In a preceding paper I have sought to trace the main lines of spiritual
growth, as these appear in Goethe's great picture. But is such growth
possible in this world? Do the circumstances in which modern men are
placed comport with it? Or is it, perhaps, a cherub only _painted_ with
wings, and despite the laws of anatomy? These questions are pertinent.
It concerns us little to know what results the crescent powers of life
might produce, if, by good luck, Eden rather than our struggling
century, another world instead of this world, were here. This world, it
happens, is here undoubtedly; our century and our place in it are facts,
which decline to take their leave, bid them good morning and show them
the door how one may. Let us know, then, what of good sufficing may be
achieved in their company. If Goethe's picture be only a picture, and
not a possibility, we will be pleased with him, provided his work prove
pleasant; we will partake of his literary dessert, and give him his meed
of languid praise. But if, on the other hand, his book be written in
full, unblinking view of all that is fixed and limitary in man and
around him, and if, in face of this, it conduct growth to its
consummation, then we may give him something better than any
praise,--namely, heed.
Is it, then, written in this spirit of reality? In proof that it is so,
I call to witness the most poignant reproach, save one, ever uttered
against it by a superior man. Novalis censured it as "thoroughly modern
and prosaic." Well, _on one side_, it is so,--just as modern and prosaic
as the modern world and actual European civilization. What is this but
to say that Goethe faces the facts? What is it but to say that he
accepts the conditions of his problem? He is to show that the high
possibilities of growth can be realized _here_. To run off, get up a
fancy world, and then picture these possibilities as coming to fruition
_there_, would be a mere toying with his readers. Here is modern
civilization, with its fixed forms, its rigid limits, its traditional
mechanisms. Here is this life, where men make, execute, and obey laws,
own and manage property, buy and sell, plant, sail, build, marry and
beget children and maintain households, pay taxes, keep out of debt, if
they are wise, and go to the poorhouse, or beg, or do worse, if they are
unwise or unfortunate. Here such trivialities as starched collars,
blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society
has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and
connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare
exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. One cannot even go into
the street in a wilfully strange costume, without establishing
repulsions and balking relations between him and his neighbors which
destroy their use to each other. Every man is bound to the actual form
of society by his necessities at least, if not by his good-will.
To step violently out of all this puts one in a social vacuum,--a
position in which few respire well, while most either perish or become
in some degree monstrous. It is necessary that one should live and work
with his fellows, if he is to obtain the largest growth. On the other
hand, to be merely in and of this--a wheel, spoke, or screw, in this
vast social mechanism--makes one, not a man, but a thing, and precludes
all growth but such as is obscure and indirect. Thousands, indeed, have
no desire but to obtain some advantageous place in this machinery.
Meanwhile this enormous conventional civilization strives, and must
strive, to make every soul its puppet. Let each fall into the routine,
pursue it in some shining manner, asking no radical questions, and he
shall have his heart's desire. "Blessed is he," it cries, "who
handsomely and with his whole soul reads upwards from man to position
and estate,--from man to millionnaire, judge, lord, bishop! Cursed is he
who questions, who aims to strike down beneath this great mechanism, and
to connect himself with the primal resources of his being! There are no
such resources. It is a wickedness to dream of them. Man has no root but
in tradition and custom, no blessing but in serving them."
As that assurance is taken, and as that spirit prevails, man forfeits
his manhood. His life becomes mechanical. Ideas disappear in the forms
that once embodied them; imagination is buried beneath symbol; belief
dies of creed, and morality of custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide
pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting,
and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is
properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction,
filling all the air with the breath of their foulness.
The earlier part of the eighteenth century found all Europe in this
stage. Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let
him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery.
Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh--with a screaming wail inside
it, if one can hear well--rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up,
toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true;
then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.
Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of
reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few
noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life.
"Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let
us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,--momentarily
created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."
The noblest type I have ever known of this _extra-vagance_, this
wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity,
as of a newborn babe,--with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my
observation,--with his indomitable persistency,--by the aid also of that
all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his
priceless gift,--he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an
indescribable charm. In him it came at once to beauty and to
consecration.
