Chapter VI: Conclusion (3)

One is in Union blue. With a little band of heroes about him, he is posted on a projecting rock, which is scarred with bullets, and in full view of both armies. His head is uncovered, his hair streaming in the wind, his face upturned in the darkening daylight, and from his soul is going up a prayer,--a prayer for Sheldon and Cranor. He turns his eyes to the northward, and his lip tightens, as he throws off his coat, and says to his hundred men,--"Boys, _we_ must go at them!"

The other is in Rebel gray. Moving out to the brow of the opposite hill, and placing a glass to his eye, he, too, takes a long look to the northward. He starts, for he sees something which the other, on lower ground, does not distinguish. Soon he wheels his horse, and the word "RETREAT" echoes along the valley between them. It is his last word; for six rifles crack, and the Rebel Major lies on the ground quivering.

The one in blue looks to the north again, and now, floating proudly among the trees, he sees the starry banner. It is Sheldon and Cranor! The long ride of the scout is at last doing its work for the nation. On they come like the rushing wind, filling the air with their shouting. The rescued eleven hundred take up the strain, and then, above the swift pursuit, above the lessening conflict, above the last boom of the wheeling cannon, goes up the wild huzza of Victory. The gallant Garfield has won the day, and rolled back the disastrous tide which has been sweeping on ever since Big Bethel. In ten days Thomas routs Zollicoffer, and then we have and hold Kentucky.

* * * * *

Every one remembers a certain artist, who, after painting a "neighing steed," wrote underneath the picture, "This is a horse," lest it should be mistaken for an alligator. I am tempted to imitate his example, lest the reader, otherwise, may not detect the rambling parallel I have herein drawn between a Northern and a Southern "poor white man."

President Lincoln, when he heard of the Battle of Middle Creek, said to a distinguished officer, who happened to be with him,--

"Why did Garfield in two weeks do what would have taken one of you Regular folks two months to accomplish?"

"Because he was not educated at West Point," answered the West-Pointer, laughing.

"No," replied Mr. Lincoln. "That wasn't the reason. It was because, when he was a boy, he had to work for a living."

But our good President, for once, was wrong,--for once, he did not get at the core of the matter. Jordan, as well as Garfield, "had, when a boy, to work for a living." The two men were, perhaps, of about equal natural abilities,--both were born in log huts, both worked their own way to manhood, and both went into the war consecrating their very lives to their country: but one came out of it with a brace of stars on his shoulder, and honored by all the nation; the other never rose from the ranks, and went down to an unknown grave, mourned only among his native mountains. Something more than _work_ was at the bottom of this contrast in their lives and their destinies. It was FREE SCHOOLS, which the North gave the one, and of which the South robbed the other. Plant a free school at every Southern cross-road, and every Southern Jordan will become a Garfield. Then, and not till then, will this Union be "reconstructed."

FOOTNOTES:

[B] The Baine is a small stream which puts into the Big Sandy, a short distance from the town of Louisa, Ky.

NOËL.[C]

L'Académie en respect,
Nonobstant l'incorrection,
A la faveur du sujet,
Ture-lure,
N'y fera point de rature;
Noël! ture-lure-lure.

GUI-BARÔZAI.

1.

Quand les astres de Noël
Brillaient, palpitaient au ciel,
Six gaillards, et chacun ivre,
Chantaient gaîment dans le givre,
"Bons amis,
Allons done chez Agassiz!"

2.

Ces illustres Pèlerins
D'Outre-Mer, adroits et fins,
Se donnant des airs de prêtre,
A l'envi se vantaient d'être
"Bons amis
De Jean Rudolphe Agassiz!"

3.

Oeil-de-Perdrix, grand farceur,
Sans reproche et sans pudeur,
Dans son patois de Bourgogne,
Bredouillait comme un ivrogne,
"Bons amis,
J'ai dansé chez Agassiz!"

4.

Verzenay le Champenois,
Bon Français, point New-Yorquois,
Mais des environs d'Avize,
Fredonne, à mainte reprise,
"Bons amis,
J'ai chanté chez Agassiz!"

5.

A côté marchait un vieux
Hidalgo, mais non mousseux;
Dans le temps de Charlemagne
Fut son père Grand d'Espagne!
"Bons amis,
J'ai dîné chez Agassiz!"

