Like all the really great men of literature, Goethe added some of the
qualities of the man of science to those of the artist, especially the
habit of careful and patient observation of Nature. The great poet
was no mere book-learned speculator. His acquaintance with mineralogy,
geology, botany and osteology, the fruit of long and wide studies, would
have sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate in those
days, if only he could have pleaded ignorance of everything else.
Unfortunately for Goethe's credit with his scientific contemporaries,
and, consequently, for the attention attracted by his work, he did not
come forward as a man of science until the public had ranged him among
the men of literature. And when the little men have thus classified a
big man, they consider that the last word has been said about him; it
appears to the thought hardly decent on his part if he venture to stray
beyond the speciality they have assigned to him. It does not seem to
occur to them that a clear intellect is an engine capable of supplying
power to all sorts of mental factories; nor to admit that, as Goethe
somewhere pathetically remarks, a man may have a right to live for
himself as well as for the public; to follow the line of work that
happens to interest him, rather than that which interests them.
On the face of the matter it is not obvious that the brilliant poet had
less chance of doing good service in natural science than the dullest of
dissectors and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured to indicate,
there was considerable reason, a hundred years ago, for thinking that an
infusion of the artistic way of looking at things might tend to revivify
the somewhat mummified body of technical zoology and botany. Great ideas
were floating about; the artistic apprehension was needed to give
these airy nothings a local habitation and a name; to convert vague
suppositions into definite hypotheses. And I apprehend that it was
just this service which Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the
intermaxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on the metamorphoses of
plants.