ALDA.
Mrs. Austin's "Characteristics of Goethe." I came upon a passage which sent back my thoughts to Weimar. I was again in his house; the faces, the voices of his grandchildren were around me; the room in which he studied, the bed in which he slept, the old chair in which he died,—and, above all, her in whose arms he died—from whose lips I heard the detail of his last moments—
MEDON.
What! all this emotion for Goethe?
ALDA.
For Goethe!—I should as soon think of weeping because the sun set yesterday, which now is pouring its light around me! Our tears are for those who suffer, for those who die, for those who are absent, for those who are cold or lost—not for those who cannot die, who cannot suffer,—who must be, to the end of time, a presence and an existence among us! No.
But I was reading here, among the Characteristics of Goethe, who certainly "knew all qualities, with a learned spirit in human dealings," that he was not only the quick discerner and most cordial hater of all affectation;—but even the unconscious affectation—the nature de convention,—the taught, the artificial, the acquired in manner or character, though it were meritorious in itself, he always detected, and it appeared to impress him disagreeably. Stay, I will read you the passage—here it is.
"Even virtue, laboriously and painfully acquired, was distasteful to him. I might almost affirm, that a faulty but vigorous character, if it had any real native qualities as its basis, was regarded by him with more indulgence and respect than one which, at no moment of its existence, is genuine; which is incessantly under the most unamiable constraint, and consequently imposes a painful constraint on others. 'Oh,' said he, sighing, on such occasions, 'if they had but the heart to commit some absurdity, that would be something, and they would at least be restored to their own natural soil, free from all hypocrisy and acting: wherever that is the case, one may entertain the cheering hope that something will spring from the germ of good which nature implants in every individual. But on the ground they are now upon, nothing can grow.' 'Pretty dolls,' was his common expression when speaking of them. Another phrase was, 'That's a piece of nature,' (literally, das ist eine Natur, that is a nature,) which from Goethe's lips was considerable praise."[ 24]