'The whole! The whole!' was Goethe's frequent exclamation--'life! action! being!--the living whole, not the dead parts!' He was for ever decrying mere thought, mere intellect, mere cleverness. And yet of all moderns what greater intellect, what greater thinker, can we name than Goethe himself? Seldom, perhaps never, has there existed a mortal so many-sided. 'In such manifold directions'--he wrote to his friend Jacobi--'does my nature move, that I cannot be satisfied with _one_ single mode of thought. As poet and artist I am polytheist; as a student of Nature I am pantheist. When I need a God for my personal nature, as a moral and spiritual human being, He also exists for me. Heaven and earth are such an immense realm that it can only be grasped by the collective intelligence of all intelligent beings.' Such 'collective intelligence' Goethe perhaps more nearly possessed than any other human being has done. The lordly pleasure-house which he built for his soul was such as Tennyson describes (and his words refer of course to Goethe): Full of great rooms and small the palace stood, All various, each a perfect whole From living Nature, fit for every mood And change of my still soul. And wonderfully true are those other lines of Tennyson--but rather bitter, as perhaps was to be expected of Tennyson when he was describing a great character with which he had so little sympathy: I take possession of man's mind and deed. I care not what the sects may brawl. I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all. To Goethe all things, both in Nature and in Art were but transitory reflexions of the real and eternal. 'Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis'--all things transitory are but a parable, an allegory of truth and reality--such are some of the last words of his great Poem; and thus too he regarded his own poetry. 'I have,' he said, 'always regarded all that I have produced as merely symbolic, and I did not much care whether what I made were pots or dishes.' Even that life-poem of his, _Faust_, which he planned and began as a young man of about twenty-five, and the last lines of which he wrote a few months before his death, aged eighty-two, only represents (as indeed do all great works of art) _one_ aspect of belief--or perhaps I should rather say a certain number of truth's innumerable aspects, none of them claiming to afford a full vision, and not a few of them apparently contradictory; for, as both Plato and Shakespeare tell us, truth cannot be directly stated: it lies, as it were, in equipoise between contradictory statements: For no thought is contented. The better sort, As thoughts of things divine ... do set the word Against the word.