II.
There is a second quality which Goethe possesses in a supreme degree, and by which he is distinguished from his contemporaries—namely, mental sanity and serenity. Most of his fellow-poets reveal some morbid characteristics, are afflicted with some Weltschmerz, with some internal spiritual malady. They live in an atmosphere of strife and discord. The marvellous vitality of Goethe has escaped from the contagion. Like his fellow-poets, he passed through the crisis of the Sturm und Drang. But it seems as if he had only known it in order to give to his experiences a final artistic expression. He communicated the “Wertherian malady” to a whole generation, but he himself emerged triumphant and unscathed. The hurricane which wrecked so many powerful intellects spared his own. After the Italian journey he never ceased by example and precept to recommend harmony and balance, and he became so completely the perfect type of intellectual and artistic sanity that the world has forgotten the Bohemian days of Frankfurt and Leipzig, the merry days of Weimar, the repulsive vulgarity of his drunken mistress and wife, the degradation of his son, and has agreed only to contemplate the Olympian majesty of Weimar. Whether the repose and sanity of Goethe were unmixed virtues, or whether they were partly the result of indifference, of impassivity or selfishness, is another question. Certain it is that there is no other trait in Goethe’s personality which has done more to raise him in the esteem of posterity. He has proved to the world that internal discord and distraction and morbid exaltation are not the necessary appanage of genius, and that, on the contrary, the most powerful genius is also the most sane, the most balanced, the most self-possessed, the most harmonious.