Whoever is turned from his natural path may, if he will, gain in largeness and depth what he loses in simple beauty; and so it was with Goethe. Faust became a wiser if not a nobler being. Werther, who must die because life was not wide enough and rich enough in love for him, ends as the Meister of the Wanderjahre, well content to be one never inadequate to the occasion, "help-full, comfort-full."
A great change was, during these years, perceptible to his friends in the character of Goethe. From being always "either too volatile or infatuated," he retreated into a self-collected state, which seemed at first even icy to those around him. No longer he darted about him the lightnings of his genius, but sat Jove-like and calm, with the thunderbolts grasped in his hand, and the eagle gathered to his feet. His freakish wit was subdued into a calm and even cold irony; his multiplied relations no longer permitted him to abandon himself to any; the minister and courtier could not expatiate in the free regions of invention, and bring upon paper the signs of his higher life, without subjecting himself to an artificial process of isolation. Obliged to economy of time and means, he made of his intimates not objects of devout tenderness, of disinterested care, but the crammers and feeders of his intellect. The world was to him an arena or a studio, but not a temple.
Had Goethe entered upon practical life from the dictate of his spirit, which bade him not be a mere author, but a living, loving man, that had all been well. But he must also be a man of the world, and nothing can be more unfavorable to true manhood than this ambition. The citizen, the hero, the general, the poet, all these are in true relations; but what is called being a man of the world is to truckle to it, not truly to serve it.
Thus fettered in false relations, detained from retirement upon the centre of his being, yet so relieved from the early pressure of his great thoughts as to pity more pious souls for being restless seekers, no wonder that he wrote,--
"Es ist dafür gesorgt dass die Bäume nicht in den Himmel wachsen."
"Care is taken that the trees grow not up into the heavens." Ay, Goethe, but in proportion to their force of aspiration is their height.