mind is the tendency of his composition; namely, whether it leads
us to nature, or to the person of the writer. The great always
introduce us to facts; small men introduce us always to themselves.
The great man, even whilst he relates a private fact personal to him,
is really leading us away from him to an universal experience. His
own affection is in nature, in _what is_, and, of course, all his
communication leads outward to it, starting from whatsoever point.
The great never with their own consent become a load on the minds
they instruct. The more they draw us to them, the farther from them
or more independent of them we are, because they have brought us to
the knowledge of somewhat deeper than both them and us. The great
never hinder us; for their activity is coincident with the sun and
moon, with the course of the rivers and of the winds, with the stream
of laborers in the street and with all the activity and well-being of
the race. The great lead us to nature, and in our age to metaphysical
nature, to the invisible awful facts, to moral abstractions, which
are not less nature than is a river or a coal-mine,—nay, they are
far more nature,—but its essence and soul.
But the weak and wicked, led also to analyze, saw nothing in thought
but luxury. Thought for the selfish became selfish. They invited us
to contemplate nature, and showed us an abominable self. Would you
know the genius of the writer? Do not enumerate his talents or his
feats, but ask thyself, What spirit is he of? Do gladness and hope
and fortitude flow from his page into thy heart? Has he led thee to
nature because his own soul was too happy in beholding her power and
love? Or is his passion for the wilderness only the sensibility of
the sick, the exhibition of a talent which only shines whilst you
praise it; which has no root in the character, and can thus minister
to the vanity but not to the happiness of the possessor; and which
derives all its _éclat_ from our conventional education, but would
not make itself intelligible to the wise man of another age or
country? The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does
fire or wind or tree. Neither does the noble natural man: he yields
himself to your occasion and use, but his act expresses a reference
to universal good.
Another element of the modern poetry akin to this subjective
tendency, or rather the direction of that same on the question of
resources, is the Feeling of the Infinite. Of the perception now fast
becoming a conscious fact,—that there is One Mind, and that all the
powers and privileges which lie in any, lie in all; that I as a man
may claim and appropriate whatever of true or fair or good or strong
has anywhere been exhibited; that Moses and Confucius, Montaigne and
Leibnitz are not so much individuals as they are parts of man and
parts of me, and my intelligence proves them my own,—literature is
far the best expression. It is true, this is not the only nor the
obvious lesson it teaches. A selfish commerce and government have
caught the eye and usurped the hand of the masses. It is not to be
contested that selfishness and the senses write the laws under which
we live, and that the street seems to be built and the men and women
in it moving, not in reference to pure and grand ends, but rather to
very short and sordid ones. Perhaps no considerable minority, no one
man, leads a quite clean and lofty life. What then? We concede in
sadness the fact. But we say that these low customary ways are not
all that survives in human beings. There is that in us which mutters,
and that which groans, and that which triumphs, and that which
aspires. There are facts on which men of the world superciliously
smile, which are worth all their trade and politics; which drive
young men into gardens and solitary places, and cause extravagant
gestures, starts, distortions of the countenance, and passionate
exclamations; sentiments, which find no aliment or language for
themselves on the wharves, in court, or market, but which are soothed
by silence, by darkness, by the pale stars, and the presence of
nature. All over the modern world the educated and susceptible have
betrayed their discontent with the limits of our municipal life,
and with the poverty of our dogmas of religion and philosophy. They
betray this impatience by fleeing for resource to a conversation with
nature, which is courted in a certain moody and exploring spirit,
as if they anticipated a more intimate union of man with the world
than has been known in recent ages. Those who cannot tell what they
desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts
and vast wishes. The very child in the nursery prattles mysticism,
and doubts and philosophizes. A wild striving to express a more
inward and infinite sense characterizes the works of every art. The
music of Beethoven is said, by those who understand it, to labor with
vaster conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before.
