It may be that I have never read to the core any one grand,
representative book. How, indeed, amid the tumult and toss of our
sea-sick life, is one to do so? How, again, while the presses of all
literary capitals swarm with books that in one way or another demand
attention, shall one do justice to books which are to be read as life is
lived,--_not_ in a minute? Only by some hardihood can one pronounce it
possible. But if to any great book I have done this justice, it is to
that above named.
At the first reading, "Wilhelm Meister," as a whole, was quite opaque to
me, while some of the details were unpleasing, and the coolness of tone
seemed to betoken coldness of heart; and it was only the observations
and aphorisms, scattered like a profusion of pearls through the work,
that drew me to it a second time. On a second reading, a year later, I
began to see that the characters were representative of permanent
classes,--that they were not only "samples to judge of," as Carlyle
says, but samples by which to judge of human nature. At a third reading,
after another interval, I began to get some glimpse of a total
significance. And when, a year later, I took the book with me to the
coast of Maine, and _lived_ with it, in-doors and out, for a solid
month, this significance came forth clearly, and made that month's
reading almost equivalent to a great experience.
It is now nearly ten years, since, chiefly for my own behoof, but also
not without an ultimate eye to publication, I drew up a formal statement
of that which the book stood for to my mind. Time has added much to that
material; for the work steadily grew upon me, and now and then extorted,
as it were, notes, special dissertations, word-clutches at the meaning
of the whole. And now, taking a hint from the handsome new edition, I
propose to smelt this rough ore and send it forth, to fare as it may
with the readers of the "Atlantic." The liberal editor allows me two
papers of not far from ten pages each, in which to make this
statement,--not, one sees, without some tolerant wish that a smaller
space had sufficed. But even now I cast aside half my material, and
double my labor in seeking brevity for the rest.
The typical history of growth in a human spirit,--"Wilhelm Meister" is
that. Can you conceive of a theme more enticing? And this, too, treated
by one of the master minds of the world. Why do not we shut up our
shops, and leave the streets deserted, till the import of this has been
exhausted? Who can _afford_ to pass it by? Precious, indeed, must be his
time, who for this has none!
The history, I said, is typical. Botanists picture for us a plant which
represents the _idea_ of all vegetable form. Goethe, who led botanists
to this central treatment, here takes up growth in a human soul, and
proceeds with it in a similar way. He recognizes those spiritual forces
which, obscurely or visibly, work in all; he recognizes equally the
conditions, inward and outward, under which growth takes place; he
depicts these in their advent, their collisions, their interplay, their
result.
A spiritual physiology we may name it. He gives not merely the typical
form, but also the working processes, and the _type_ of these. Nor does
he merely enumerate and describe these, after the manner of science, but
pictures them in their total action and final unity. Of such a work,
wrought out with so much of penetration and power, one can speak coolly
enough only by effort.
But the whole is not yet said. Not only does he delineate the idea of
growth in man, but he assumes this as the central use and meaning of the
world. "Positive philosophy" will groan. Give it the smelling-bottle,
and leave it. Goethe does not deign it even a denial; without pausing to
say, he sovereignly assumes, that Nature, as her supreme function, is
the school-mistress of man. For the results enshrined in his spirit,
suns shine, worlds wheel, and systems "move in mystic dance, not without
song." Through the long toil out of chaos to orderly completion and
green fertility, Nature bore in her heart one constant, inspiring
hope,--at last to educate a man. To this end are all times and seasons;
to this end are government, property, labor, rest, pain, and peace; the
world of things and the world of events alike draw meekly near to the
crescent soul, and tender to it their total result, saying,--"In thee,
only in thee, do we come at length to use."
This, then, is the task at which Goethe toiled for many an earnest year.
He will read through world to man, and through all man's fortunes,
inward and outward, to the complete constitution and perfect
architectures of his spirit. Let him succeed in that, and the word of
words for our century and for many centuries is spoken. "Positive
philosophy," with complacent sciolism, may still coldly asseverate that
the world is a dead congeries of "laws," into whose realm man is cast to
take pot-luck in the universe; but we shall know better. The worldling
may still find all good and all evil in the mere fortunes of man; we
shall see beyond these. The fatalist may persist in regarding limits and
conditions as the all in all of life; we shall see them as a foothold
for growth. Once that the spirit of man appears as the final recipient
and vessel of uses, the orderly emptiness of world-law is filled with a
meaning, while the wild welter of man's fortunes and the rigid fixity of
his conditions find alike sufficing centre around which their orbit is
drawn.
