If we ask,—for this, after all, is the capital question of criticism,—What has Goethe done to make us better? the answer is: He has made each of us aspire and endeavor to be no fragment of manhood, but a man; he has taught us that to squander ourselves in vain desires is the road to spiritual poverty; that to discover our appropriate work, and to embody our passion in such work, is the way to true wealth; that such passion and such toil must be not servile, but glad and free; that the use of our intelligence is not chiefly to destroy, but to guide our activity in construction; and that in doing our best work we incorporate ourselves in the best possible way in the life of our fellows. Such lessons may seem obvious; but they had not been taught by Goethe's great predecessors, Voltaire and Rousseau. Goethe, unlike Voltaire, inculcates reverence and love; unlike Rousseau, he teaches us to see objects clearly as they are, he trains us to sanity. And Europe needed sanity in the days of Revolution and in the days which followed of Reaction. Sanity for the imagination Goethe found in classical art. The young leader of the Romantic revival in Germany resigned his leadership; he seemed to his contemporaries to have lost the fire and impulse of his youth; his work was found cold and formal. A great change had indeed taken place within him; but his ardor had only grown steadier and stronger, extending now to every part of his complex nature. The change was a transition from what is merely inward and personal to what is outward and general. Goethe cared[Pg 6389] less than formerly to fling out his private passions, and cared more to comprehend the world and human life and to interpret these through art. He did not go into bondage under the authority of the ancients; but he found their methods right, and he endeavored to work as they had worked. For a time the reaction carried him too far: in seeking for what is general, he sometimes passed on to what is abstract, and so was forced into the error of offering symbols to represent these abstractions, instead of bodying forth his ideas in imaginative creations. But in the noble drama of 'Iphigenie,' in the epic-idyll of 'Hermann und Dorothea,' and in many of the ballads written during his period of close companionship with Schiller, we have examples of art at once modern in sentiment and classical in method.