Yet even he must leave out marriage, to make his scheme of life
practicable. He must ignore Nature's demand that humanity continue, or
recognize it only with loathing. "Marriage is that!" said he to a
friend,--and held up a carrion-flower.
Moreover, the success of his life--nay, the very quality of his
being--implied New England and its civilization. To suppose him born
among the Flathead Indians were to suppose _him_, the Thoreau of our
love and pride, unborn still. The civilization he slighted was an air
that he breathed; it was implied, as impulse and audience, in those
books of his, wherein he enshrined his spirit, and whereby he kept its
health.
A fixed social order is indirectly necessary even to him who, by rare
gifts of Nature, can stand nobly and unfalteringly aside from it. And it
is directly, instantly necessary to him who, either by less power of
self-support or by a more flowing human sympathy, _must_ live with men,
and _must_ comply with the conditions by which social connection is
preserved.
The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the
primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous,
engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few
elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The
reconciling word,--is there a reconciling word?
Here, now, comes one who answers, Yes. And he answers thus, not by a
bald assertion, but by a picture wherein these opposites lose their
antagonism,--by a picture which is true to both, yet embraces both, and
shapes them into a unity. That is Goethe. This attempt represents the
grand _nisus_ of his life. It is most fully made in "Wilhelm Meister."
Above the world he places the growing spirit of man, the vessel of all
uses, with his resource in eternal Nature. Then he seizes with a
sovereign hand upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it
all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization,
he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true
end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in
all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with
growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the
harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that
jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand
rolling organ-harmonies of life.
That he succeeds to perfection I do not say. I could find fault enough
with his book, if there were either time or need. There is no need: its
faults are obvious. In binding himself by such unsparing oaths to
recognize and admit all the outward truth of society, he has, indeed,
grappled with the whole problem, but also made its solution a little
cumbrous and incomplete. Nay, this which he so admits in his picture was
also sufficiently, perhaps a touch more than sufficiently, admitted in
his own being. He would have been a conventionalist and epicurean,
unless he had been a seer. He would have been a mere man of the world,
had he not been Goethe. But whereas a man of the world reads up from man
to dignity, estate, and social advantage, he reverses the process, and
reads up from these to man. Say that he does it with some stammering,
with some want of the last nicety. What then? It were enough, if he set
forth upon the true road, though his own strength fail before the end is
reached. It is enough, if, falling midway, even though it be by excess
of the earthly weight he bears, he still point forward, and his voice
out of the dust whisper, "There lies your way!" This alone makes him a
benefactor of mankind.
This specific aim of Goethe's work makes it, indeed, a novel.
Conventional society and the actual conditions of life are, with respect
to eternal truth, but the _novelties_ of time. The novelist is to
picture these, and, in picturing, subordinate them to that which is
perpetual and inspiring. Just so far as he opens the ravishing
possibilities of life in commanding reconciliation with the formal
civilization of a particular time, he does his true work.
The function of the poet is different. His business it is simply to
_refresh_ the spirit of man. To its lip he holds the purest ichors of
existence; with ennobling draughts of awe, pity, sympathy, and joy, he
quickens its blood and strengthens its vital assimilations. The
particular circumstances he uses are merely the cup wherein this wine of
life is contained. This he may obtain as most easily he can; the world
is all before him where to choose.
The novelist has no such liberty. His business it is to find the ideal
possibilities of man _here_, in the midst of actual society. He shall
teach us to free the heart, while respecting the bonds of circumstance.
And the more strictly he clings to that which is central in man on the
one hand, and the more broadly and faithfully he embraces the existing
prosaic limitations on the other, the more his work answers to the whole
nature of his function. Goethe has done the latter thoroughly, his
accusers themselves being judges; that he has done the other, and how he
has done it, I have sought to show in a preceding paper. He looks on
actual men and actual society with an eye of piercing observation; he
depicts them with remorseless verity; and through and by all builds,
builds at the great architectures of spiritual growth.