This feeling of the Infinite has deeply colored the poetry of the
period. This new love of the vast, always native in Germany, was
imported into France by De Staël, appeared in England in Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and finds a most genial
climate in the American mind. Scott and Crabbe, who formed themselves
on the past, had none of this tendency; their poetry is objective. In
Byron, on the other hand, it predominates; but in Byron it is blind,
it sees not its true end—an infinite good, alive and beautiful, a
life nourished on absolute beatitudes, descending into nature to
behold itself reflected there. His will is perverted, he worships
the accidents of society, and his praise of nature is thieving and
selfish.
Nothing certifies the prevalence of this taste in the people more
than the circulation of the poems,—one would say most incongruously
united by some bookseller,—of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. The only
unity is in the subjectiveness and the aspiration common to the three
writers. Shelley, though a poetic mind, is never a poet. His muse is
uniformly imitative; all his poems composite. A good English scholar
he is, with ear, taste, and memory; much more, he is a character
full of noble and prophetic traits; but imagination, the original,
authentic fire of the bard, he has not. He is clearly modern, and
shares with Richter, Chateaubriand, Manzoni and Wordsworth, the
feeling of the infinite, which so labors for expression in their
different genius. But all his lines are arbitrary, not necessary.
When we read poetry, the mind asks,—Was this verse one of twenty
which the author might have written as well; or is this what that
man was created to say? But, whilst every line of the true poet will
be genuine, he is in a boundless power and freedom to say a million
things. And the reason why he can say one thing well, is because his
vision extends to the sight of all things, and so he describes each
as one who knows many and all.
The fame of Wordsworth is a leading fact in modern literature, when
it is considered how hostile his genius at first seemed to the
reigning taste, and with what limited poetic talents his great and
steadily growing dominion has been established. More than any poet
his success has been not his own but that of the idea which he shared
with his coevals, and which he has rarely succeeded in adequately
expressing. The Excursion awakened in every lover of Nature the right
feeling. We saw stars shine, we felt the awe of mountains, we heard
the rustle of the wind in the grass, and knew again the ineffable
secret of solitude. It was a great joy. It was nearer to Nature than
anything we had before. But the interest of the poem ended almost
with the narrative of the influences of Nature on the mind of the
Boy, in the First Book. Obviously for that passage the poem was
written, and with the exception of this and of a few strains of the
like character in the sequel, the whole poem was dull. Here was no
poem, but here was poetry, and a sure index where the subtle muse was
about to pitch her tent and find the argument of her song. It was
the human soul in these last ages striving for a just publication of
itself. Add to this, however, the great praise of Wordsworth, that
more than any other contemporary bard he is pervaded with a reverence
of somewhat higher than (conscious) thought. There is in him that
property common to all great poets, a wisdom of humanity, which is
superior to any talents which they exert. It is the wisest part of
Shakspeare and of Milton. For they are poets by the free course
which they allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes
beholdeth again and blesseth the things which it hath made. The soul
is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works.
With the name of Wordsworth rises to our recollection the name of
his contemporary and friend, Walter Savage Landor—a man working
in a very different and peculiar spirit, yet one whose genius and
accomplishments deserve a wiser criticism than we have yet seen
applied to them, and the rather that his name does not readily
associate itself with any school of writers. Of Thomas Carlyle, also,
we shall say nothing at this time, since the quality and energy of
his influence on the youth of this country will require at our hands,
erelong, a distinct and faithful acknowledgment.
But of all men he who has united in himself, and that in the most
extraordinary degree, the tendencies of the era, is the German poet,
naturalist and philosopher, Goethe. Whatever the age inherited
or invented, he made his own. He has owed to Commerce and to the
victories of the Understanding, all their spoils. Such was his
capacity, that the magazines of the world’s ancient or modern
wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command,—he
wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used
it as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical,
painter, composer,—all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed to
look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men breathe.
Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at home in
it as he. He was not afraid to live. And in him this encyclopædia of
facts, which it has been the boast of the age to compile, wrought
an equal effect. He was knowing; he was brave; he was clean from
all narrowness; he has a perfect propriety and taste,—a quality by
no means common to the German writers. Nay, since the earth as we
said had become a reading-room, the new opportunities seem to have
aided him to be that resolute realist he is, and seconded his sturdy
determination to see things for what they are. To look at him one
would say there was never an observer before. What sagacity, what
industry of observation. To read his record is a frugality of time,
for you shall find no word that does not stand for a thing, and he is
of that comprehension which can see the value of truth. His love of
Nature has seemed to give a new meaning to that word. There was never
man more domesticated in this world than he. And he is an apology for
the analytic spirit of the period, because, of his analysis, always
wholes were the result. All conventions, all traditions he rejected.
And yet he felt his entire right and duty to stand before and try
and judge every fact in nature. He thought it necessary to dot round
with his own pen the entire sphere of knowables; and for many of his
stories, this seems the only reason: Here is a piece of humanity I
had hitherto omitted to sketch;—take this. He does not say so in
syllables,—yet a sort of conscientious feeling he had to be _up_ to
the universe, is the best account and apology for many of them. He
shared also the subjectiveness of the age, and that too in both the
senses I have discriminated. With the sharpest eye for form, color,
botany, engraving, medals, persons and manners, he never stopped at
surface, but pierced the purpose of a thing and studied to reconcile
that purpose with his own being. What he could so reconcile was good;
what he could not, was false. Hence a certain greatness encircles
every fact he treats; for to him it has a soul, an eternal reason
why it was so, and not otherwise. This is the secret of that deep
realism, which went about among all objects he beheld, to find the
cause why they must be what they are. It was with him a favorite
task to find a theory of every institution, custom, art, work of
art, which he observed. Witness his explanation of the Italian mode
of reckoning the hours of the day, as growing out of the Italian
climate; of the obelisk of Egypt, as growing out of a common natural
fracture in the granite parallelopiped in Upper Egypt; of the Doric
architecture, and the Gothic; of the Venetian music of the gondolier,
originating in the habit of the fishers’ wives of the Lido singing
on shore to their husbands on the sea; of the amphitheatre, which
is the enclosure of the natural cup of heads that arranges itself
round every spectacle in the street; of the coloring of Titian and
Paul Veronese, which one may verify in common daylight in Venice
every afternoon; of the Carnival at Rome; of the domestic rural
architecture in Italy; and many the like examples.
But also that other vicious subjectiveness, that vice of the
time, infected him also. We are provoked with his Olympian
self-complacency, the patronizing air with which he vouchsafes to
tolerate the genius and performances of other mortals, “the good
Hiller,” “our excellent Kant,” “the friendly Wieland,” &c. &c. There
is a good letter from Wieland to Merck, in which Wieland relates that
Goethe read to a select party his journal of a tour in Switzerland
with the Grand Duke, and their passage through the Vallais and over
the St. Gothard. “It was,” says Wieland, “as good as Xenophon’s
Anabasis. The piece is one of his most masterly productions, and is
thought and written with the greatness peculiar to him. The fair
hearers were enthusiastic at the nature in this piece; I liked the
sly art in the composition, whereof they saw nothing, still better.
It is a true poem, so concealed is the art too. But what most
remarkably in this, as in all his other works, distinguishes him from
Homer and Shakspeare, is, that the Me, the _Ille ego_, everywhere
glimmers through, although without any boasting and with an infinite
fineness.” This subtle element of egotism in Goethe certainly does
not seem to deform his compositions, but to lower the moral influence
of the man. He differs from all the great in the total want of
frankness. Who saw Milton, who saw Shakspeare, saw them do their
best, and utter their whole heart manlike among their brethren. No
man was permitted to call Goethe brother. He hid himself, and worked
always to astonish, which is egotism, and therefore little.
If we try Goethe by the ordinary canons of criticism, we should
say that his thinking is of great altitude, and all level; not a
succession of summits, but a high Asiatic table-land. Dramatic power,
the rarest talent in literature, he has very little. He has an eye
constant to the fact of life and that never pauses in its advance.
