has raised—­with remorse I am sure—­the cup of ignoble pleasures to his lips, believing he might find forgetfulness there.  How many times have not his accusers drained this cup, without redeeming the sin by a single virtue; without—­I will not say bearing—­but without having even the capacity of appreciating the burden which weighed on Byron!  And did he not himself dash into fragments the ignoble cup, so soon as he beheld something worthy the devotion of his life?

Goethe—­individuality in its objective life—­having, like Byron, a sense of the falsehood and evil of the world round him-followed exactly the opposite path.  After having—­he, too, in his youth—­ uttered a cry of anguish in his Werther; after having laid bare the problem of the epoch in all its terrific nudity, in Faust; he thought he had done enough, and refused to occupy himself with its solution.  It is possible that the impulse of rebellion against social wrong and evil which burst forth for an instant in Werther may long have held his soul in secret travail; but that he despaired of the task of reforming it as beyond his powers.  He himself remarked in his later years, when commenting on the exclamation made by a Frenchman on first seeing him:  “That is the face of a man who has suffered much”:  that he should rather have said:  “That is the face of a man who has struggled energetically;” but of this there remains no trace in his works.  Whilst Byron writhed and suffered under the sense of the wrong and evil around him, he attained the calm—­I cannot say of victory—­but of indifference.  In Byron the man always ruled, and even at times, overcame the artist:  the man was completely lost in the artist in Goethe.  In him there was no subjective life; no unity springing either from heart or head.  Goethe is an intelligence that receives, elaborates, and reproduces the poetry affluent to him from all external objects:  from all points of the circumference; to him as centre.  He dwells aloft alone; a mighty watcher in the midst of creation.  His curious scrutiny investigates, with equal penetration and equal interest, the depths of the ocean and the calyx of the floweret.  Whether he studies the rose exhaling its Eastern perfume to the sky, or the ocean casting its countless wrecks upon the shore, the brow of the poet remains equally calm:  to him they are but two forms of the beautiful; two subjects for art.

Goethe has been called a pantheist.  I know not in what sense critics apply this vague and often ill-understood word to him.  There is a materialistic pantheism and a spiritual pantheism; the pantheism of Spinoza and that of Giordano Bruno; of St. Paul; and of many others--all different.  But there is no poetic pantheism possible, save on the condition of embracing the whole world of phenomena in one unique conception:  of feeling and comprehending the life of the universe in its divine unity.  There is nothing of this in Goethe.  There is pantheism in some parts of