We found much that was true and convincing in Goethe’s words, and were very willing to consider the subject in that light.  After dinner, and when the rest of the party had departed, I remained sitting with Goethe, and conversed with him on various interesting topics.

We discoursed upon English literature, on the greatness of Shakespeare, and on the unfavorable position held by all English dramatic authors who had appeared after that poetical giant.

“A dramatic talent of any importance,” said Goethe, “could not forbear to notice Shakespeare’s works, nay, could not forbear to study them.  Having studied them, he must be aware that Shakespeare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, in all its heights and depths, and that, in fact, there remains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do.  And how could one get courage only to put pen to paper, if one were conscious in an earnest, appreciating spirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable excellences were already in existence!

“It fared better with me fifty years ago in my own dear Germany.  I could soon come to an end with all that then existed; it could not long awe me, or occupy my attention.  I soon left behind me German literature, and the study of it, and turned my thoughts to life and to production.  So on and on I went in my own natural development, and on and on I fashioned the productions of epoch after epoch.  And at every step of life and development, my standard of excellence was not much higher than what at such step I was able to attain.  But had I been born an Englishman, and had all those numerous masterpieces been brought before me in all their power, at my first dawn of youthful consciousness, they would have overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do.  I could not have gone on with such fresh light-heartedness, but should have had to bethink myself, and look about for a long time, to find some new outlet.”

I turned the conversation back to Shakespeare.  “When one, to some degree, disengages him from English literature,” said I, “and considers him transformed into a German, one cannot fail to look upon his gigantic greatness as a miracle.  But if one seeks him in his home, transplants oneself to the soil of his country, and to the atmosphere of the century in which he lived; further, if one studies his contemporaries, and his immediate successors, and inhales the force wafted to us from Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare still, indeed, appears a being of the most exalted magnitude; but still, one arrives at the conviction that many of the wonders of his genius are, in some measure, accessible, and that much is due to the powerfully productive atmosphere of his age and time.”

“You are perfectly right,” returned Goethe.  “It is with Shakespeare as with the mountains of Switzerland.  Transplant Mont Blanc at once into the large plain of Lueneburg Heath, and we should find no words to express our wonder at its magnitude.  Seek it, however, in its gigantic home, go to it over its immense neighbors, the Jungfrau, the Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, St. Gotthard, and Monte Rosa; Mont Blanc will, indeed, still remain a giant, but it will no longer produce in us such amazement.”