The case of Goethe requires no appeal to general principles.  It only requires that the charges against him be fairly investigated; that he be tried by documentary evidence, and by the testimony of competent witnesses.  The mistake is made of confusing breaches of conventional decorum with essential depravity.

That Goethe was faulty in many ways may be freely conceded.  But surely there is a wide difference between not being faultless and being definitely bad.  To call a man bad is to say that the evil in him preponderates over the good.  In the case of Goethe the balance was greatly the other way.  It has been said that he abused the confidence reposed in him by women; that he encouraged affection which he did not reciprocate for artistic purposes.  The charge is utterly groundless; and in the case of Bettine has been refuted by irrefragable proof.  To say that he was wanting in love, heartless, cold, is ridiculously false.  Yet the charge is constantly reiterated in the face of facts,—­reiterated with undoubting assurance and a certain complacency which seems to say, “Thank God! we are not as this man was.”  There is a satisfaction which some people feel in spotting their man,—­Burns drank; Coleridge took opium; Byron was a rake; Goethe was cold:  by these marks we know them.  The poet found it necessary, as I have said, in later years, under social pressure, for the sake of the work which was given him to do, to fortify himself with a mail of reserve.  And this, indeed, contrasted strangely with his former abandon, and with the customary gush of German sentimentality.  It was common then for Germans who had known each other by report, and were mutually attracted, when first they met, to fall on each other’s necks and kiss and weep.  Goethe, as a young man, had indulged such fervors; but in old age he had lost this effusiveness, or saw fit to restrain himself outwardly, while his kindly nature still glowed with its pristine fires.  He wrote to Frau von Stein, “I may truly say that my innermost condition does not correspond to my outward behavior.”  Hence the charge of coldness.  Say that Mount Aetna is cold:  do we not see the snow on its sides?

But he was unpatriotic; he occupied himself with poetry, and did not cry out while his country was in the death-throes—­so it seemed—­of the struggle with France!  But what should he have done?  What could he have done?  What would his single arm or declamation have availed?  No man more than Goethe longed for the rehabilitation of Germany.  In his own way he wrought for that end; he could work effectually in no other.  That enigmatical composition,—­the “Maerchen,”—­according to the latest interpretation, indicates how, in Goethe’s view, that end was to be accomplished.  To one who considers the relation of ideas to events, it will not seem extravagant when I say that to Goethe, more than to any one individual, Germany is indebted for her emancipation, independence, and present political regeneration.[6]