the further
it was removed from a fugitive indulgence, the more moral and
healthy it became."

He was in his fifty-eighth year when he married her. She had changed
much in the passing years. From the bright, lively, pleasure-loving
girl, she had grown into a coarse and almost repulsive woman. Her
father, as we know, had ruined himself by intemperance, her brother
also, and she herself had not escaped the fatal appetite. She was not
restrained by the checks which refined society imposes, for in Weimar
she had no society, and as the years went by she became openly and
shamelessly given over to intemperance. This tragedy in Goethe's life
would have been little suspected by those who saw how calmly he bore
himself in public. The mere mention of the fact, however, tells its own
tale of humiliation and woe. It is often asked why Goethe did not part
from her at once. In answer we might ask, Why do not all the noble and
right-principled women who wear out wretched lives as drunkards' wives
part at once from their debauched husbands? The answer would no doubt be
similar in the two cases. He was too weak to alter his position, he was
strong enough to bear it. And he did bear it to the bitter end. And when
that end came he mourned for her with sincere affection. Says Lewes:--

"She who had for twenty-eight years loved and aided him; who,
whatever her faults, had been to him what no other woman had been,
could not be taken from him without his feeling her loss. His
self-mastery was utterly shaken. He knelt by her bedside, taking
her cold hands in his, and exclaiming, 'Thou wilt not forsake me,
thou must not forsake me,' and sobbing aloud. He had been to her
the most tender of devoted husbands throughout all those weary
years."

Many accounts of her vulgarity and repulsiveness have been circulated;
but in making up our estimate of her, the fact that she held Goethe in
loyal bonds for eight and twenty years must not be passed over lightly.
Fickle as he was in youth, and admiring as he did brilliant women in his
manhood, Christine Vulpius must have had charms, and not of a light
order, to have held him thus her willing slave. No mere fat and vulgar
Frau without mind or sensibility could have done this. It is not in the
nature of things. We often see men of brilliant minds in our own day
choosing to marry women who are not intellectual or cultured,--women who
have only beauty, or sty