His Life and Genius 185 



patible with keen personal feeling, he could 

 hardly have surveyed them so calmly and objec- 

 tively as he did. Vices and virtues, loves and 

 hates, follies and crimes, good and bad deeds 

 of all sorts, human doings in all their aspects he 

 placidly observed with impartial insight and de- 

 tachment, lucidly unfolding with sympathetic 

 imagination their complex interworkings of 

 causes and effects, because he contemplated 

 them as a philosopher and felt them as an artist 

 without being much moved by them as a man. 



Why scruple to think true and say of him that 

 which all the world agrees to be true, and say 

 of Goethe — the modern poet next in greatness — 

 who, having pursued his love adventures at the 

 cost of others, freed himself from all after-pangs 

 by embodying his experiences in a poem or a 

 romance, passing thenceforth on his serene way 

 of systematic self-culture with an almost Olym- 

 pian indifference ? An excellent medicine by 

 which a loving self-lover so cures his hurt, turn- 

 ing hurts to pearls, as to love the use of the hurt ! 

 This Goethe did of set purpose and with con- 

 sistent execution, whereas Shakspeare's placid 

 egoistic course was apparently pursued with even 

 pace and benign temper, unillumined by any 

 formulated theory of self-development. There 

 is nothing to be said, then, but to praise egoism 

 for it, seeing that had he been a sapless saint he 

 would not have been Shakspeare, and mankind 

 would have lost the priceless fruits of his depth 



