"Tasso," "Iphigenia," and "Egmont ” were written out in forms which were afterwards very largely or wholly discarded. So far as "Faust" was concerned, it was a kind of running commentary begun when the poet was a student and completed in his eighty-second year! Evidently here was a singer whose gifts were from heaven but whose methods of work were as deliberately thought out and his processes of creation as consciously ordered as if he had been a child of Mercury rather than of the Muses. In studying Goethe's genius one is constantly reminded of the free, spontaneous, and buoyant temper of his mother; in studying his methods one is reminded of his precise, orderly, and prosaic father.

There was a distinct vein of philosophic inquiry running through Goethe's intellectual life, and there was a strong critical tendency in his nature. He was never an orderly thinker, but he was always striving to arrive at the unity of things and to discover those central points at which the arts and sciences disclosed the identity of their laws and the harmony of their methods. He studied both Spinoza and Kant, not exhaustively, but intelligently; and while he resolutely confined his speculations within the horizons of time and space, he habitually concerned himself with the deeper relations of things, and especially with their relations of interdependence. He cared little for phenomena in themselves, although his attachment to the concrete in nature was so intense as seriously to impair the value of his methods of observation; but he cared greatly for phenomena as they hinted at that interior unity which made them all manifestations of one force. His discovery of the intermaxillary bone and of the typical plant disclose the bent of his mind toward a comprehension of nature as a living whole. In spite of the large place which generalization holds in his work, Goethe was a poet with a philosophic bent rather than a philosopher with a poetic temper. In his old age the didactic mood predominated over the purely artistic, but even in the Elective Affinities" there are passages of passionate intensity and power.

The critical faculty, when it deals mainly with principles, as in Goethe's case, contains a distinct philosophical

element; but its chief characteristic is its power to discern artistic values and to judge artistic processes. It is allied, therefore, with the creative rather than with the purely philosophic mind. Goethe is, on the whole, the greatest of literary critics; indeed, his criticism has such insight and range that he may be called the greatest of art critics. No man has said so many and such luminous things about the artist and the creative mind and mood. A complete philosophy of art, in the widest sense of a much-abused word, lies in his work; a philosophy not like that of Hegel, worked out from the historical standpoint and with constant reference to its relations with the Absolute; nor like that of Taine, elaborated from the psycho-physiological point of view; but slowly distilled from a prolonged artistic activity, and from first-hand acquaintance with the artistic nature. In this field, as in others, Goethe is fragmentary and defective in logical arrangement; because his conclusions were reached, not as steps in a formal process of thought, but as generalizations from a growing experience. He does not discuss art with speculative interest; he speaks as one having authority, because he discerns the vital processes and relations of artistic production to the artist and to life. He values technical skill, and knows the secrets of craftsmanship; but he is concerned constantly with art in its fundamental relations with civilization and with individual experience, and he is in constant contact with the sources of its power and freshness. The distinctly judicial activity of the critical faculty is, nevertheless, always going on in him, and constantly betrays its presence. So clearly, indeed, does he recognize the influence of the critical spirit in his own life that he has more than once given it objective form, and Mephistopheles remains the greatest literary representative of the critical spirit divorced from the creative spirit and become, therefore, entirely negative and destructive.

There is still another characteristic of Goethe which must be emphasized in connection with the rationalizing side of his nature, and that is the extraordinary intimacy of connection between his works and his experience. All the greater works of Goethe, even those which, like "Iphigenia" and "Tasso," seem most detached

temper and methods became a writer of classical temper and methods. To" Götz" and "Werther" succeeded " Iphigenia," "Tasso," and the " Roman Elegies;" and to the storm of applause which greeted the earlier pieces succeeded the silence of indifference or the murmurs of criticism. Goethe lost his audience, and did not completely regain it until the publication of the first part of "Faust" in 1808. He had not only discarded old forms and employed new ones, but he had wholly changed his attitude towards his work; he not only modeled his work freely on classical models, but he attempted to detach himself from it and remove it as definitely from all relation to his life as the works of Sophocles were freed from all trace of connection, except the inevita

THE GARDEN OF GOETHE'S HOUSE

ble local color and individual touch, with the dramatist's personal experience. From "Iphigenia," "Tasso," the "Roman Elegies," and from a number of shorter poems like "The Bride of Corinth" and "Alexis and Dora," Goethe endeavored to detach himself entirely and to give his work an objectivity as definite and complete as that of a Greek statue. not succeed, because his works are one and all rooted in his experience, and because the effort was out of date; no modern man can do perfectly what Gocthe attempted to do. "Iphigenia " is a very noble work, but when we search for the essential Goethe we do not look into "Iphigenia" or "Tasso;" we look into the first part of "Faust"-the "Faust" of the romantic, not the "Faust" of the classical, period.

Thus there appears in the maturity of Goethe's years and genius a transformation, which was regarded at the time and is now regarded by many as a complete revolution of his aims and methods, indeed of his very nature; for it was not until his return to Weimar, after the two momentcus years in Italy, that the charge of coldness began to be heard.

From any point of view the change is striking and of farreaching influence, and could have been possible only in a man to whom his own country and time did not furnish all the means of expression he craved, and who was in the habit of a constant and connected meditation on his art and his life. A man of Goethe's years, intelligence, and selfcommand does not sever himself from his artistic past, break with his audience, and essay entirely new methods of creation without deep and prolonged thought. Goethe's conversion was rapidly accomplished in the genial Italian air, but it had been long in preparation. It is probable that no great writer ever searched his own nature more rigorously or reflected on the

conditions and functions of art more exhaustively than Goethe did before and after the Italian visit. Every step away from the earlier standpoint was taken with deliberate intention and after maturest thought. The change was the product of a philosophy of art completely formulated in the poet's mind. For it is clear that Goethe was drawn away from the Gothic spirit and the Romantic manner, not by the charm which attaches to the classical form, but by that spell which resides in the antique view of life and of art as its intimate and natural expression. Goethe was primarily an artist, with a lyrical note as clear, personal, and beguiling as any in literature; and art was to him the one form which life took on that gave it harmony, unity, and coherence; and he found in the antique ideas and atmosphere the conditions which made art, not sporadic and individual, but the constant and glorious witness of the beauty at the heart of all things. If he was mistaken, there was a noble element in his error; it was the mistake of an Olympian born in an age of Titanic unrest and struggle.

In Goethe's nature, moreover, the spontaneous element was always held in check or directed by the rationalizing element. The flowers of song often bloomed very rapidly under his hand, but in such cases there was always an antecedent

preparation of the soil; the seeds were already germinating, and the urgence of some deeply felt experience or the genial warmth of some prosperous hour or event swiftly brought the blade to the light. He often wrote with great rapid ty, but there was nothing in common between his methods and the methods of the great improvisers like Byron and Lope de Vega. The germinal idea of "Faust," he tells us, was suddenly unfolded to his imagination; but he spent sixty years in working it out! "The truth is," wrote Lowell to Mr. Fields, "my brain requires a long brooding-time ere it can hatch anything. As soon as the life comes into the thing, it is quick enough in chipping the shell." With Goethe the process was not so much brooding over his theme as looking at it from many sides and putting it into different forms. During the first Weimar period, from 1776 to 1786, while he was so silent and apparently so absorbed in pleasures and administration, "Tasso," "Iphigenia," " Egmont," "Wilhelm Meister," and Faust" possessed his imagination by turns. They had lodged there in those first prodigal years of his youth at Frankfort. He not only nourished and matured them by brooding meditation, but he gave them shape and form. While "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister" received occasional touches,

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