austerity, of a calm earnestness; a majestic age of the ripest wisdom,
when there came to him, as it were a second youth, with something of the
fire of the old romantic feeling lighted up in him anew. And out of all
these prodigious efforts in so many directions, he passed unharmed, and
never lost himself. He steadily pursued his own task and refused to be
drawn aside. He stood aloof from the controversies of his time. The
battles of belief, philosophical systems, French Revolutions, Wars of
Liberation, struggles of democracy and nationality,--these things
moved him little or not at all. But he is not on that account to be
held, as some foolish critics have held him, indifferent, selfish, or
less serious, or less complete a man than his fellows. He did the best
in any one's power: he resolutely kept to his own business, and, neither
heating nor resting, worked at his own high aims, in the struggle not
merely to learn and to know, but to act and to do. He felt profoundly
that the best anyone can achieve for himself is often the best he can
achieve for others. The whole moral of _Wilhelm Meister_ is that a man's
first and greatest duty, whether to others or to himself, is to see that
his business in life is a worthy one and suited to his capacities. If he
discovers his vocation and pursues it steadily, he will make his outer
life of the greatest use and service to the world, and at the same time
produce the utmost harmony within. That was what Goethe tried to do in
his own person, and he laboured at his self-imposed task with a
perseverance, a real unselfishness, and a determination entirely
admirable.

It is almost the last fruit of this life of concentrated activity, the
final outcome of this indomitable character, that is here put before us.
And we shall find that to the complex phenomena of the world Goethe
applied no other measure but reason and the nature and needs of man.
With a full consciousness of the mysteries that surround our existence,
he never made the futile endeavour to pass beyond the bounds of present
knowledge and experience, or to resolve contradictions by manipulating
the facts. In these detached reflections he does, indeed, propound a
theory and sketch out a system of conduct; but they cannot, like the
_Thoughts_ of Pascal, for instance, be brought under a single and
definite point of view. They are a mirror of life itself, and the inner
and outer facts of life in all their diversity. The unity they