dily form, or any joyful union with the world
without: the shadows had grown too long, the light too solemn, for that.
It could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by the direct
exercise of any single talent: amid the manifold claims of modern
culture, that could only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe's
Hellenism was of another order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, the
completeness and serenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism. Im
Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben--is Goethe's description of his
own higher life; and what is meant by life in the whole--im Ganzen? It
means the life of one for whom, over and over again, what was once
precious has become indifferent. Every one who aims at the life of
culture is met by many forms of it, arising out of the intense,
laborious, one-sided development of some special talent. They are the
brightest enthusiasms the world has to show. It is not their part to
weigh the claims which this or that alien form of culture makes upon
them. But the pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all
that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own
strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must
see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every
divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation
between itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is
won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place; in the
supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness, such
natures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves. Above all,
they are jealous of that abandonment to one special gift which really
limits their capabilities. It would have been easy for Goethe, with the
gift of a sensuous nature, to let it overgrow him. It comes easily and
naturally, perhaps, to certain "other-worldly" natures to be even as the
Schoene Seele, that ideal of gentle pietism, in Wilhelm Meister: but to
the large vision of Goethe, that seemed to be a phase of life that a man
might feel all round, and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to indulge
the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be
one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives
to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied
gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions
which help one to det