Observe, however, that we have here no piece of system-making. Goethe
does not attempt a final scientific theory of existence. He _pictures_
life from this point of view. If you can feel the verity in this
picture, you may then feel the same verity in that picture which Another
has painted, namely, in life itself.
Observe, once more, that even here life is depicted only from _one_ of
its two poles, and that, perhaps, the lesser. The theme is Growth, and
this growth is considered as proceeding from definite elements contained
in man's being, and proceeding to definite results still contained in
his being. "Faust" assumes the opposite pole. Its theme is Destiny. It
regards man's life as sweeping down upon him from heights above his
thought, and proceeding to ends beyond his imagination. His existence
appears as fashioned in essence and end by predestinating power, and the
Eternal "takes the responsibility."
The artist must choose his point of view. It is impossible to paint the
house at once from the inside and from the outside. "Faust" is properly
an epic poem; "Wilhelm Meister" is a prose epic,--and prose, not from
lack of metre, but precisely from its point of view. It treats life, not
as proceeding from the bosom and moving to the ends of benign Destiny,
but as contained in thought, will, character, aspiration, love, and as
contingent, rather than eternally predestined, in its result. Much of
religious grandeur, therefore,--to the great disgust of Novalis,--it
loses; much of economic value it gains. A prose picture: yet even here
we read through all else to man, and through all else in man himself to
the upbuilding of his spirit. As Goethe reads life, let us see if we can
read his book.
We assume, then, his point of view. Growth,--our eyes are given us that
we may see this as the end, all else as material and means. Prices and
kingdoms may rise or fall; we are not indifferent; but the immortal
architectures of man's spirit are priceless, and here the sceptres are
indeed held by divine right.
What, now,--every one will hasten to question,--what are the chief
forces that induce or regulate growth? What is their typical order in
appearance and combination? What is the complete result? To these
questions _Wilhelm Meister_ is Goethe's answer.
The first place in the list of producing forces is given by him to
Imagination. He makes Wilhelm describe, with elaborate and lingering
detail, a puppet-show which in childhood enchanted him, and whose
mechanism he afterwards possessed and managed with enduring fascination.
Mariana yawns in listening; the lounging novel-reader will yawn too. But
under this tedious triviality, as the reader of stock-novels will deem
it, lurks a meaning serious enough to entice all save those who are
indeed trivial. It indicates the play-instinct in children as the first
fountain of growth. Nature justifies Goethe. How grave and absorbed are
children at their play! With what touching implicit faith do they assume
this as something that pays for its costs! Crabtree scowls; Moneybags
pooh-poohs; but Nature is too strong for them, and the children play on.
It is significant. In truth, a child's faculty for play, that is, for
imaginative engagement, is the prime measure of his capacity for growth.
Follow his play, you who would know him,--follow it with studious,
sympathetic eye; for in the range and depth of imaginative interest it
displays you read the promise of his being. The child that is not
fascinated by his fancies is of a meagre nature, and will come to
nothing great.
_Why_ is imagination so concerned in growth? That I call a delightful
question, and could run with rejoicing to answer it; but here, not
without effort, I must pass it by. There is more to be said upon it than
we have space for now: some other day. Enough now that imagination _is_
so concerned with growth; enough that Nature, by the being of every
child born into the world, makes oath to the fact.
But there is a spice of devil in this angel. Of old, when the sons of
God came together, Satan came with them; and still, when the primal
powers of man's soul assemble to perform their grand act of worship,
which is the complete upbuilding of a human spirit, Factitious Tendency,
the father of mischief, is punctually at hand. So in young Wilhelm. He
craves free _play_ for the divine energies of his being. But the hard
actual world resists him; instead of offering itself humbly as a vehicle
for his fine imaginings, it tries to make a mere tool of _him_. So he
flies from it in scorn. The cold, spacious emptiness of his father's
life, the shrivelled content of old Werner's,--these show him the
quality of real life. Fie upon reality, then! He will away, and find a
concocted play-world, where all shall suit his purpose, and where he
shall have nothing to do but picture forth in beauty his inward being.
He finds this, poor boy, in the stage. There no reality will exist but
such as is _made_ for his purposes. There his fine imaginations may have
it all their own way. There, in heroic costume and by gas-light, his
sole business shall be to express sublime sentiments in the most
effective manner, while all the surroundings are strictly accessory. How
fine to discover an heroic situation dumbly begging him to appear and be
its speaking lay-figure!
_Making_ play, instead of ennobling work till through that the soul can
play,--that is child's play. Finding spiritual deliverance in a _there_,
in a "got-up" situation,--that is romanticism. And it is the
representative error of nobly imagining youth.
But lay-figure heroics are not heroism; and the made-up situation proves
more straitening than that situation which God has made for all, namely,
the real world. The stage is found to be wooden as its own boards. It
gives Wilhelm for companions a crew of spiritual incapables, who have
excellent appetites at others' cost, who higgle, bicker, sneak away from
duty, are good for nothing, and pretend everything; while, but for his
escape, it would make his own life a mere cul-de-sac with a slough at
the end.
Yet he is boy-wise as well as boy-foolish. His imaginations fertilize,
though they mislead him. His impulse to live _over_ the world, rather
than under it, is the vital impulse of the human soul.
But long before imagination has proceeded to the results named, another
grand fructifying force has come to its aid, namely, Love. "The
ever-womanly leadeth us on." Love,--it is, we may say, a chemical change
in the man, like the conversion of starch into sugar, or grape-juice
into wine. Full of sweetness and sweet intoxication, it belongs to the
profoundest economies of Nature; and he who with his whole soul and body
has once loved is another being henceforth. Acid or even putrid
fermentations may set in; but what he was before he cannot be again.
Goethe, therefore, follows Nature in placing this next to imagination as
a producer of growth,--next in Nature and in Goethe's pages, because its
alliance with imagination is so immediate and intimate. He who does not
idealize does not love.
But here also is peril. Love, while filling Wilhelm's being with those
precious heats which are the blind substance of all chivalry and
nobility, clothes the stage with the added enchantment of Mariana's
presence, and so bewitches the poor youth with still more of that "false
tendency" which is his proper Satan. Moreover, by rushing headlong
toward consummation, and overleaping the bounds of prudential morality,
it brings both upon Mariana and himself sore retributions. Her, poor
child, it hurries to the grave; him it pushes to the grave's brink, and
stores even his recovered strength with anguish and a lifelong regret.
Goethe is accused of immorality. He does, indeed, depict grave errors
without exclaiming over them, without holding up his hands, or playing
any pantomime of horror. Moreover, a love pure in its essence, but
heedless in its procedure, he persists in naming pure, though heedless.
But he indicates, with a rigor that is even appalling, the retributions
which pursue levity and precipitation, not to mention things worse. I
have read many books which gave more moral _stimulation_ than "Wilhelm
Meister"; I have never read any which, while frankly acknowledging that
Nature's blessing goes more with noble essence than with decorous form,
yet indicates with equal power the iron nerve of moral law that runs
through and through the world.
And now, as third performer in this _real_ drama of growth, comes
forward a redoubtable figure, the Sense of Self. His reputation, indeed,
is not of the best. All, it is true, embrace him privately; but most
think it decorous to disavow him in public.
On the whole, _I_ is a very serviceable pronoun; and equally its
complement in consciousness is serviceable. Welcome, Ego, to your place!
The feeling of Self is the nominative, the _naming_ case, in the syntax
of consciousness. But, as, by the rules of grammar, the nominative is to
be made the _subject_ of a verb, so in the grammar of growth this
self-feeling is subjected to the grand _verbum_, the action and total
significance of one's existence.
Bring it out, then, clearly, pronounce it with due distinctness and
force, that it may be clearly and definitely subjected.
Nature attends to that. She secures the nominative in her spiritual
syntax. And so there is a period in earlier life when this feeling of
self is getting pronounced. _Very_ pronounced it is sometimes, a little
severe in its emphasis upon delicate ears. And, indeed, if it come
without adjective, without gentle qualification, almost any hearer must
confess that he has known sounds more musical.
In Wilhelm it is sweetly qualified with love and imagination. It appears
in luxuriant dreams of the poet's life,--of him who is not merely a
pen-poet, but a living lyric, a poet in heart and soul. "And this life
of true glory," cries the heart of Wilhelm, "may be mine, _mine_!" A
gentle and magnanimous egoism, but still an egoism. But the due
subjection of this self-feeling will come duly; in the qualifications
that even now make it lovely the sure promise of that is contained.
Fourth in order appears a much prettier figure, namely, Philanthropy,
the loving desire to serve man. It is, indeed, at first, sufficiently
sweeping and ambitious. No half-way work, no boy's play here! He will
regenerate the race; he will ennoble humanity, without sparing one
caitiff of them all; he will establish it on some perpetual mount of
transfiguration; and all by the magic of stage effect. No boy's play!
All this, too, is noble and vital. With exquisite appreciation Goethe
depicts it, seeing well how vital it is in essence,--seeing, too, how
vapory it is in form. Who knows better than he that to crave service,
and to crave it in love, and to crave it without limit, is of the very
substance of all that enriches man? To whomsoever this divine longing is
foreign all the profound uses of life are foreign; he is barren as
beach-sand.
Humanity, however, is not swung away from its mud-moorings so easily;
probably would only go adrift and come to wreck, if it were: witness the
French Revolution. Sing, bird, in the tree-tops! but when you fly, think
not to make the pines fly with you! It is only by slow vital
assimilations that man is ameliorated. We do our best in digging and
fertilizing a little about the roots, or in bearing pollen, like bees,
from flower to flower. We do our best by a little meek furtherance of
Nature. And this meekness of labor is no less necessary for ourselves
than for those we would serve. Ambitious world-mending is, on one side,
self-flattery.
Meanwhile horrible tragedies of charlatanism, or terrible tragedies of
disgust and despair await an incontinent enthusiasm for the _role_ of
Providence.
Wilhelm's nature has now been greatly enriched. But all that has
enriched has also imperilled. Imagination, love, self-feeling, and
philanthropy have stored his breast with golden wealth; but they are one
and all making over that wealth to a false tendency. Long before this,
however, Goethe has brought in chastening, tempering forces, by which
these riches may be economized.
First, and in the person of Jarno, enters the Critical Understanding.
True as steel, cold and keen as steel also, antipathetic to all
sentiment, clear and decisive partly by what he has and partly by what
he has not, Jarno offers with unsparing rigor to shear away Wilhelm's
illusions, not seeing that in these very illusions runs an artery rich
in his reddest life-blood.
Critical understanding, the disenchanter,--light without heat or
color,--begins at a certain period in nobly imagining and impassioned
youth to break through the cloudy glories, and shame all with its cold
glare. That sudden skeptic shame! Do you know it, reader? Do you
remember moments when all that had glorified life seemed suddenly to
stand before you a detected impostor, a beggar playing king, and now
stripped to his rags? Ah, me! and how pathetically old and wise the
neophyte becomes all at once! He will be fooled no longer, he! Love,
friendship, philanthropy,--he has looked under the words, and found all
they covered, namely, nothing. Henceforth he will hunt sentiment out of
him, as it were a wolf. Henceforth he will measure out his life by hand,
and be purely--and barrenly--"reasonable."
Unhappy, could he succeed. A mere life of the understanding is just one
degree better than idiocy. Sweep out imagination, and all the angels go
with it. To freeze the heated geysers of the soul? It were to freeze the
core of the world. Better to be nobly moonstruck than turned into a
pillar of salt, even were it Attic salt. Better to be Don Quixote than a
very archangel Sancho.
And yet unhappy is the nobly impassioned and imagining soul that can
never discriminate, never distinguish between the central suggestions of
the soul and the chance directions these may have taken. It is he of all
men who needs just this, discrimination. Is there any tragedy like that
of Don Quixote? A god blinded by his own light! An Olympian charging
upon windmills, while a toad squats aside and grins at the spectacle!
The ludicrousness is but the last sting of the tragedy. On the whole,
critical understanding must have heed. The divine mania of the soul must
listen even to this Sancho with his wise saws. Hard it is for the
higher to become pupil of the lower, to accept and use its very
contempt, and yet forbear to learn contempt of itself, stooping only to
conquer. Yet even this must be. Heat is divine, but cold also is
necessary. The cloudy glories of rich impassioned spirits, the vapors
that float, scarlet and gold, in their heavens, must strike against the
icy mountain-tops of common-sense, that the cold may condense them into
fruitful rain. Hence thunder, lightning, storm, and wild commotion in
the soul; but hence harvest also. The first great inward struggle is
this between heat and cold; and where the heats are tropical, the
collision is violent. Yet these contraries _must_ both work into the
great economies of life.
Cold--cold prudence and choice--appears first in its embodiment, Jarno,
who symbolizes its _secret_ beginnings in Wilhelm. But then and there
its beginnings are only symbolized. Soon, however, disappointment
bitterer than death, with sickness, remorse, horror, enters and chills
him to the core. Ah, and so these clouds of glory are only raw vapor and
mist, after all! The rainy season has set in. "Let's into the house,"
says Prudence; "let's box ourselves up nicely, and get some comfort,
since that is the whole of life." No, he will not do that; he will stand
out, and be drenched, and realize the full extent of his illusion.
Henceforth his one employment shall be to taunt his heart with its own
hopes, to put all the summer blossom and beauty of his former
imaginations beside this wintry death-in-life, and shame them by the
contrast.
This period in Wilhelm's life is wrought out in Goethe's picture with
extreme power.
But he recovers himself, slowly. And Goethe's great knowledge of human
nature is shown in this, that Wilhelm does not regain his ennobling
imaginations while holding fast to the cool suggestions of prudence. No,
he reverts to the former, forsaking the latter. The cold season has
passed over him, and seemingly left nothing behind. With health and joy,
his illusions, one by one, one and all, return. I find this true.
Oscillation between opposite poles,--how long it lasts! A powerful
experience comes, and all seems changed in one's being; it passes, and
nothing seems changed. "Is there for me," one might cry, "only this
aimless see-saw? To-day Don Quixote, to-morrow Sancho, next day Don
Quixote again,--is that to go on forever?" Happy is he, provided his
poverty be not his exemption, who has never wrung his hands in utter
despair of finding centrality, unity, at last,--a centre where the
divine passion and afflatus of the heart are reconciled with the
hard-eyed perceptions of common-sense.
But life is not a mere pendulum. Nature works to her ends. There is
oscillation, but also growth. And so, though Wilhelm recurs to his
illusions, and even embodies them by going upon the stage, the seeds of
discriminating judgment are sown in his heart, and are already
germinating.
Travel, with observation of men, and the attempt to work with them,
sobers him further. He begins to recognize limits and conditions, and to
do so _without_ surrendering his hopes and happy dreams. He perceives,
little by little, that there are some men who can give and receive help,
and some who can do neither,--some with whom one can nobly cooperate,
others whose hands approach his own only to obstruct and entangle. He
sees that he himself is limited, and that possibly the world might not
fare so much better in his hands than in those of its Maker. It dawns
upon him, that, on the whole, he is not here to make worlds, but to work
in a limited sphere and for limited results. And yet his hopes and
imaginations are not put to shame; for he feels, that, even amid these
iron limits of labor and effect, a result of unlimited, _absolute_ worth
is also getting wrought.
And now, in this harmonizing of heat and cold into one tempered economy,
in this recognition of limits and conditions, without surrender of
inspiring imagination and hope, he approaches the term of his
wandering, and nears home.
This consummation is hastened in what may seem a singular way,--by
reading Shakspeare. These matchless pictures of real life give him, as
life itself had never given, the feeling of _real_. The sentiment of
Reality, for the first time, awakens in power. It is much, almost
infinitely much, he perceives, to be just this, real. The smallest
reality--so with some astonishment he discovers--affords more scope to
imagination itself than any conceivable magnificence of make-belief.
Real,--rooted in eternal Nature, with a pedigree older than the stars!
Is not any pebble, if we consider its advent into existence and its
cosmic relations, enough, not only to occupy, but to beggar imagination?
Existence,--is not that the one inexhaustible fact? He feels it so, and
in that feeling the contending opposites of his being come to sudden
reconciliation.
Reality,--the hard, cold, critical understanding has done no worse than
to insist upon that. But it has insisted upon that after its own cold
fashion, as a mere frozen surface, giving no warm and fruitful
hospitality to the divine seeds of hope, love, and imagination. On the
other hand, the angels of Wilhelm's heart have fled away from reality
because they accepted this representation. Suddenly they find this their
true home. Now, then, they will sow in the clouds no longer. Reality,
beneath its hard, limited outside, opens to them its divine bosom, and
says, "Ye also are real: sow here."
And now the boards feel thin under Wilhelm's feet. Enough of these.
Enough of masquerading. Enough of make-belief heroics: belief, accepting
limits and conditions, that on them and out of them it may build the
spiritual architectures of life, is heroism. Enough of play-acting: work
is the true play. Moral imagination has found its home and its freedom
in the real; and therewith the first epoch of his life rounds into
completion, passes over its virtue to another, and in his life there is
an ending and a beginning.
In what consists this complete beginning? In this, that he now gets his
eye on himself in a wholly new way. He sees his being as a spiritual
whole, a complete design in the thought of Eternal Nature, which design
he is religiously bound to divine and serve. To serve Creative Reality
even in the regards he bestows upon himself,--in coming to that aim and
action, he, for the first time, beholds his being with a pure eye. "To
say it in a word," he writes to Werner, "the cultivation of my
individual self, here as I am, has, from my youth upward, been
constantly, though dimly, my wish and purpose. The same intention I
still cherish, but the means of realizing it are now grown somewhat
clearer."[A]
"Selfish" is that? It is not the goal, but it is not selfish. Only as
the sense of self is subordinated, only as it not only resigns dominion,
but becomes a loyal steward in the household of the soul, happy in
obedience, can one arrive at real self-culture,--that is, accept his
being at the hands of Formative Nature as a design to be _served_. While
self-feeling holds one in close grip, he can never so much as see his
being in this pure, objective way, any more than he can look back into
his own eyes. The very act of receiving it as the farm which he is to
till,--as a spiritual whole, to which all parts, all partial acts and
interests, and the sense of self among them, are to be subordinated and
made serviceable,--this implies not merely a liberation from egoism, but
much more, namely, utilization of it. Real self-culture consists in the
happy and obedient service of _uses_ in one's own spirit. The uses of
the world, we have said, are enshrined in the spirit of man; when one
can freely and faithfully serve these, his life as a whole human being
has begun.
Self-culture, in the Goethean sense, is, then, a much nobler and more
religious affair than the popular notion makes it. But even this, I
repeat, is, in Goethe's view, simply the complete beginning. True, the
usual notion is different. Some, that suppose themselves his followers,
rest finally in self-culture; many, who think this the goal of Goethe's
own life, inveigh against him accordingly. Did men, however, always wait
to understand ere condemning, much virtuous indignation would never come
to use. Precious is virtuous indignation; nevertheless, here there is
for it no suitable occasion. Wilhelm goes on toward spiritual ripeness;
we follow his advance.
The next step is symbolized by that charming episode, "Confessions of a
Fair Saint," whose relation to the whole work many critics profess
themselves unable to see,--indeed, I know not whether any critic has
seen clearly what, nevertheless, is clearly there to be seen. Religion
is flowering in Wilhelm's soul. He rests softly in Absolute Reality, in
That which eternally, infinitely IS. It is a deepening _to infinitude_
of his feeling for the Real. From superficial, he comes to divine
Reality, and finds this not only sufficing, but inspiring, not only
commanding obedience, but blessing, exalting, crowning, making it royal.
This is not directly shown in Wilhelm himself, but symbolized by
his interest in the narrative of another. In Wilhelm it is
hidden,--a-flowering, but secret. The very design is to suggest that his
religion does not come _out_ of him, and become formal, but remains _in_
him, in vital, creative intimacy with his entire being. For it is one
point of Goethe's art to hint at secret processes in the soul by some
external representative,--and the appearance of principal personages in
this work is _always_ connected with some suggestion of that kind. They
stand for what they are in themselves; they have also their direct
influence on Wilhelm; and they also symbolize that which cannot be
directly shown in his inward growth.
Wilhelm comes to his knees before Absolute Reality; kneeling, he accepts
his being. Self-culture henceforth has got its baptism, freedom its law
and its blessing of obedience, which leave it freedom still.
Has the reader some misgiving that I foist this interpretation upon the
book? There is not, indeed, a direct syllable to this effect. What
assurance, then, that this interpretation is not gratuitous?
This, first,--the "Confessions" are _there_; hence are related to the
import of the whole. But perhaps the reader thinks, with the redoubtable
Mr. Lewes, that the work is not a _whole_ at all, but a piece of
patchwork. If so, this reason will not weigh with him.
But my interpretation is conclusively affirmed in another way. _The
Wilhelm of the seventh book is no longer the Wilhelm of the fifth._ We
leave him on one side this episode, we find him on the other, and he is
not the same man. He has suffered a sea-change; for his keel has been
wetted in the waters of Eternity. The Abbe recognizes him with
difficulty.
It is the old secret. No man can look on Absolute Reality, and
live in the antecedent quality of his life. He is a new man
henceforth,--consumed and created.
