Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 13.djvu/69

Rh at six years of age he doubts the beneficence of the Creator, and at seven, doubts the competence and justice of the world's judgment. He is inventive, poetical, proud, loving, volatile, with a mind open to all influences, swayed by every gust, and yet, while thus swayed as to the direction of his activity, master over that activity. The most diverse characters, the most antagonistic opinions interest him. He is very studious: no bookworm more so; alternately busy with languages, mythology, antiquities, law, philosophy, poetry, and religion; yet he joins in all festive scenes, gets familiar with life in various forms, and stays out late o'nights. He is also troubled by melancholy, dreamy moods forcing him ever and anon into solitude.

Among the dominant characteristics, however, are seriousness, formality, rationality. He is by no means a naughty boy. He gives his parents no tremulous anxiety as to "what will become of him." He seems very much master of himself. It is this which in later years perplexed his critics, who could not reconcile this appearance of self-mastery, this absence of expressed enthusiasm, with their conceptions of a poet. Assuredly he had enthusiasm, if ever man had it: at least, if enthusiasm (being "full of the God") means being filled with a sublime idea, and by its light working steadily. He had little of the other kind of enthusiasm—that insurrection of the feelings carrying away upon their triumphant shoulders the Reason which has no longer power to guide them. And hence it is that whereas the quality which first strikes us in most poets is Emotion, with its caprices, infirmities, and generous errors; the first quality which strikes us in Goethe—the Child and Man, but not the Youth—is Intellect, with its clearness and calmness. He has also a provoking immunity from error. I say provoking, for we all gladly overlook the errors of enthusiasm: some, because these errors appeal to compassion; and