6.

Derrière eux un Bordelais,
Gascon, s'il en fut jamais,
Parfumé de poésie
Riait, chantait plein de vie,
"Bons amis,
J'ai soupé chez Agassiz!"

7.

Avec ce beau cadet roux,
Bras dessus et bras dessous,
Mine altière et couleur terne,
Vint le Sire de Sauterne:
"Bons amis,
J'ai couché chez Agassiz!"

8.

Mais le dernier de ces preux
Était un pauvre Chartreux,
Qui disait, d'un ton robuste,
"Bénédictions sur le Juste!
Bons amis,
Bénissons Père Agassiz!"

9.

Ils arrivent trois à trois,
Montent l'escalier de bois
Clopin-clopant! quel gendarme
Peut permettre ce vacarme,
Bons amis,
A la porte d'Agassiz!

10.

"Ouvrez donc, mon bon Seigneur,
Ouvrez vite et n'ayez peur;
Ouvrez, ouvrez, car nous sommes
Gens de bien et gentilshommes,
Bons amis
De la famille Agassiz!"

11.

Chut, ganaches! taisez-vous!
C'en est trop de vos glouglous;
Épargnez aux Philosophes
Vos abominables strophes!
Bons amis,
Respectez mon Agassiz!

FOOTNOTES:

[C] Sent to Mr. Agassiz, with a basket of wine, on Christmas Eve, 1864.

WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP.

SECOND PAPER.

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.

DOCTOR JOHNS.

XXXIV.

Reuben has in many respects vastly improved under his city education. It would be wrong to say that the good Doctor did not take a very human pride in his increased alertness of mind, in his vivacity, in his self-possession,--nay, even in that very air of world-acquaintance which now covered entirely the old homely manner of the country lad. He thought within himself, what a glad smile of triumph would have been kindled upon the face of the lost Rachel, could she but have seen this tall youth with his kindly attentions and his graceful speech. May-be she did see it all,--but with far other eyes, now. Was the child ripening into fellowship with the sainted mother?

The Doctor underneath all his pride carried a great deal of anxious doubt; and as he walked beside his boy upon the thronged street, elated in some strange way by the touch of that strong arm of the youth, whose blood was his own,--so dearly his own,--he pondered gravely with himself, if the mocking delusions of the Evil One were not the occasion of his pride? Was not Satan setting himself artfully to the work of quieting all sense of responsibility in regard to the lad's future, by thus kindling in his old heart anew the vanities of the flesh and the pride of life?

"I say, father, I want to put you through now. It'll do you a great deal of good to see some of our wonders here in the city."

"The very voice,--the very voice of Rachel!" says the Doctor to himself, quickening his laggard step to keep pace with Reuben.

"There are such lots of things to show you, father! Look in this store, now. You can step in, if you like. It's the largest carpet-store in the United States, three stories packed full. There's the head man of the firm,--the stout man in a white choker; with half a million, they say: he's a deacon in Mowry's church."

"I hope, then, Reuben, that he makes a worthy use of his wealth."

"Oh, he gives thunderingly to the missionary societies," said Reuben, with a glibness that grated on the father's ear.

"You see that building yonder? That's Gothic. They've got the finest bowling-alleys in the world there."

"I hope, my son, you never go to such places?"

"Bowl? Oh, yes, I bowl sometimes: the physicians recommend it; good exercise for the chest. Besides, it's kept by a fine man, and he's got one of the prettiest little trotting horses you ever saw in your life."

"Why, my son, you don't mean to tell me that you know the keeper of this bowling-alley?"

"Oh, yes, father,--we fellows all know him; and he gave me a splendid cigar the last time I was there."

"You don't mean to say that you smoke, Reuben?" said the old gentleman, gravely.

"Not much, father: but then everybody smokes now and then. Mowry--Dr. Mowry smokes, you know; and they say he has prime cigars."

"Is it possible? Well, well!"

"You see that fine building over there?" said Reuben, as they passed on.

"Yes, my son."

"That's the theatre,--the Old Park."

The Doctor ran his eye over it, and its effigy of Shakspeare upon the niche in the wall, as Gabriel might have looked upon the armor of Beelzebub.

"I hope, Reuben, you never enter those doors?"

"Well, father, since Kean and Mathews are gone, there's really nothing worth the seeing."

"Kean! Mathews!" said the Doctor, stopping in his walk and confronting Reuben with a stern brow,--"is it possible, my son, that I hear you talking in this familiar way of play-actors? You don't tell me that you have been a participant in such orgies of Satan?"

"Why, father," says Reuben, a little startled by the Doctor's earnestness, "the truth is, Aunt Mabel goes occasionally, like 'most all the ladies; but we go, you know, to see the moral pieces, generally."

"Moral pieces! moral pieces!" says the Doctor, with a withering scowl. "Reuben! those who go thither take hold on the door-posts of hell!"

"That's the Tract Society building yonder," said Reuben, wishing to divert the Doctor, if possible, from the special object of his reflections.

"Rachel's voice!--always Rachel's voice!"--said the Doctor to himself.

"Would you like to go in, father?"

"No, my son, we have no time; and yet"--meditating, and thrusting his hand in his pocket--"there is a tract or two I would like to buy for you, Reuben."

"Go in, then," says Reuben. "Let me tell them who you are, father, and you can get them at wholesale prices. It's the merest song."

"No, my son, no," said the Doctor, disheartened by the blithe air of Reuben. "I fear it would be wasted effort. Yet I trust that you do not wholly neglect the opportunities for religious instruction on the Sabbath?"

"Oh, no," says Reuben, gayly. "I see Dr. Mowry off and on, pretty often. He's a clever old gentleman,--Dr. Mowry."

Clever old gentleman!

The Doctor walked on oppressed with grief,--silent, but with lips moving in prayer,--beseeching God to take away the stony heart from this poor child of his, and to give him a heart of flesh.

Reuben had improved, as we said, by his New York schooling. He was quick of apprehension, well informed; and his familiarity with the counting-room of Mr. Brindlock had given him a business promptitude that was specially agreeable to the Doctor, whose habits in that regard were of woful slackness. But religiously, the good man looked upon his son as a castaway. It was only too apparent that Reuben had not derived the desired improvement from attendance at the Fulton-Street Church. That attendance had been punctual, indeed, for nearly all the first year of his city life, in virtue of the inexorable habit of his education; but Dr. Mowry had not won upon him by any personal magnetism. The city Doctor was a ponderously good man, preaching for the most part ponderous sermons, and possessed of a most imposing friendliness of manner. When Reuben had presented to him the credentials from his father, (which he could hardly have done, save for the urgency of the Brindlocks,) the ponderous Doctor had patted him upon the shoulder, and said,--

"My young friend, your father is a most worthy man,--most worthy. I should be delighted to see you following in his steps. I shall be most glad to be of service to you. Our meetings for Bible instruction are on Wednesdays, at seven: the young men upon the left, the young ladies on the right."

The Doctor appeared to Reuben a man solemnly preoccupied with the immensity of his charge; and it seemed to him (though it was doubtless a wicked thought of the boy) that the ponderous minister would have counted it a matter of far smaller merit to instruct, and guide, and save a wanderer from the country, than to perform the same offices for a good fat sinner of the city.

As we have said, the memory of old teachings for a year or more made any divergence from the severe path of boyhood seem to Reuben a sin; and these divergencies so multiplied by easy accessions as to have made him, after a time, look upon himself very confidently, and almost cheerily, as a reprobate. And if a reprobate, why not taste the Devil's cup to the full?

That first visit to the theatre was like a bold push into the very domain of Satan. Even the ticket-seller at the door seemed to him on that eventful night an understrapper of Beelzebub, who looked out at him with the goggle eyes of a demon. That such a man could have a family, or family affections, or friendships, or any sense of duty or honor, was to him a thing incomprehensible; and when he passed the wicket for the first time into the vestibule of the old Park Theatre, the very usher in the corridor had to his eye a look like the Giant Dagon, and he conceived of him as mumbling, in his leisure moments, the flesh from human bones. And when at last the curtain rose, and the damp air came out upon him from behind the scenes as he sat in the pit, and the play began with some wonderful creature in tight bodice and painted cheeks, sailing across the stage, it seemed to him that the flames of Divine wrath might presently be bursting out over the house, or a great judgment of God break down the roof and destroy them all.