so
many-sided. 'In such manifold directions'--he wrote to his friend
Jacobi--'does my nature move, that I cannot be satisfied with _one_
single mode of thought. As poet and artist I am polytheist; as a
student of Nature I am pantheist. When I need a God for my personal
nature, as a moral and spiritual human being, He also exists for me.
Heaven and earth are such an immense realm that it can only be grasped
by the collective intelligence of all intelligent beings.' Such
'collective intelligence' Goethe perhaps more nearly possessed than any
other human being has done. The lordly pleasure-house which he built for
his soul was such as Tennyson describes (and his words refer of course
to Goethe):

Full of great rooms and small the palace stood,
All various, each a perfect whole
From living Nature, fit for every mood
And change of my still soul.

And wonderfully true are those other lines of Tennyson--but rather
bitter