Hence the difference between him and satirists like Thackeray, who
equal him in keenness of observation, are not behind him in verity of
report, while surpassing him often in pictorial effect,--but who bring
to the picture out of themselves only a noble indignation against
baseness. They contemn; he uses. They cry, "Fie!" upon unclean
substances; he ploughs the offence into the soil, and sows wheat over
it. They see the world as it is; he sees it, and through it. They probe
sores; he leads forth into the air and the sunshine. They tinge the
cheek with blushes of honorable shame; he paints it with the glow of
wholesome activity. Their point of view is that of pathology; his, that
of physiology. The great satirists, at best, give a medicine to
sickness; Goethe gives a task to health. They open a door into a
hospital; he opens a door _out_ of one, and cries, "Lo, the green earth
and blue heaven, the fields of labor, the skies of growth!"
On the other hand, by this relentless fidelity to observation, by his
stern refusal to give men supposititious qualities and characters, by
his resolute acceptance of European civilization, by his unalterable
determination to practicable results, by always limiting himself _to
that which all superior men might be expected not merely to read of with
gusto, but to do_, he is widely differenced from novelists like the
authoress of "Consuelo." He does not propose to furnish a moral luxury,
over which at the close one may smack the lips, and cry, "How sweet!" No
gardener's manual ever looked more simply to results. His aim is, to get
something _done_, to get _all_ done which he suggests. Accordingly, he
does not gratify us with vasty magnanimities, holy beggaries voluntarily
assumed, Bouddhistic "missions"; he shows us no more than high-minded,
incorruptible men, fixed in their regards upon the high ends of life,
established in noble, fruitful fellowship, willing and glad to help
others so far as they can clearly see their way, not making public
distribution of their property, but managing it so that it shall in
themselves and others serve culture, health, and all well-being of body
and mind. Wealth here is a trust; it is held for use; its uses are, to
subserve the high ends of Nature in the spirit of man. Lothario seeks
association with all who can aid him in these applications. So intent is
he, that he _loves_ Theresa because she has a genius at once for
economizing means and for seeing where they may be applied to the
service of the more common natures. He keeps the great-minded,
penetrating, providential Abbé in his pay, that this inevitable eye may
distinguish for him the more capable natures, and find out whether or
how they may be forwarded on their proper paths. Here are no sublime
professions, but a steady, modest, resolute, discriminate doing.
For suggestion of what one may really _do_, and for impelling one toward
the practicable best, I find this book worth a moonful of "Consuelos."
The latter work has, indeed, beautiful pictures; and simply as a picture
of a fresh, sweet, young life, it is charming. But in its aim at a
higher import I find it simply an arrow shot into the air, going _so_
high, but at--nothing! If one crave a moral luxury, it is here. If he
desire a lash for egoism, this, perhaps, is also here. If he is already
praying the heavens for a sufficing worth and work in life, and is
asking only the _what_ and _how_, this book, taken in connection with
its sequel, says, "Distribute your property, and begin wandering about
and 'doing good.'"
I decline. After due consideration, I have fully determined to own a
house, and provide each day a respectable dinner for my table, if the
fates agree; to secure, still in submission to the fates, such a
competency as will give me leisure for the best work I can do; to
further justice and general well-being, so far as is in me to further or
hinder, but always on the basis of the existing civilization; to cherish
sympathy and good-will in myself, and in others by cherishing them in
myself; to help another when I clearly can; and to give, when what I
give will obviously do more service toward the high ends of life, in
the hands of another than in my own. Toward carrying out these purposes
"Consuelo" has not given me a hint, not one; "Wilhelm Meister" has given
me invaluable hints. Therefore I feel no great gratitude to the one, and
am profoundly grateful to the other.
It is not the mere absence of suffering, it is not a pound of beef on
every peasant's plate, that makes life worth living. Health, happiness,
even education, however diffused, do not alone make life worth living.
Tell me the quality of a man's happiness before I can very rapturously
congratulate him upon it; tell me the quality of his suffering before I
can grieve over it without solace. Noble pain is worth more than ignoble
pleasure; and there is a health in the _dying_ Schiller which beggars in
comparison that of the fat cattle on a thousand hills. All the world
might be well fed, well clothed, well sheltered, and very properly
behaved, and be a pitiful world nevertheless, were this all.
