fury
of a wild beast, and mastered all three. On the loss of Gretchen he
"wept and raved," and, as the result of his morbid sensibility, his
constitution, always abnormally influenced by his emotions, was
seriously impaired. Here we have the _Weiblichkeit_, the feminine
strain in his nature, which was noted by Schiller, and which explains
the shrinking from all forms of pain which he inherited from his
mother.

More than once these emotional elements in his nature were to bring
him near to moral shipwreck, and it was doubtless the consciousness of
such a possibility in his own case that explains his haunting interest
in the character and career of Byron. But underneath his "chameleon"
temperament (the expression is his own[13]) there was a solid
foundation, the lack of which was the ruin of Byron. Goethe has
himself told us what this saving element in him was. It was a
strenuousness and seriousness implanted in him by nature (_von der
Natur in mich gelegter Ernst_), which, he says, "exerted its influence
[on him] at an early age, and showed itself more distinctly in after
years." This side of his complex nature did not escape the notice even
of his youthful contemporaries. "Goethe," wrote one of them from
Leipzig, "is as great a philosopher as ever." Here again we see in the
boy the father of the man. Increasingly, as the years went on, his
innate tendency to reflection asserted itself, till at length in his
latest period it so completely dominated him that the sage proved too
much for the artist.

[Footnote 13: So Weislingen (in _Goetz von Berlichingen_), whom Goethe
meant to be a double of himself, says: "_Ich bin ein Chamaeleon_."]

If the character of the boy foreshadowed that of the man, so did the
tendencies of his genius the lines they were afterwards to follow.
"Turn a man whither he will," he remarks in his Autobiography, "he
will always return to the path marked out for him by nature," and his
own development signally illustrates the truth of the remark. From his
earliest youth, he tells us, he had "a passion for investigating
natural things"; and towards middle life his interest in physical
science became so absorbing as for many years to stifle his creative
faculty. But in the retrospect of his life as a whole he had no doubt
as to the supreme bent of his genius. The "laurel crown of the poet"
was the goal of his youthful ambition, and the last bequest he made to
posterity was the Second Part of _Faust_