and attending only
to the style of its frame, debating whether it is carved well or ill,
and how much it cost to gild it.

This is all very well. However, there is another class of
persons whose interest is also directed to material and personal
considerations, but they go much further and carry it to a point where
it becomes absolutely futile. Because a great man has opened up to
them the treasures of his inmost being, and, by a supreme effort
of his faculties, produced works which not only redound to their
elevation and enlightenment, but will also benefit their posterity to
the tenth and twentieth generation; because he has presented mankind
with a matchless gift, these varlets think themselves justified in
sitting in judgment upon his personal morality, and trying if they
cannot discover here or there some spot in him which will soothe the
pain they feel at the sight of so great a mind, compared with the
overwhelming feeling of their own nothingness.

This is the real source of all those prolix discussions, carried on in
countless books and reviews, on the moral aspect of Goethe's life, and
whether he ought not to have married one or other of the girls with
whom he fell in love in his young days; whether, again, instead of
honestly devoting himself to the service of his master, he should not
have been a man of the people, a German patriot, worthy of a seat in
the _Paulskirche_, and so on. Such crying ingratitude and malicious
detraction prove that these self-constituted judges are as great
knaves morally as they are intellectually, which is saying a great
deal.

A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring
that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to
name. Wealth is seldom its reward. Nor is it reputation or glory; only
a Frenchman could mean that. Glory is such an uncertain thing, and,
if you look at it closely, of so little value. Besides it never
corresponds to the effort you have made:

_Responsura tuo nunquam est par fama labori._

Nor, again, is it exactly the pleasure it gives you; for this is
almost outweighed by the greatness of the effort. It is rather a
peculiar kind of instinct, which drives the man of genius to give
permanent form to what he sees and feels, without being conscious of
any further motive. It works, in the main, by a necessity similar to
that which makes a tree bear its fruit; and no external condition is
needed but the ground upon wh