Let us get out of this business of merely improving _conditions_. There
are two things which make life worth living. First, the absolute worth
and significance of man's spirit in its harmonious completeness; and
hence the absolute value of culture and growth in the deepest sense of
the words. Secondly, the relevancy of actual experience and the actual
world to these ends. Goethe attends to both these, and to both in a
spirit of great sanity. He fixes his eye with imperturbable steadiness
on the central fact, then with serene, intrepid modesty suggests the
relevancy to this of the world as it is around us, and _then trusts the
healthy attraction of the higher to modify and better the lower_. Give
man, he says, something to work _for_, namely, the high uses of his
spirit; give him next something to work _with_, namely, actual
civilization, the powers, limits, and conditions which actually exist in
and around him; and if these instruments be poor, be sure he will begin
to improve upon them, the moment he has found somewhat inspiring and
sufficing to do with them. Actual conditions will improve precisely in
proportion as _all_ conditions are utilized, are placed in relations of
service to a result which contents the soul of men. And to establish in
this relation all the existing conditions of life, natural and
artificial, is the task which Goethe has undertaken.
I invite the reader to dwell upon this fact, that, the moment life has
an inspiring significance, and the moment also the men, industries, and
conditions around us become instrumental toward resolving that, in this
moment one must begin, so far as he may, bettering these conditions. If
I hire a man to work in my garden, how much is it worth to me, if he
bring not merely his hands and gardening skill, but also an appreciable
soul, with him! So soon as that fact is apparent, fruitful relations are
established between us, and sympathies begin to fly like bees, bearing
pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be
degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I _can_
make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow anywhere a
disserviceable condition, when I could make it serviceable? Not in full
view of the fact that all which thwarts the inward being of another
thwarts me. If there be in the world a man who might write a grand book,
but through ill conditions cannot write it, then in me and you a door
will remain closed, which might have opened--who knows upon what
treasure? With the high ends of life before him, no man can _afford_ to
be selfish. With the fact before him that formal civilization is
instrumental, no man can afford to run away from it. With the fact in
view that each man needs every other, and needs that every other should
do and be the best he can, no one can afford to withhold help, where it
can be rendered. Finally, seeing that means are limited, and that the
means and services which are crammed into others, without being
spiritually assimilated, breed only indigestion, no one must throw his
services about at random, but see where Nature has prepared the way for
him, and there in modesty do what he can.
To strike the connection, then, between the inward and the outward,
between the spiritual and the conventional, between man and society,
between moral possibility and formal civilization,--to give growth, with
all its immortal issues, a place, and means, and opportunity,--this was
Goethe's aim; and if the execution be less than perfect, as I admit, it
yet suggests the whole; and if the shortcoming be due in part to his
personal imperfections, which doubtless may be affirmed, it yet does not
mar the sincerity of his effort. His hand trembles, his aim is not
nicely sure, but it is an aim at the right object nevertheless.
There are limits and conditions in man, as well as around him, to which
the like justice is done. Such are Special Character, Natural Degree and
Vocation, Moral Imperfection, and Limitation of Self-Knowledge. Each of
these plays a part of vast importance in life; each is portrayed and
used in Goethe's picture. But, though with reluctance, I must merely
name and pass them by. Enough to say here, that he sees them and sees
through them. Enough that they appear, and as means and material. Nor
does he merely distinguish and harp upon them, after the hard analytic
fashion one would use here; but, as the violinist sweeps all the strings
of his instrument, not to show that one sounds _so_ and another _so_,
but out of all to bring a complete melody, so does this master touch the
chords of life, and, in thus recognizing, bring out of them the
melodious completeness of a human soul.
One inquiry remains. What of inspirational impulse does Goethe bring to
his work? He depicts growth; what leads him to do so? Is it nothing but
cold curiosity? and does he leave the reader in a like mood? Or is he
commanded by some imperial inward necessity? and does he awaken in the
reader a like noble necessity, not indeed to write, but to _live_?
The inspiration which he feels and communicates is art infinite,
unspeakable reverence for Personality, for the completed, spiritual
reality of man. Literally unspeakable, it is the silent spirit in which
he writes, sovereign in him and in his work,--the soul of every
sentence, and professed in none. You find it scarcely otherwise than in
his manner of treating his material. But there you _may_ find it: the
silent, majestic homage that he pays to every _real_ grace and spiritual
accomplishment of man or woman. Any smallest trait of this is delineated
with a heed that makes no account of time or pains, with a venerating
fidelity and religious care that _unutterably_ imply its preciousness.
Indeed, it is one point of his art to bestow elaborate, reverential
attention upon some minor grace of manhood or womanhood, that one may
say, "If this be of such price, how priceless is the whole!" He resorts
habitually to this inferential suggestion,--puzzling hasty readers, who
think him frivolously exalting little things, rather than hinting beyond
all power of direct speech at the worth of the greater. In landscape
paintings a bush in the foreground may occupy more space than a whole
range of mountains in the distance: perhaps the bush is there to show
the scale of the drawing, and intimate the greatness, rather than
littleness, of the mountains.
The undertone of every page, should we mask its force in hortatives,
would be,--"Buy manhood; buy verity and completeness of being; buy
spiritual endowment and accomplishment; buy insight and clearness of
heart and wholeness of spirit; pay ease, estimation, estate,--never
consider what you pay: for though pleasure is not despicable, though
wealth, leisure, and social regard are good, yet there is no tint of
inherent grace, no grain nor atom of man's spiritual substance, but it
outweighs kingdoms, outweighs all that is external to itself."
But hortatives and assertions represent feebly, and without truth of
tone, the subtile, sovereign persuasion of the book. This is said
sovereignly by _not_ being said expressly. We are at pains to affirm
only that which may be conceived of as doubtful, therefore admit a
certain doubtfulness by the act of asserting. When one begins to
asseverate his honesty, his hearers begin to question it. The last
persuasion lies in assumptions,--not in assumptions made consciously and
with effort, but in those which one makes because he cannot help it, and
even without being too much aware what he does. All that a man of power
assumes utterly, so that he were not himself without assuming it, he
will impress upon others with a persuasion that has in it somewhat of
the infinite. Jesus never said, "There is a God,"--nor even, "God is our
Father,"--nor even, "Man is immortal"; he took all this as implicit
basis of labor and prayer. Implicit assumptions rule the world; they
build and destroy cities, make and unmake empires, open and close
epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new
truth to this degree,--made it for him an _inevitable_ assumption--then
there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to
Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and
is a soul of eloquence in his book.
Nor can we set this aside as a piece of blind and gratuitous sentiment.
Blind and gratuitous sentiment is clearly not his forte. Every line of
every page exhibits to us a man who has betaken himself, once for all,
to the use of his eyes. All sentiment, as such, he ruled back, with a
sovereign energy, into his heart,--and then, as it were, compelling his
heart into his eyes, made it an organ for discerning truth. His head was
an observatory, and every power of his soul did duty there. He enjoyed,
he suffered, intensely; but behind joy and pain alike lay the sleepless
questioner, demanding of each its message. And this, the supreme
function, the exceeding praise and preciousness of the man, the one
thing that he was born to do, and religiously did, this has been made
his chief reproach.
No zealot, then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we
here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless
eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the
fact _is_. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad;
if good, he will perceive and respect its goodness. A man, for once,
equal to the act of seeing! Having, as the indispensable preliminary,
encountered himself, and victoriously fought on all the fields of his
being the battle against self-deception, he now comes armed with new and
strange powers of vision to encounter life and the world,--ready either
to soar of dive,--above no fact, beneath none, by none appalled, by none
dazzled,--a falcon, whose prey is truth, and whose wing and eye are well
mated. And _he_ it is who sets that ineffable price on the being of a
real man.
This is manifested in many ways, all of them silent, rather than
obstreperous and obtrusive. It is shown by a certain gracious, ineffable
expectation with which for the first time he approaches any human soul,
as if unknown and incalculable possibilities were opening here; by a
noble ceremonial which he ever observes toward his higher characters,
standing uncovered in their presence; by the space in his eye, not
altogether measurable, which a man of worth is perceived to fill. Each
of his principal characters has an atmosphere about him, like the earth
itself; each has a vast perspective, and rounds off into mystery and
depths of including sky.