But the great felicities, the miracles of poetry, he has never. It
is all design with him, just thought and instructed expression,
analogies, allusion, illustration, which knowledge and correct
thinking supply; but of Shakspeare and the transcendent muse, no
syllable. Yet in the court and law to which we ordinarily speak,
and without adverting to absolute standards, we claim for him the
praise of truth, of fidelity to his intellectual nature. He is the
king of all scholars. In these days and in this country, where the
scholars are few and idle, where men read easy books and sleep after
dinner, it seems as if no book could so safely be put in the hands
of young men as the letters of Goethe, which attest the incessant
activity of this man, to eighty years, in an endless variety of
studies, with uniform cheerfulness and greatness of mind. They cannot
be read without shaming us into an emulating industry. Let him have
the praise of the love of truth. We think, when we contemplate the
stupendous glory of the world, that it were life enough for one man
merely to lift his hands and cry with St. Augustine, “Wrangle who
pleases, I will wonder.” Well, this he did. Here was a man who, in
the feeling that the thing itself was so admirable as to leave all
comment behind, went up and down, from object to object, lifting
the veil from every one, and did no more. What he said of Lavater,
may trulier be said of him, that “it was fearful to stand in the
presence of one before whom all the boundaries within which Nature
has circumscribed our being were laid flat.” His are the bright and
terrible eyes which meet the modern student in every sacred chapel of
thought, in every public enclosure.
But now, that we may not seem to dodge the question which all men
ask, nor pay a great man so ill a compliment as to praise him only
in the conventional and comparative speech, let us honestly record
our thought upon the total worth and influence of this genius.
Does he represent, not only the achievement of that age in which
he lived, but that which it would be and is now becoming? And what
shall we think of that absence of the moral sentiment, that singular
equivalence to him of good and evil in action, which discredit his
compositions to the pure? The spirit of his biography, of his poems,
of his tales, is identical, and we may here set down by way of
comment on his genius the impressions recently awakened in us by the
story of Wilhelm Meister.
All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain. They knew
that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.
So did Dante, so did Machiavel. Goethe has done this in Meister.
We can fancy him saying to himself:—There are poets enough of the
Ideal; let me paint the Actual, as, after years of dreams, it will
still appear and reappear to wise men. That all shall right itself
in the long Morrow, I may well allow, and my novel may wait for the
same regeneration. The age, that can damn it as false and falsifying,
will see that it is deeply one with the genius and history of all
the centuries. I have given my characters a bias to error. Men have
the same. I have let mischance befall instead of good fortune. They
do so daily. And out of many vices and misfortunes, I have let a
great success grow, as I had known in my own and many other examples.
Fierce churchmen and effeminate aspirants will chide and hate my
name, but every keen beholder of life will justify my truth, and will
acquit me of prejudging the cause of humanity by painting it with
this morose fidelity. To a profound soul is not austere truth the
sweetest flattery?
Yes, O Goethe! but the ideal is truer than the actual. That is
ephemeral, but this changes not. Moreover, because nature is moral,
that mind only can see, in which the same order entirely obtains. An
interchangeable Truth, Beauty and Goodness, each wholly interfused in
the other, must make the humors of that eye which would see causes
reaching to their last effect and reproducing the world forever.
The least inequality of mixture, the excess of one element over the
other, in that degree diminishes the transparency of things, makes
the world opaque to the observer, and destroys so far the value of
his experience. No particular gifts can countervail this defect. In
reading Meister, I am charmed with the insight; to use a phrase of
Ben Jonson’s, “it is rammed with life.” I find there actual men and
women even too faithfully painted. I am moreover instructed in the
possibility of a highly accomplished society, and taught to look
for great talent and culture under a gray coat. But this is all.
The limits of artificial society are never quite out of sight. The
vicious conventions, which hem us in like prison walls and which
the poet should explode at his touch, stand for all they are worth
in the newspaper. We are never lifted above ourselves, we are not
transported out of the dominion of the senses, or cheered with an
infinite tenderness, or armed with a grand trust.
Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not of the
Ideal; the poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this world,
and not of religion and hope; in short, if we may say so, the poet
of prose, and not of poetry. He accepts the base doctrine of Fate,
and gleans what straggling joys may yet remain out of its ban. He is
like a banker or a weaver with a passion for the country; he steals
out of the hot streets before sunrise, or after sunset, or on a rare
holiday, to get a draft of sweet air and a gaze at the magnificence
of summer, but dares not break from his slavery and lead a man’s life
in a man’s relation to nature. In that which should be his own place,
he feels like a truant, and is scourged back presently to his task
and his cell. Poetry is with Goethe thus external, the gilding of the
chain, the mitigation of his fate; but the Muse never assays those
thunder-tones which cause to vibrate the sun and the moon, which
dissipate by dreadful melody all this iron network of circumstance,
and abolish the old heavens and the old earth before the freewill or
Godhead of man. That Goethe had not a moral perception proportionate
to his other powers, is not then merely a circumstance, as we might
relate of a man that he had or had not the sense of tune or an eye
for colors, but it is the cardinal fact of health or disease; since,
lacking this, he failed in the high sense to be a creator, and, with
divine endowments, drops by irreversible decree into the common
history of genius. He was content to fall into the track of vulgar
poets and spend on common aims his splendid endowments, and has
declined the office proffered to now and then a man in many centuries
in the power of his genius, of a Redeemer of the human mind. He has
written better than other poets only as his talent was subtler, but
the ambition of creation he refused. Life for him is prettier,
easier, wiser, decenter, has a gem or two more on its robe, but its
old eternal burden is not relieved; no drop of healthier blood flows
yet in its veins. Let him pass. Humanity must wait for its physician
still at the side of the road, and confess as this man goes out, that
they have served it better who assured it out of the innocent hope in
their hearts that a Physician will come, than this majestic Artist,
with all the treasuries of wit, of science, and of power at his
command.
The criticism, which is not so much spoken as felt in reference to
Goethe, instructs us directly in the hope of literature. We feel
that a man gifted like him should not leave the world as he found
it. It is true, though somewhat sad, that every fine genius teaches
us how to blame himself. Being so much, we cannot forgive him for
not being more. When one of these grand monads is incarnated whom
nature seems to design for eternal men and draw to her bosom, we
think that the old weariness of Europe and Asia, the trivial forms
of daily life will now end, and a new morning break on us all. What
is Austria? What is England? What is our graduated and petrified
social scale of ranks and employments? Shall not a poet redeem us
from these idolatries, and pale their legendary lustre before the
fires of the Divine Wisdom which burn in his heart? All that in our
sovereign moments each of us has divined of the powers of thought,
all the hints of omnipresence and energy which we have caught, this
man should unfold, and constitute facts.
And this is the insatiable craving which alternately saddens and
gladdens men at this day. The Doctrine of the Life of Man established
after the truth through all his faculties;—this is the thought which
the literature of this hour meditates and labors to say. This is that
which tunes the tongue and fires the eye and sits in the silence of
the youth. Verily it will not long want articulate and melodious
expression. There is nothing in the heart but comes presently to the
lips. The very depth of the sentiment, which is the author of all the
cutaneous life we see, is guarantee for the riches of science and
of song in the age to come. He who doubts whether this age or this
country can yield any contribution to the literature of the world,
only betrays his own blindness to the necessities of the human soul.
Has the power of poetry ceased, or the need? Have the eyes ceased to
see that which they would have, and which they have not? Have they
ceased to see other eyes? Are there no lonely, anxious, wondering
children, who must tell their tale? Are we not evermore whipped by
thoughts;
“In sorrow steeped, and steeped in love
Of thoughts not yet incarnated.”
The heart beats in this age as of old, and the passions are busy as
ever. Nature has not lost one ringlet of her beauty, one impulse of
resistance and valor. From the necessity of loving none are exempt,
and he that loves must utter his desires. A charm as radiant as
beauty ever beamed, a love that fainteth at the sight of its object,
is new to-day.
“The world does not run smoother than of old,
There are sad haps that must be told.”