His genius sometimes reminds me of Ariel--the subtle spirit who,
observing from aloof, as it were (that is, from the infinite distance of
his own _unmoral_, demoniacal nature), the follies and sins and sorrows
of humanity, understands them all and sympathizes with none of them; and
describes, with equal indifference, the drunken, brutish delight in his
music expressed by the coarse Neapolitan buffoons and the savage
gorilla, Caliban, and the abject self-reproach and bitter, poignant
remorse exhibited by Antonio and his fellow conspirators; telling
Prospero that if _he_ saw them he would pity them, and adding, in his
passionless perception of their anguish, "I should, sir, _were I
human_."

There is a species of remote partiality in Goethe's mode of delineating
the sins and sorrows of his fellows, that seems hardly human and still
less divine; "_Das ist daemonisch_," to use his own expression about
Shakespeare, who, however, had nothing whatever in common with that
quality of moral _neutrality_ of the great German genius.

Perhaps nothing indicates what I should call Goethe's intellectual
_unhumanity_ so much as his absolute want of sympathy with the progress
of the race. He was but mortal man, however, though he had the head of
Jove, and Pallas Athena might have sprung all armed from it. Once, and
once only, if I remember rightly, in his conversations with Eckermann,
the cause of mankind elicits an expression of faith and hope from him,
in some reference to the future of America. I recollect, on reading the
second part of "Faust" with my friend Abeken (assuredly the most
competent of all expounders of that extraordinary composition), when I
asked him what was the signification of that final cultivation of the
barren sea sand, in Faust's blind old age, and cried, "Is it possible
that he wishes to indicate the hopelessness of all attempt at progress?"
his replying, "I am afraid he was no believer in it." And so it comes
that his letters to Madame von Stein leave one only amazed with the more
sorrowful admiration that the unrivaled genius of the civilized world in
its most civilized age found perfect satisfaction in the inane routine
of the life of a court dignitary in a petty German principality.

It is worthy of note how, in the two instances of his great
masterpieces, "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister," Goethe has worked up in a
sequel all the superabundant material he had gathered for his subject;
and in each case how