The common novelist holds his characters in the palm of his hand, as he
would his watch; winds them up, regulates, pockets them, is exceedingly
handy with them. He may continue some little, pitiful puzzle about them
for his readers; but _he_ can see over, under, around them, and can make
them stop or go, tick or be silent, altogether at pleasure. To Goethe
his characters are as intelligible and as mysterious as Nature herself.
He sees them, studies them, and with an eye how penetrating, how subtile
and sure! But over, under, and around them he would hold it for no less
than a profanity to pretend that he sees. They come upon the scene to
prove what they are; he and the reader study them together; and when
best known, their possibilities are obviously unexhausted, the unknown
remains in them still. They go forward into their future, with a real
future before them, with an unexplained life to live: not goblets whose
contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the
traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man
of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly
distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole
delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book
closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of
very definite limitations, and yet also of possibilities which the
future will ever be defining.
In this sense, the book, almost alone among novels, consists with the
hope of immortality. In average novels, there is nothing left of the
hero when the book ends. "He is utterly married," as "Eothen" says.
Utterly, sure enough! He ends at the altar, like a burnt-out candle over
which the priest puts an extinguisher to keep it from smoking. One yawns
over the last page, not considering himself any longer in company. Think
of giving perpetuity to such lives! What could they do but get
unmarried, and begin fussing at courtship again? But when Goethe's
characters leave the stage, they seem to be rather entering upon life
than quitting it; possibility opens, expectation runs before them, and
our interest grows where observation ceases.
Goethe looks at Personality as through a telescope, and sees it shade
away, beyond its cosmic systems, into star-dust and shining nebulæ; he
inspects it as with a microscope, and on that side also resolves it only
in part. He brings to it all the most spacious, all the most delicate
interpretations of his wit, yet confessedly leaves more beyond.
Now it is this large-eyed, liberal regard of man, this grand, childlike,
all-credent appreciation, which distinguishes the earlier and Scriptural
literatures. Abraham fills up all the space between earth and heaven.
Later, we arrive at limitations and secondary laws; we heap these up
till the primal fact is obscured, is hidden by them. Then ensues an
impression of man's littleness, emptiness, insignificance, utter,
mechanical limitation. Then sharp-eyed gentlemen discover that man has a
trick of dressing up his littleness in large terms,--liberty, intuition,
inspiration, immortality,--and that he only is a philosopher, who cannot
be deceived by this shallow stratagem. Your "philosopher" sees what men
are made of. Populaces may fancy that man is central in the world, that
he is the all-containing vessel of its uses: but your philosopher,
admirable gentleman, sees through all that; he is superior to any such
vulgar partiality for that particular species of insect to which he
happens to belong. "A fly thinks himself the greatest of created
beings," says philosopher; "man flatters himself in the same way; but I,
I am not merely man, I am philosopher, and know better."
The early seers and poets had not attained to this sublime
superciliousness of self-contempt; for this, of course, is a fruit to be
borne only by the "progress of the species." They are still weak enough
to believe in gods and godlike men, in spirit and inspiration, in the
ineffable fulness and meaning of a noble life, in the cosmic
relationship of man, in the _divineness_ of speech and thought. In their
books man is placed in a large light; honor and estimation come to him
out of the heavens; what he does, if it be in any profound way
characteristic, is told without misgiving, without fear to be
superfluous; he is the care, or even the companion, of the immortals. To
go forth, therefore, from our little cells of criticism and controversy,
and to enter upon the pages where man's being appears so spacious and
significant,--where, at length, it is really _imagined_,--is like
leaving stove-heated, paper-walled rooms, and passing out beneath the
blue cope and into the sweet air of heaven.
Quite this epic boldness and wholeness we cannot attribute to Goethe. He
is still a little straitened, a little pestered by the doubting and
critical optics which our time turns upon man, a little victimized by
his knowledge of limitary conditions and secondary laws. Nevertheless, a
noble man is not to his eye "contained between hat and boots," but is of
untold depth and dimension. He indicates traits of the soul with that
repose in his facts and respect for them which Lyell shows in spelling
out terrestrial history, or Herschel in tracing that of the solar
system. Observe how he relates the plays of a child,--with what grave,
imperial respect, with what undoubting, reverential minuteness! He does
not say, "Bear with me, ladies and gentlemen; I will come to something
of importance soon." This is important,--the formation of suns not more
so.
