We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives.  Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance.  To write a true work of fiction even, is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.  A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.  Though I am not much acquainted with the works of Goethe, I should say that it was one of his chief excellences as a writer, that he was satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him.  Most travellers have not self-respect enough to do this simply, and make objects and events stand around them as the centre, but still imagine more favorable positions and relations than the actual ones, and so we get no valuable report from them at all.  In his Italian Travels Goethe jogs along at a snail’s pace, but always mindful that the earth is beneath and the heavens are above him.  His Italy is not merely the fatherland of lazzaroni and virtuosi, and scene of splendid ruins, but a solid turf-clad soil, daily shined on by the sun, and nightly by the moon.  Even the few showers are faithfully recorded.  He speaks as an unconcerned spectator, whose object is faithfully to describe what he sees, and that, for the most part, in the order in which he sees it.  Even his reflections do not interfere with his descriptions.  In one place he speaks of himself as giving so glowing and truthful a description of an old tower to the peasants who had gathered around him, that they who had been born and brought up in the neighborhood must needs look over their shoulders, “that,” to use his own words, “they might behold with their eyes, what I had praised to their ears,”—­“and I added nothing, not even the ivy which for centuries had decorated the walls.”  It would thus be possible for inferior minds to produce invaluable books, if this very moderation were not the evidence of superiority; for the wise are not so much wiser than others as respecters of their own wisdom.  Some, poor in spirit, record plaintively only what has happened to them; but others how they have happened to the universe, and the judgment which they have awarded to circumstances.  Above all, he possessed a hearty good-will to all men, and never wrote a cross or even careless word.  On one occasion the post-boy snivelling, “Signor perdonate, questa e` la mia patria,” he confesses that “to me poor northerner came something tear-like into the eyes.”

Goethe’s whole education and life were those of the artist.  He lacks the unconsciousness of the poet.  In his autobiography he describes accurately the life of the author of Wilhelm Meister.  For as there is in that book, mingled with a rare and serene wisdom, a certain pettiness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom applied to produce a constrained and partial and merely well-bred man,—­a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned