and thinks of. The bounding impetuosity is then gone; or rather it is kept
back and restrained, so as to form a calm and steady fund of internal
energy, capable sometimes of a flash and outbreak, but generally revealing
itself only in labour and its fruits. What was formerly the beauty of an
Apollo, graceful, light, and full of motion, is now the beauty of a
Jupiter, composed, stately, serene. "What a sublime form!" says Eckermann,
describing his first interview with him. "I forgot to speak for looking at
him: I could not look enough. His face is so powerful and brown, full of
wrinkles, and each wrinkle full of expression. And everywhere there is
such nobleness and firmness, such repose and greatness. He spoke in a
slow, composed manner, such as you would expect from an aged monarch."
Such is Goethe, as he lasts now in the imagination of the world. Living
among statues, books, and pictures; daily doing something for his own
culture and for that of the world; daily receiving guests and visitors,
whom he entertained and instructed with his wise and deep, yet charming
and simple, converse; daily corresponding with friends and strangers, and
giving advice or doing a good turn to some young talent or other--never
was such a mind consecrated so perseveringly and exclusively to the
service of _Kunst_ and _Literatur_. One almost begins to wonder if it was
altogether right that an old man should go on, morning after morning, and
evening after evening, in such a fashion, talking about art and science
and literature as if they were the only interests in the world, taking his
guests into corners to have quiet discussions with them on these subjects,
and always finding something new and nice to be said about them. Possibly,
indeed, this is the fault of those who have reported him, and who only
took notes when the discourse turned on what they considered the proper
Goethean themes. But that Goethe far outdid Shakespeare in this conscious
dedication of himself to a life of the intellect is as certain as the
testimony of likelihood can make it. Shakespeare did enjoy his art; it was
what, in his pensive hours, as he himself hints, he enjoyed most; and
whatever of intellectual ecstasy literary production can bring must surely
have been his in those hours when he composed _Hamlet_ and the _Tempest_.
But Shakespeare's was precisely one of those minds whose strength is a
revelation to themselves during the moment of its exercise, rather than a
chronic ascertained possession; and from this circumstance, as well as
from the attested fact of his carelessness as to the fate of his
compositions, we can very well conceive that literature and mental culture
formed but a small part of the general system of things in Shakespeare's
daily thoughts, and that he would have been absolutely ashamed of himself
if, when anything else, from the state of the weather to the quality of
the wine, was within the circle of possible allusion, he had said a word
about his own plays. If he had not Sir Walter Scott's positive conviction
that every man ought to be either a laird or a lawyer, casting in
authorship as a mere addition if it were to be practised at all, he at
least led so full and keen a life, and was drawn forth on so many sides by
nature, society, and the unseen, that Literature, out of the actual
moments in which he was engaged in it, must have seemed to him a mere
bagatelle, a mere fantastic echo of not a tithe of life. In his home in
London, or his retirement at Stratford, he wrote on and on, because he
could not help doing so, and because it was his business and his solace;
but no play seemed to him worth a day of the contemporary actions of men,
no description worth a single glance at the Thames or at the deer feeding
in the forest, no sonnet worth the tear it was made to embalm. Literature
was by no means to him, as it was to Goethe, the main interest of life;
nor was he a man so far master of himself as ever to be able to behave as
if it were so, and to accept, as Goethe did, all that occurred as so much
culture. Yet Shakespeare would have understood Goethe, and would have
regarded him, almost with envy, as one of those men who, as being "lords
and owners of their faces," and not mere "stewards," know how to husband
Nature's gifts best.
"They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit Heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence."--_Sonnet 94._
If Goethe attained this character, however, it was not because, as it is
the fashion to say, he was by nature cold, heartless, and impassive, but
because, uniting will and wisdom to his wealth of sensibilities, he had
disciplined himself into what he was. A heartless man does not diffuse
geniality and kindliness around him, as Goethe did; and a statue is not
seized, as Goethe once was, with haemorrhage in the night, the result of
suppressed grief.
That which made Goethe what he was--namely, his philosophy of life--is to
be gathered, in the form of hints, from his various writings and
conversations. We present a few important passages here, in what seems
their philosophic connexion, as well as the order most suitable for
bringing out Goethe's mode of thought in contrast with that of
Shakespeare.
_Goethe's Thoughts of Death._--"We had gone round the thicket, and
had turned by Tiefurt into the Weimar-road, where we had a view of
the setting sun. Goethe was for a while lost in thought; he then said
to me, in the words of one of the ancients,
'Untergehend sogar ist's immer dieselbige Sonne.'
(Still it continues the self-same sun, even while it is sinking.)
'At the age of seventy-five,' continued he, with much cheerfulness,
'one must, of course, think sometimes of death. But this thought
never gives me the least uneasiness, for I am fully convinced that
our spirit is a being of a nature quite indestructible, and that its
activity continues from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun,
which seems to set only to our earthly eyes, but which, in reality,
never sets, but shines on unceasingly.'"--_Eckermann's Conversations
of Goethe_, vol. i. p. 161.
_Goethe's Maxim with respect to Metaphysics._--"Man is born not to
solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem
begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the
comprehensible."--_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 272.
_Goethe's Theory of the intention of the Supernatural with regard to
the Visible._--"After all, what does it all come to? God did not
retire to rest after the well-known six days of creation, but, on the
contrary, is constantly active as on the first. It would have been
for Him a poor occupation to compose this heavy world out of simple
elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year,
if He had not the plan of founding a nursery for a world of spirits
upon this material basis. So He is now constantly active in higher
natures to attract the lower ones."--_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 426.
_Goethe's Doctrine of Immortality._--"Kant has unquestionably done
the best service, by drawing the limits beyond which human intellect
is not able to penetrate, and leaving at rest the insoluble problems.
What a deal have people philosophised about immortality! and how far
have they got? I doubt not of our immortality, for nature cannot
dispense with the _entelecheia_. But we are not all, in like manner,
immortal; and he who would manifest himself in future as a great
_entelecheia_ must be one now.... To me the eternal existence of my
soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work on incessantly
till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence
when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit."--_Ibid._ vol.
ii. pp. 193, 194, and p. 122.
_Goethe's Image of Life._--"Child, child, no more! The coursers of
Time, lashed, as it were, by invisible spirits, hurry on the light
car of our destiny; and all that we can do is, in cool
self-possession, to hold the reins with a firm hand, and to guide the
wheels, now to the left, now to the right, avoiding a stone here, or
a precipice there. Whither it is hurrying, who can tell? and who,
indeed, can remember the point from which it started?"--_Egmont._
_Man's proper business._--"It has at all times been said and repeated
that man should strive to know himself. This is a singular
requisition; with which no one complies, or indeed ever will comply.
Man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals--to the
world around him; and he has to know this so far, and to make it so
far serviceable, as he requires for his own ends. It is only when he
feels joy or sorrow that he knows anything about himself, and only by
joy or sorrow is he instructed what to seek and what to
shun."--_Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe_, vol. ii. p. 180.
_The Abstract and the Concrete, and the Subjective and the
Objective._--"The Germans are certainly strange people. By their deep
thoughts and ideas, which they seek in everything, and fix upon
everything, they make life much more burdensome than is necessary.
Only have the courage to give yourself up to your impressions; allow
yourself to be delighted, moved, elevated--nay, instructed and
inspired by something great; but do not imagine all is vanity if it
is not abstract thought and idea.... It was not in my line, as a
poet, to strive to embody anything abstract. I received in my mind
impressions, and those of a sensual, animated, charming, varied,
hundred-fold kind, just as a lively imagination presented them; and I
had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically to round off and
elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively
representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the
same impressions in hearing or reading my representation of them....
A poet deserves not the name while he only speaks out his few
subjective feelings; but as soon as he can appropriate to himself and
express the world he is a poet. Then he is inexhaustible, and can be
always new; while a subjective nature has soon talked out his little
internal material, and is at last ruined by mannerism. People always
talk of the study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except
that it says 'Turn your attention to the real world, and try to
express it, for that is what the ancients did when they were alive?'
Goethe arose and walked to and fro, while I remained seated at the
table, as he likes to see me. He stood a moment at the stove, and
then, like one who has reflected, came to me, and, with his finger on
his lips, said to me, 'I will now tell you something which you will
often find confirmed in your own experience. All eras in a state of
decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand, all
progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is
retrograde, for it is subjective; we see this not merely in poetry,
but also in painting and much besides. Every healthy effort, on the
contrary, is directed from the inward to the outward world, as you
will see in all great eras, which have been really in a state of
progression, and all of an objective nature.'"--_Ibid._ vol. i. pp.
415, 416, and pp. 283, 284.
_Rule of Individual Activity._--"The most reasonable way is for every
man to follow his own vocation to which he has been born and which he
has learnt, and to avoid hindering others from following theirs. Let
the shoemaker abide by his last, the peasant by his plough, and let
the king know how to govern; for this is also a business which must
be learned, and with which no one should meddle who does not
understand it."--_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 134.
_Right and Wrong: The habit of Controversy._--"The end of all
opposition is negation, and negation is nothing. If I call _bad_ bad,
what do I gain? But, if I call _good_ bad, I do a great deal of
mischief. He who will work aright must never rail, must not trouble
himself at all about what is ill done, but only do well himself. For
the great point is not to pull down, but to build up; and in this
humanity finds pure joy."--_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 208.
_Goethe's own Relation to the Disputes of his Time._--"'You have been
reproached,' remarked I, rather inconsiderately, 'for not taking up
arms at that great period [the war with Napoleon], or at least
co-operating as a poet.' 'Let us leave that point alone, my good
friend,' returned Goethe. 'It is an absurd world, which knows not
what it wants, and which one must allow to have its own way. How
could I take up arms without hatred, and how could I hate without
youth? If such an emergency had befallen me when twenty years old, I
should certainly not have been the last; but it found me as one who
had already passed the first sixties. Besides, we cannot all serve
our country in the same way; but each does his best, according as God
has endowed him. I have toiled hard enough during half a century. I
can say that, in those things which nature has appointed for my daily
work, I have permitted myself no relaxation night or day, but have
always striven, investigated, and done as much, and that as well, as
I could. If everyone can say the same of himself, it will prove well
with all. I will not say what I think. There is more ill-will
towards me hidden beneath that remark than you are aware of. I feel
therein a new form of the old hatred with which people have
persecuted me, and endeavoured quietly to wound me, for years. I know
very well that I am an eyesore to many; that they would all willingly
get rid of me; and that, since they cannot touch my talent, they aim
at my character. Now, it is said that I am proud; now, egotistical;
now, immersed in sensuality; now, without Christianity; and now,
without love for my native country and my own dear Germans. You have
now known me sufficiently for years, and you feel what all that talk
is worth.... The poet, as a man and citizen, will love his native
land; but the native land of his _poetic_ powers and _poetic_ action
is the good, noble, and beautiful: which is confined to no particular
province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms wherever he
finds them. Therein he is like the eagle, who hovers with free gaze
over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence whether the
hare on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in
Saxony.'"--_Ibid._ vol. ii. pp. 257, 258, and p. 427.
Whoever has read these sentences attentively, and penetrated their meaning
in connexion, will see that they reveal a mode of thought somewhat
resembling that which we have attributed to Shakespeare, and yet
essentially different from it. Both poets are distinguished by this, that
they abstained systematically during their lives from the abstract, the
dialectical, and the controversial, and devoted themselves, with true
feeling and enjoyment, to the concrete, the real, and the unquestioned;
and so far there is an obvious resemblance between them. But the manner in
which this characteristic was attained was by no means the same in both
cases. In Shakespeare, as we have seen, there was a metaphysical longing,
a tendency towards the supersensible and invisible, absolutely morbid, if
we take ordinary constitutions as the standard of health in this respect;
and, if, with all this, he revelled with delight and moved with ease and
firmness in the sensuous and actual, it was because the very same soul
which pressed with such energy and wailing against the bounds of this life
of man was also related with inordinate keenness and intimacy to all that
this life spheres in. In Goethe, on the other hand, the tendency to the
real existed under easier constitutional conditions, and in a state of
such natural preponderance over any concomitant craving for the
metaphysical, that it necessarily took, German though he was, a higher
place in his estimate of what is desirable in a human character. That
world of the real in which Shakespeare delighted, and which he knew so
well, seemed to him, all this knowledge and delight notwithstanding, far
more evanescent, far more a mere filmy show, far less considerable a shred
of all that is, than it did to Goethe. To Shakespeare, as we have already
said, life was but as a little island on the bosom of a boundless sea: men
must needs know what the island contains, and act as those who have to
till and rule it; still, with that expanse of waters all round in view,
and that roar of waters ever in the ear, what can men call themselves or
pretend their realm to be? "Poor fools of Nature" is the poet's own
phrase--the realm so small that it is pitiful to belong to it! Not so with
Goethe. To him also, of course, the thought was familiar of a vast region
of the supersensible outlying nature and life; but a higher value on the
whole was reserved for nature and life, even on the universal scale, by
his peculiar habit of conceiving them, not as distinct from the
supersensible and contemporaneously begirt by it, but rather, if we may so
speak, as a considerable portion, or even duration, of the
_quondam_-supersensible in the new form of the sensible. In other words,
Goethe was full of the notion of progress or evolution; the world was to
him not a mere spectacle and dominion for the supernatural, but an actual
manifestation of the substance of the supernatural itself, on its way
through time to new issues. Hence his peculiar notion of immortality;
hence his view as to the mere relativeness of the terms right and wrong,
good and bad, and the like; and hence also his resolute inculcation of the
doctrine, so unpalatable to his countrymen, that men ought to direct their
thoughts and efforts to the actual and the outward. Life being the current
phase of the universal mystery, the true duty of men could be but to
contribute in their various ways to the furtherance of life.
And what then, finally, was Goethe's _own_ mode of activity in a life thus
defined in his general philosophy? Like Shakespeare, he was a literary
man; his function was literature. Yes, but in what respect, otherwise than
Shakespeare had done before him, did he fulfil this literary function in
reference to the world he lived in and enjoyed? In the first place, as all
know, he differed from Shakespeare in this, that he did not address the
world exclusively in the character of a poet. Besides his poetry, properly
so called, Goethe has left behind him numerous prose-writings, ranking
under very different heads, abounding with such deep and wise maxims and
perceptions, in reference to all things under the sun, as would have
entitled him, even had he been no poet, to rank as a sage. So great,
indeed, is Goethe as a thinker and a critic that it may very well be
disputed whether his prose-writings, as a whole, are not more precious
than his poems. But even if we set apart this difference, and regard the
two men in their special character as poets or artists, a marked
difference is still discernible. Hear Goethe's own definition of his
poetical career and aim.
"Thus began that tendency from which I could not deviate my whole
life through: namely, the tendency to turn into an image, into a
poem, everything that delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied
me, and to come to some certain understanding with myself upon it,
that I might both rectify my conceptions of external things, and set
my mind at rest about them. The faculty of doing this was necessary
to no one more than to me, for my natural disposition whirled me
constantly from one extreme to the other. All, therefore, that has
been put forth by me consists of fragments of a great
confession."--_Autobiography_, vol. i. p. 240.
Shakespeare's genius we defined to be the genius of universal expression,
of clothing objects, circumstances, and feelings with magnificent
language, of pouring over the image of any given situation, whether
suggested from within or from without, an effusion of the richest
intellectual matter that could possibly be related to it. Goethe's genius,
as here defined by himself, was something different and narrower. It was
the genius of translation from the subjective into the objective, of
clothing real feelings with fictitious circumstance, of giving happy
intellectual form to states of mind, so as to dismiss and throw them off.
Let this distinction be sufficiently conceived and developed, and a full
idea will be obtained of the exact difference between the literary
many-sidedness attributed to Shakespeare and that also attributed to
Goethe.
MILTON'S YOUTH.
MILTON'S YOUTH.[5]
Never surely did a youth leave the academic halls of England more full of
fair promise than Milton, when, at the age of twenty-three, he quitted
Cambridge to reside at his father's house, amid the quiet beauties of a
rural neighbourhood some twenty miles distant from London. Fair in person,
with a clear fresh complexion, light brown hair which parted in the middle
and fell in locks to his shoulders, clear grey eyes, and a well-knit frame
of moderate proportions--there could not have been found a finer picture
of pure and ingenuous English youth. And that health and beauty which
distinguished his outward appearance, and the effect of which was
increased by a voice surpassingly sweet and musical, indicated with
perfect truth the qualities of the mind within. Seriousness, studiousness,
fondness for flowers and music, fondness also for manly exercises in the
open air, courage and resolution of character, combined with the most
maiden purity and innocence of life--these were the traits conspicuous in
Milton in his early years. Of his accomplishments it is hardly necessary
to take particular note. Whatever of learning, of science, or of
discipline in logic or philosophy, the University at that time could give,
he had duly and in the largest measure acquired. No better Greek or Latin
scholar probably had the University in that age sent forth; he was
proficient in the Hebrew tongue, and in all the other customary aids to a
Biblical Theology; and he could speak and write well in French and
Italian. His acquaintance, obtained by independent reading, with the
history and with the whole body of the literature of ancient and modern
nations, was extensive and various. And, as nature had endowed him in no
ordinary degree with that most exquisite of her gifts, the ear and the
passion for harmony, he had studied music as an art, and had taught
himself not only to sing in the society of others, but also to touch the
keys for his solitary pleasure.
The instruments which Milton preferred as a musician were, his biographers
tell us, the organ and the bass-viol. This fact seems to us to be not
without its significance. Were we to define in one word our impression of
the prevailing tone, the characteristic mood and disposition of Milton's
mind, even in his early youth, we should say that it consisted in a deep
and habitual _seriousness_. We use the word in none of those special and
restricted senses that are sometimes given to it. We do not mean that
Milton, at the period of his early youth with which we are now concerned,
was, or accounted himself as being, a confessed member of that noble party
of English Puritans with which he afterwards became allied, and to which
he rendered such vast services. True, he himself tells us, in his account
of his education, that "care had ever been had of him, with his earliest
capacity, not to be negligently trained in the precepts of the Christian
religion;" and in the fact that his first tutor, selected for him by his
father, was one Thomas Young, a Scotchman of subsequent distinction among
the English Puritans, there is enough to prove that the formation of his
character in youth was aided expressly by Puritanical influences. But
Milton, if ever in a denominational sense he could be called a Puritan (he
wore his hair long, and in other respects did not conform to the usages of
the Puritan party), could hardly, with any propriety, be designated as a
Puritan in this sense, at the time when he left College. There is evidence
that at this time he had not given so much attention, on his own personal
account, to matters of religious doctrine as he afterwards bestowed. That
seriousness of which we speak was, therefore, rather a constitutional
seriousness, ratified and nourished by rational reflection, than the
assumed temper of a sect. "A certain reservedness of natural disposition,
and a moral discipline learnt out of the noblest philosophy"--such, in
Milton's own words, were the causes which, apart from his Christian
training, would have always kept him, as he believed, above the vices that
debase youth. And herein the example of Milton contradicts much that is
commonly advanced by way of a theory of the poetical character.