In this respect he stands in wide contrast to the prevailing tone of the
time. It seems right and admirable that Tyndale should risk life and
limb in learning the laws of glaciers, that large-brained Agassiz should
pursue for years, if need be, his microscopic researches into the
natural history of turtles; and were life or eyesight lost so, we should
all say, "Lost, but well and worthily." But ask a conclave of sober
_savans_ to listen to reports on the natural-spiritual history of babies
and little children,--ask them to join, one and all, in this piece of
discovery, spending labor and lifetime in watching the sports, the
moods, the imaginations, the fanciful loves and fears, the whole baby
unfolding of these budding revelations of divine uses in Nature,--and
see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be
your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and
still escape the lunatic asylum,--_provided_ you do so in the way of
pleasantry. In this case, the gravest _savant_, if he have children, may
condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this
_in his quality of man of science_, and no less seriously than he would
investigate the history of mud-worms, and you become ridiculous in his
eyes.
Goethe is guiltless of this inversion of interest. Truth of outward
Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really
_imagine_ men,--that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere
bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and a pound of that, but so
that the illimitable possibilities and immortal ancestries of man shall
look forth from their eyes, shall show in their features, and give to
them a certain grace of the infinite. The powers which created for the
Greeks their gods are active in him, even in his observation of men; and
this gives him that other eye, without which the effigies of men are
seen, but never man himself. And because he has this divine eye for the
inner reality of personal being, and yet also that eagle eye of his for
conditions and limits,--because he can see man as central in Nature, the
sum of all uses, the vessel of all significance, and yet has no
"carpenter theory" of the universe,--and because he can discern the
substance and the _revealing_ form of man, while yet no satirist sees
more clearly man's accidental and concealing form,--because of this,
history comes in him to new blood, regaining its inspirations without
forfeiture of its experience.
Carlyle has the same eye, but less creative, and tinctured always with
the special humors of his temperament; yet the attitude he can hold
toward a human personality, the spirit in which he can contemplate it,
gives that to his books which will keep them alive, I think, while the
world lasts.
Among the recent writers of prose fiction in England, I know of but one
who, in a degree worth naming in this connection, has regarded and
delineated persons in the large, old, believing way. That one is the
author of "Counterparts." In many respects her book seems to me weak;
its theories are crude, its tone extravagant. But man and woman are
wonderful to her; and when she names them in full voice of admiration,
one thinks he has never heard the words before. And this merit is so
commanding, that, despite faults and imbecilities, it renders the book
almost unique in excellence. Sarona is impossible: thanks for that noble
impossibility! Impossible, he yet embodies more reality, more true
suggestion of human possibility and resource, than a whole swarming
limbo of the ordinary heroes of fiction,--very credible, and the more's
the pity! He is finely _imagined_, and poorly _conceived_,--true, that
is, to the inspiring substance of man, but not true to his limitary
form: for imagination gives the revealing form, conception the form
which limits and conceals.
In spite, therefore, of marked infirmities and extravagances, the book
remains a superior, perhaps a great work. The writer can look at a human
existence with childlike, all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative
vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her,
beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical
doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse,
descended on the one side from Memory, or superficial fact, but on the
other from Zeus, the _soul_ of fact; and being gifted to discern the
divine halo on the brows of humanity, she rightly obtains the laurel
upon her own.
Goethe, at least, rivals her in this Olympic intelligence, while he
combines it with a practical wisdom far profounder, with a survey and
fulness of knowledge incomparably wider and more various, with a tone
tempered to the last sobriety, for the whole of actual life, which no
man of the world ever surpassed, and no seer ever equalled. And thus I
must abide in my opinion, that he has given us the one prose epic of the
world, up to this date. In other words, he has best reconciled World
with the final vessel of its uses, Man,--and best reconciled actual
civilization and the fixed conditions of man with the uses of that in
which all the meaning of his existence is summed, his seeing and unseen
spirit.