And it is a fact that
he was not made of marble. He started with all the disadvantages of
flesh and blood, and retained them to the last. Yet from no angle, as
he went his long way, could it be plausibly hinted that he wasn't
sublime. Endearing though failure always is, we grudge no man a
moderately successful career, and glory itself we will wink at if it
befall some thoroughly good fellow. But a man whose career was
glorious without intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try
our patience. He, we know, cannot have been a thoroughly good fellow.
Of Goethe we are shy for such reasons as that he was never
injudicious, never lazy, always in his best form--and always in love
with some lady or another just so much as was good for the development
of his soul and his art, but never more than that by a tittle. Fate
decreed that Sir Willoughby Patterne should cut a ridiculous figure
and so earn our forgiveness. Fate may have had a similar plan for
Goethe; if so, it went all agley. Yet, in the course of that pageant,
his career, there did happen just one humiliation--one thing that
needed to be hushed up. There Tischbein's defalcation was; a chip in
the marble, a flaw in the crystal, just one thread loose in the great
grand tapestry.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character.
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