Among the heroic qualities notable in Goethe, I reckon his faithful and unflagging industry.  Here was a man who took pains with himself,—­liess sich’s sauer werden,—­and made the most of himself.  He speaks of wasting, while a student in Leipsic, “the beautiful time;” and certainly neither at Leipsic nor afterward at Strasburg did he toil as his Wagner in “Faust” would have done.  But he was always learning.  In the lecture-room or out of it, with pen and books or gay companions, he was taking in, to give forth again in dramatic or philosophic form the world of his experience.

A frolicsome youth may leave something to regret in the way of time misspent; but Goethe the man was no dawdler, no easy-going Epicurean.  On the whole, he made the most of himself, and stands before the world a notable instance of a complete life.  He would do the work which was given him to do.  He would not die till the second part of “Faust” was brought to its predetermined close.  By sheer force of will he lived till that work was done.  Smitten at fourscore by the death of his son, and by deaths all around, he kept to his task.  “The idea of duty alone sustains me; the spirit is willing, the flesh must.”  When “Faust” was finished, the strain relaxed.  “My remaining days,” he said, “I may consider a free gift; it matters little what I do now, or whether I do anything.”  And six months later he died.

A complete life!  A life of strenuous toil!  At home and abroad,—­in Italy and Sicily, at Ilmenau and Carlsbad, as in his study at Weimar,—­with eye or pen or speech, he was always at work.  A man of rigid habits; no lolling or lounging.  “He showed me,” says Eckermann, “an elegant easy-chair which he had bought to-day at auction.  ‘But,’ said he, ’I shall never or rarely use it; all indolent habits are against my nature.  You see in my chamber no sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a leaning place for my head to be added.  If surrounded by tasteful furniture, my thoughts are arrested; I am placed in an agreeable but passive state.  Unless we are accustomed to them from early youth, splendid chambers and elegant furniture had better be left to people without thoughts.’” This in his eighty-second year!

A widely diffused prejudice regarding the personal character of Goethe refuses to credit him with any moral worth accordant with his bodily and mental gifts.  It figures him a libertine,—­heartless, loveless, bad.  I do not envy the mental condition of those who can rest in the belief that a really great poet can be a bad man.  Be assured that the fruits of genius have never grown, and will never grow, in such a soil.  Of all great poets Byron might seem at first glance to constitute an exception to this—­I venture to call it—­law of Nature.  Yet hear what Walter Scott, a sufficient judge, said of Byron:—­

“The errors of Lord Byron arose neither from depravity of heart—­for nature had not committed the anomaly of uniting to such extraordinary talents an imperfect moral sense—­nor from feelings dead to the admiration of virtue.  No man had ever a kinder heart for sympathy, or a more open hand for the relief of distress; and no mind was ever more formed for enthusiastic admiration of noble actions.”