H. Those who share what they have with others. And the richest was the best If he had more muscular strength than he needed, he gave another man a good thrashing; and of course no good man and true will have anything to do with a weaker man than himself, only with his equals, or his superiors. If he had a superfluity of sap and vigour, he provided the women with as many children as they might wish for—I myself begot fifty men-children in a single night. And if Heaven had given him goods and gold enough for a thousand, he opened his doors and bade a thousand welcome to enjoy it with him.
W. Most of this would be considered vice in our day.
H. Vice? that is another of your fine words I The very reason why everything is so poor and small with you is, that you represent virtue and vice as two extremes between which you oscillate, instead of thinking the middle course the ordained and best, as do your peasants and your men-servants and maid-servants.
W. Let me tell you that in my century you would be stoned for such opinions. See how they have denounced me for my little attack on virtue and religion.
H. And what had you to do attacking them? I have fought with horses, cannibals, and dragons, to the best of my ability, but never with clouds, what shape soever it pleased them to take. A sensible man leaves it to the winds that have blown them together to sweep them away again.
W. You are a monster, a blasphemer.
H. And you can't understand. Your Hercules stands like a beardless simpleton, hesitating between virtue and vice. If the two jades had met me on the way—see! one under this arm, one under that, off I'd have gone with them both.
Here we have Goethe's early and vigorous new conception of the antique contrasted with Wieland's Frenchified one; and we have at the same time the poetical confession of faith of the man whom his contemporaries called the Great Pagan. This is the philosophy of Spinoza in the form of a daring jest. But Goethe did not retain this bold, naturalistic view of the antique. When his youthful ardour had exhausted itself in Werther, in Götz, and in his enthusiastic treatise on Gothic architecture, he abruptly turned his back upon the Gothic and upon enthusiasm; and when he returns to the Greeks, it is their serenity and their lucidity, their simple harmonies and their sound common sense which captivate him. All that was passionate, full of colour, and realistic, he put aside and ignored; what was popular, burlesque, sensational, he only admitted in his allegorical farces, such as Die klassische Walpurgisnacht in Faust; and for what was wildly bacchantic or darkly mystical his eyes were closed.
With an increasing aversion for Christianity, which finds its chief expression in the Venetian Epigrams, was associated such a repugnance for the Gothic and all Christian art, that when he was at Assisi, a place so rich in famous Christian mementoes, Goethe did not even visit the beautiful Church of St. Francis, but devoted his attention exclusively to the insignificant ruins of the Temple of Minerva. It was in this frame of mind that he wrote his Iphigenia, a work which may be looked upon as typical of the whole Germanic-Gothic renaissance of the antique, and which played an important part in the formation of the art theories of the nineteenth century. It was regarded by German æstheticism under the leadership of Hegel, and by French æstheticism under the leadership of Taine, as a species of model work of art. Hegel considered that only the Antigone of Sophocles was worthy to be compared with it. The spirit by which it is inspired is the same spirit which inspired all Schiller's neo-Hellenic poems, Die Götter Griechenlands, Die Künstler, Die Ideale, Das Ideal und das Leben. Men were actually inclined at that time to accept, as representative of the life of the Greeks, Schiller's description of the life of the gods:
"Ewig klar und spiegelrein und eben
Fliesst das zephyrleichte Leben
Im Olymp den Seligen dahin."