Perhaps nothing indicates what I should call Goethe's intellectual
_unhumanity_ so much as his absolute want of sympathy with the progress
of the race. He was but mortal man, however, though he had the head of
Jove, and Pallas Athena might have sprung all armed from it. Once, and
once only, if I remember rightly, in his conversations with Eckermann,
the cause of mankind elicits an expression of faith and hope from him,
in some reference to the future of America. I recollect, on reading the
second part of "Faust" with my friend Abeken (assuredly the most
competent of all expounders of that extraordinary composition), when I
asked him what was the signification of that final cultivation of the
barren sea sand, in Faust's blind old age, and cried, "Is it possible
that he wishes to indicate the hopelessness of all attempt at progress?"
his replying, "I am afraid he was no believer in it." And so it comes
that his letters to Madame von Stein leave one only amazed with the more
sorrowful admiration that the unrivaled genius of the civilized world in
its most civilized age found perfect satisfaction in the inane routine
of the life of a court dignitary in a petty German principality.
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