“A good illustration of what the world calls his indifferentism.”

“And do you know I rather like this indifferentism?  Did you never have the misfortune to live in a community, where a difficulty in the parish seemed to announce the end of the world? or to know one of the benefactors of the human race, in the very `storm and pressure period’ of his indiscreet enthusiasm?  If you have, I think you will see something beautiful in the calm and dignified attitude which the old philosopher assumes.”

“It is a pity, that his admirers had not a little of this philosophic coolness.  It amuses me to read the various epithets, which they apply to him; The Dear, dear Man!  The Life-enjoying Man!  The All-sided One!  The Representative of Poetry upon earth!  The Many-sided Master-Mind of Germany!  His enemies rush into the other extreme, and hurl at him the fierce names of Old Humbug! and Old Heathen! which hit like pistol-bullets.”

“I confess, he was no saint.”

“No; his philosophy is the old ethnic philosophy.  You will find it all in a convenient andconcentrated, portable form in Horace’s beautiful Ode to Thaliarcus.  What I most object to in the old gentleman is his sensuality.”

“O nonsense.  Nothing can be purer than the Iphigenia; it is as cold and passionless as a marble statue.”

“Very true; but you cannot say the same of some of the Roman Elegies and of that monstrous book the Elective Affinities.”

“Ah, my friend, Goethe is an artist; and looks upon all things as objects of art merely.  Why should he not be allowed to copy in words what painters and sculptors copy in colors and in marble?”

“The artist shows his character in the choice of his subject.  Goethe never sculptured an Apollo, nor painted a Madonna.  He gives us only sinful Magdalens and rampant Fauns.  He does not so much idealize as realize.”

“He only copies nature.”

“So did the artists, who made the bronzelamps of Pompeii.  Would you hang one of those in your hall?  To say that a man is an artist and copies nature is not enough.  There are two great schools of art; the imitative and the imaginative.  The latter is the most noble, and most enduring; and Goethe belonged rather to the former.  Have you read Menzel’s attack upon him?”

“It is truly ferocious.  The Suabian hews into him lustily.  I hope you do not side with him.”

“By no means.  He goes too far.  He blames the poet for not being a politician.  He might as well blame him for not being a missionary to the Sandwich Islands.”

“And what do you think of Eckermann?”

“I think he is a toady; a kind of German Boswell.  Goethe knew he was drawing his portrait, and attitudinized accordingly.  He works very hard to make a Saint Peter out of an old Jupiter, as the Catholics did at Rome.”

“Well; call him Old Humbug, or Old Heathen, or what you please; I maintain, that, with all his errors and short-comings, he was a glorious specimen of a man.”