edly a personage on the great scale, in
the grand manner, gloriously balanced, rounded. And it is a fact that he
was not made of marble. He started with all the disadvantages of flesh
and blood, and retained them to the last. Yet from no angle, as he
went his long way, could it be plausibly hinted that he wasn't sublime.
Endearing though failure always is, we grudge no man a moderately
successful career, and glory itself we will wink at if it befall some
thoroughly good fellow. But a man whose career was glorious without
intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try our patience. He, we
know, cannot have been a thoroughly good fellow. Of Goethe we are shy
for such reasons as that he was never injudicious, never lazy, always in
his best form--and always in love with some lady or another just so much
as was good for the development of his soul and his art, but never more
than that by a tittle. Fate decreed that Sir Willoughby Patterne should
cut a ridiculous figure and so earn our forgiveness. Fate may have had a
similar plan for Goethe; if so, it went all agley. Yet, in the course
of that pageant, his career, there did happen just one humiliation--one
thing that needed to be hushed up. There Tischbein's defalcation was; a
chip in the marble, a flaw in the crystal, just one thread loose in the
great grand tapestry.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high
imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
Had you and I been at Goethe's elbow when, in the October of 1786, he
entered Rome and was received by the excited Tischbein, no doubt we
should have whispered in his ear, 'Beware of that man! He will one day
fail you.' Unassisted Goethe had no misgivings. For some years he had
been receiving letters from this Herr Tischbein. They were the letters
of a man steeped in the Sorrows of Werther and in all else that Goethe
had written. This was a matter of course. But also they were the
letters of a man familiar with all the treasures of Rome. All Italy was
desirable; but it was especially towards great Rome that the soul of the
illustrious poet, the confined State Councillor of Weimar, had been ever
yearning. So that when came the longed-for day, and the Duke gave leave
of absence, and Goethe, closing his official portfolio with a snap and
imprinting a fervent but hasty kiss on the hand of Frau von Stein, fared
forth on his pilgrimage, Tischbein was a prospect insepara