And now we come to the consummate act and epoch of his life. He has
found himself; he is now to give himself, and, in giving, is to find
himself anew. He is to lose and find himself in social uses. In this
sacred act of social immersion, by which, since it can now be done
sanely, he is to be, not dissipated, but divinely assured to himself,
his spirit and Goethe's work at last rest.
The key-note to this part of the work is struck in the cool tones of
Jarno. "It is right," he says, "that a man, when he first enters upon
life, should think highly of himself, should determine to attain many
high distinctions, should endeavor to make all things possible; but when
his education has proceeded to a certain pitch, it is advantageous for
him that he learn to lose himself among a mass of men, that he learn to
live for the sake of others, and to forget himself in an activity
prescribed by duty."
Wilhelm approaches this higher act by degrees.
First, by an exalted and matured love of woman. It is not here a fume
and sweet intoxication in the blood, but a true passion of the soul, a
profound yearning to _ally_ his spirit. By an inward necessity, he must
give himself to one other, and from that other receive himself again,
made sacred with Nature's baptism. The need of this reciprocation is
stronger with him than even his election of a particular person with
whom to establish it. So, when it becomes impossible for Theresa to
accept his hand, he passes soon to Natalia, to whom, however, his
attraction is subtler and older.
On this follows the deep self-devotion of fatherhood. The longing to
bestow his soul pushes beyond the love of woman, and looks for another
object, where the giving is more simple, because the visible return is
less. But here again he does not wish to give himself officiously,--to
thrust himself unbidden into the household of another life; he would do
it in simple obedience to Nature. Therefore, when of those who seem to
know everything he can ask one question and no more, there is just one
question which his very soul asks:--"Is Felix indeed my son?"
"Hail to thee for the question!" cries the providential Abbe. "Hail to
thee, my son! Thy apprenticeship is ended. Nature pronounces thee free."
Yes, when he craves of Nature, not aggrandizement, but a duty,--when he
entreats her commands to bestow of all that is deepest and dearest in
his spirit on another, and yet to do it so in simple response to her
behest that in all he shall give only what is _due_,--then he is free.
No self-flattery here; no feeling that he is performing some wonderful
piece of self-sacrifice, which puts the universe under obligations to
him. He would give all, but give where he owes all, not only in
obedience, but in meek thankfulness.
This done, he can go farther. Established indestructibly in the unity of
his own being, established also in these devout relationships, he is
prepared to enter into ampler relations, carrying into these the same
obedience to Nature, the same sense of giving only what is due.
Accordingly, he passes into noble mutualities of cooperation, service,
and love with his equals, with those superior to himself, and with those
to whom he is superior, not defrauded of his being, but secured in its
possession, by that self-surrender.
Not at a leap, indeed, does he attain to this dignity of life. Causeless
suspicions infest him; again and again he snatches himself back, and
retreats into spiritual isolation. Like an uncertain swimmer, who,
wading into deep water, draws back in sudden alarm as his feet begin to
lift themselves buoyantly from the sands, so he is smitten with jealous
fear, and hastens to regain his former foothold, just when his immersion
in social use and fellowship was becoming complete. But ever as he grows
surer of himself, and ever as he rests more trustfully in eternal
Reality, he becomes more capable of yielding trust to those who deserve
it, and yielding himself to those unto whom he rightly belongs.
And so lost and found, so self-given and self-contained, so abandoned to
the high uses of life, and by that very act saved, by that act secured
to himself in spiritual wholeness, Goethe leaves him at the close of the
_Apprenticeship_: for of the _Travels_, which is another mine of
suggestion, I do not speak here.
To sum all. The whole work climbs steadily to this consummate act of
self-surrender without self-dissipation, without self-flattery, without
officiousness, and without reserve. But in order that one may give
himself nobly, he must nobly have himself to give. To this end there are
prerequisites. First, fructification, a rich development of heats and
fruitful powers; and of the nature and order of these Goethe aims to
give account. Secondly, a due tempering of these by the cold, faithful
severities of understanding and experience. Third, as resulting, a high
repose in Reality,--high, because one reposes there, not in base
compromise with it or with himself, but in hope, in duty, in imagining
heroism of heart. Fourthly and finally, comes a relation to one's own
being, at once utterly religious and utterly sane, whereby one _commands
himself in obedience to the total law and uses of his spirit_. Having
achieved this, one may go forward, through further experience and deeper
life, to that act of religious and sane self-bestowal, wherein he first
becomes, in the full, majestic sense, a man.