ABSTRACT
In Biographia Literaria Coleridge makes the suggestive statement that "there have been men in all ages who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution." Such a man was Goethe. Goethe's awareness is to be distinguished from hostility in any sense. It is in contrast, for instance, to Irving Babbitt's view that this spiritual revolution was simply an aberration, a seduction from the proper concerns of men. If Goethe was drawn to Byron's demonic power, he was ambivalently responsive to Byron's sentimental side. With the instinct of the doctor, Goethe also saw this sentimentality as hypochondria. Before Byron had awakened to find himself famous, Goethe had already anatomized this hypochondria in The Sorrows of Werther, a work that has close kinship with Childe Harold. If Goethe's wisdom irritates the modern sensibility, it is because the self-possession on which it is based is old-fashioned.
