Charles Lamb says, “It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare.” There is much truth in that. Shakespeare, however, is only known to us as a poet. Goethe is a better example, because we know him as a man as well. Indeed, we have a clearer insight into his inmost feelings than we have into those of almost any man that ever lived. If we wish to call up the typical idea of a perfect man we naturally think of Goethe. Whoever came into personal contact with him was ravished of his soul and inspired by the greatness of his mind. Heine, the poet of the senses, greets him as a “fiery spirit with eagle wings, as a genius of the whirlpool from top to toe “; the Christian enthusiast Lavater terms him a genius whose characteristic was love; the sensible Jung-Stilling regrets that so few people were acquainted with the heart of this admirable man with the great, clear eyes, the beautiful brow, and the stately stature; the forcible Klinger writes that posterity will be astounded that such a man ever lived: and the poetical philosopher Jacobi holds it as impossible for anyone who had not seen and heard Goethe to conceive of this extraordinary creation of God. It is ridiculous to desire that he should think and act otherwise than he does; that does not mean that no change could make him finer or better, but that no change would be possible any more than the flower could bloom otherwise, the grain could ripen otherwise, or the tree could grow and crown itself otherwise than it does. When he would walk down the Rhine between Lavater and Basedow—” a prophet to the right, a prophet to the left, and the world-child in the middle “—there was a picture of how he understood everybody and had something to proffer to everybody. It was because he aimed at all-sidedness, at a full and free humanity; and Wieland acknowledges that never in God’s world did a son of man show himself who so combined all that was good and all that was mighty, who so deeply impressed himself upon every soul, and yet who lived so entirely within himself.

In entering upon the psychological analysis of Goethe, we are justified in assuming as a premise that we have here a case of a mentally sound man. Whatever we may find, however uncommon it may be, must be set down as a healthy condition. If, then, Goethe, as we have seen, was subject to occasional illusions of sense, it would be illogical to infer that Goethe was insane. We must rather conclude that we have been in error if we have been supposing that deceptions of sense occur only in the insane; and the problem set before us is to ascertain the distinction between the hallucinations of the sane and the hallucinations of the insane.