"as God holding no form of creed
But contemplating all."[243]

[Footnote 243: Tennyson disclaimed having Goethe in his mind when he
wrote _The Palace of Art_.]

But such transformations of human character are not in the order of
nature, and, due allowance made for the numbing hand of time, the
youthful Goethe remained essentially the same Goethe to the end.
Behind the mask of impassivity which chilled the casually curious who
sought him in his last years there was ever that _etwas weibliches_
which Schiller noted in him in his middle age. In the critical moments
of life he was in his maturity as in his youth subject to emotions
which for the time seemed to be beyond his control. On the death of
his wife his behaviour was that of one distracted. He described
himself at the age of fifteen as "something of a chameleon," and, as
already remarked, Felix Mendelssohn, who saw him a year before his
death, declared that the world would one day come to believe that
there had not been one but many Goethes. We have seen that throughout
the period of his youth some external impulse to production was a
necessity of his nature, and so it was to the close. What Behrisch and
Merck and his sister Cornelia did for him in these early years, had
to be done for him in later life by similar friends and counsellors.
If, like Plato and Dante, he was "a great lover" in his youth, "a
great lover" he remained even into time-stricken age; when past his
seventieth year he was moved by a passion from which, as in youth, he
found deliverance by giving vent to it in passionate verse. It is in
the youthful Goethe, before time and circumstance had dulled the
spontaneous play of feeling, that we see the man as he came from
nature's hand, with all his manifold gifts, and with all his sensuous
impulses, tossing him from one object of desire to another, yet ever
held in check by the passion that was deepest in him--the passion to
know and to create.

* * * * *

GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, LETCHWORTH, HERTS.

INDEX

_Adler und Taube_, poem by Goethe, 183, 184.

AEschylus, 175.

_An Belinden_, lyric addressed by Goethe to Lili Schoenemann, 252.

_An Schwager Kronos_, poem by Goethe, 240.

Arnold, Gottfried, his _History of the Church and of Heretics_,
Goethe's study of it, 64, 65.

Arnold, Matthew, 6;
quoted, 140.

Basedow, Johann Bernhard, his character, 227, 228;
his intercourse wit