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In plainer words, he is a great and exact scholar laborious, patient, indefatigable, reserved; and, at the same time, a Protean Wizard, breathing forbidden life into the Tyrian-stained writhings of many an enchanted Lamia! At a thousand points he is the only modern literary figure who draws us towards him with the old Leonardian, Goethean spell.
The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I felt a quality of Cambridge.
When we pass to "Wilhelm Meister," we are in quite a different world. The earlier part of this book has the very stamp of the Goethean "truth and poetry." One can read it side by side with the great "Autobiography" and find the shrewd insight and oracular wisdom quite equally convincing in the invention and the reality.
If it is not Kantian philosophy, it is certainly Goethean. Margaret Fuller was the first American critic, if not the first of all critics, to point out that Goethe in writing "Elective Affinities" designed to show that an evil thought may have consequences as serious and irremediable as an evil action in addition to the well-known homily that evil thoughts lead to evil actions.
Strange that Nordau, in his "Conventional Lies of Civilisation," should echo this aspiration and gush over the Goethean Wahlverwandtschaft the elective affinity of souls almost with the rapture of a Platonist, conceiving love as the soul finding its pre-natal half.
No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean attitude, cannot be described as "cosmic," while that word implies a certain complete yielding to a vague earth-worship. There was nothing vague about Goethe's intimacy, if I may put it so, with the Earth. He and It seemed destined to understand one another most serenely, in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!
We must regard them as dynamic realms of particularly extreme spherical and radial activities. As such they represent metamorphoses, in the Goethean sense, of the levity-gravity interaction represented by the optically visible part of the spectrum.
The Goethean attitude to the Universe is too self-poised and self-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests complete abandonment. It is too what shall I say? too sly and demonic too much inside the little secrets of the great Mother to be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of Titanic whirlwind of embraces.
Natural observation along Goethean lines leads to a form of higher contemplation which unites the second and third stages by nourishing man's ethical being and at the same time furnishing him with useful knowledge-knowledge, that is, which enables him to improve the conditions of the human race on the earth.
This man had come to see that if one held strictly to the Goethean practice of using nothing for the explanation of the plant but what one could read from the plant itself, one must not ascribe to it any sexual process.
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