s to one's
fellow-men--with one section of it. They forget that Goethe was a man of
the old _regime_; that his faults were those of his time and class. They
forget that an extreme repugnance to all monasticism, asceticism, and
Roman Catholicism in general, naturally led him to pay a diminished
regard to the one virtue of which the Christian world is sometimes apt
to exaggerate the importance, and on which it is often ready to hang all
the law and the prophets. To some, again, Goethe appears to be a
supremely selfish wizard, dissecting human passion in the coldest blood,
and making poetical capital out of the emotional tortures he caused in
others. This, too, is a charge which the merest acquaintance with his
life and work must of necessity refute: it is too simple a slander to be
seriously discussed. Since these are charges which have, however, kept
many estimable people from reading Goethe, it may be some consolation to
them to know that the maxims are entirely free from any possibility of
objection on this ground.

The element of moral teaching which runs through Goethe's mature works
like a golden thread, re-appears in the maxims free and detached from
the poetic and romantic environment which in such varied shapes is woven
around it in _Werther, Tasso, Meister_, above all in _Faust_. To do the
next duty; to meet the claims of each day; to persist with a single mind
and unwearied effort on a definite, positive, productive path;
cheerfully to renounce what is denied us, and vigorously to make the
best of what we have; to restrain vague desires and uncertain aims; to
cease bewailing the vanity of all things and the fleeting nature of this
our world, and do what we can to make our stay in it of lasting
use,--these are lessons which will always be needed, and all the more
needed as life becomes increasingly complex. They are taught in the
maxims with a great variety of application, and nowhere so concisely
summarised as in one of them. "The mind endowed with active powers," so
it runs, "and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies
nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth."

Goethe has been called, and with truth, the prophet of culture; but the
word is often misunderstood. We cannot too clearly see that what is here
meant is not a mere range of intellectual knowledge, pursued with
idolatrous devotion: it is moral discipline, a practical endeavour,
forming wise thought and noble character. And this is the