g, at Weimar, that he always kept a clear, cool, Apollonian
head, mad and amorous though his escapades may seem!

I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really "give himself away,"
or lose the foursquare solidity of his balance in any wild staggering
to left or right. No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean attitude,
cannot be described as "cosmic," while that word implies a certain
complete yielding to a vague earth-worship. There was nothing
vague about Goethe's _intimacy,_ if I may put it so, with the Earth.
He and It seemed destined to understand one another most
_serenely,_ in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!

The Goethean attitude to the Universe is too self-poised and
self-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests
complete abandonment. It is too--what shall I say?--too sly and
_demonic_--too much _inside_ the little secrets of the great Mother--to
be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of Titanic whirlwind
of embraces. And yet, on the other hand, it is quite as easy to
exaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe. When this is carried too
far, something in him, something extraordinarily characteristic,
evaporates, like a thin stream of Parnassian smoke.

How shall I express what this is? Perhaps it is the _German_ in him.
For, in spite of all Nietzsche's Mediterraneanizing of this Superman,
Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German. The Rhine-Maidens
rocked him in his cradle and, though he might journey to
Rome or Troy or Carthage, it was to the Rhine-Maidens that he
returned. Yes, I do not think that those understand him best who
keep bowing to the ground and muttering "Olympian"!

Am I carrying this particular taper-light of discrimination too far
when I say that there is, to the Celtic mind at least, something
humorously naive and childlike in Goethe, mixed in, queerly enough,
with all his rich, mellow, and even worldly, wisdom? One overtakes
him, now and then, and catches him, as it were, off his guard, in
little pathetic lapses into a curious simplicity--a simplicity grave-eyed,
portentious and solemn--almost like that of some great Infant-Faun,
trying very seriously to learn the difficult syllables of our
human "Categorical Imperative"! World-child, as he was, the magic
of the universe pouring through him, one sometimes feels a strange,
dim hope with regard to that dubious general Issue, when we find
him so confident about the presence of the mysterious Being he
worshipped; a