BEAUTY AND THE ELECTIVE AFFINITIES 181 



that serves to bring about this result, and its meaning 

 is that any sort of union is better than none at all. 

 Nature is content, like the master of a gaming-table, 

 to establish one or two chances in her favour, trust- 

 ing thereby to reap an ultimate advantage from the 

 game, that ultimate advantage being the secret of 

 evolution. Even where the elective affinities declare 

 themselves, we must guard against supposing that 

 they tend to the production of what we are accus- 

 tomed to call superior types. As we have seen, 

 certain forms of genius are closely allied to in- 

 sanity, and the history of the world yields more 

 than one example of a cultured and intellectual race 

 succumbing in the battle of life. Goethe's long 

 attachment to Christiane Vulpius was an exemplifi- 

 cation of the elective affinities. From his relations 

 with Frau von Stein we gather comparatively little 

 instruction. Their attachment appears to have been 

 a sympathetic one ; but when it began Frau von 

 Stein was a married woman of thirty-five with 

 children, and Goethe a young man of twenty-seven. 

 They saw each other constantly for nine years, at the 

 end of which time Goethe went to Italy. On his re- 

 turn he became alive to the fact that Frau von Stein 

 was forty-five, and the breach between them occurred 



