I FIND a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer, or
secretary, who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that
everywhere throbs and works. His office is a reception of the facts into the
mind, and then a selection of the eminent and characteristic experiences.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history.
The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves
its scratches on the mountain; the river its channel in the soil; the animal
its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the
coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a
foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more
or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself
in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is
full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the round is all memoranda and
signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the
intelligent.

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the
print of the seal. It neither exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But
nature strives upward; and, in man, the report is something more than print
of the seal. It is a new and finer form of the original. The record is
alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the memory is a kind of
looking-glass, which, having received the images of surrounding objects, is
touched with life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts do not lie in
it inert; but some subside and others shine; so that we soon have a new
picture, composed of the eminent experiences. The man cooperates. He loves
to communicate; and that which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart
until it is delivered. But, besides the universal joy of conversation, some
men are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are born to
write. The gardener saves every slip and seed and peach-stone: his vocation
is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair.
Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its
picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are
undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written,
first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so
broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and
he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the
universe is the possibility of being reported. In conversation, in calamity,
he finds new materials; as our German poet said, "Some god gave me the power
to paint what I suffer." He draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting
rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely. Vexations and a tempest of
passion only fill his sail; as the good Luther writes, "When I am angry, I
can pray well and preach well": and, if we knew the genesis of fine strokes
of eloquence, they might recall the complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who
struck off some Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the
spasms in the muscles of the neck. His failures are the preparation of his
victories. A new thought or a crisis of passion apprises him that all that
he has yet learned and written is exoteric,- is not the fact, but some rumor
of the fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins again to
describe in the new light which has shined on him,- if, by some means, he
may yet save some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can
be spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering
organs. If they can not compass it, it waits and works, until at last it
moulds them to its perfect will and is articulated.

This striving after imitative expression, which one meets every where, is
significant of the aim of nature, but is mere stenography. There are higher
degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments for those whom she elects
to a superior office; for the class of scholars or writers, who see
connection where the multitude see fragments, and who are impelled to
exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis on which the frame of
things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the formation of the speculative
man, or scholar. It is an end never lost sight of, and is prepared in the
original casting of things. He is no permissive or accidental appearance,
but an organic agent, one of the estates of the realm, provided and prepared
from of old and from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture of things.
Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the breast
which attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the
spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought which dawns on
the mine, in the moment of its emergence announces its own rank,- whether it
is some whimsy, or whether it is a power.

If he have his incitements, there is, on the other side, invitation and need
enough of his gift. Society has, at all times, the same want, namely of one
sane man with adequate powers of expression to hold up each object of
monomania in its right relations. The ambitious and mercenary bring their
last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, railroad, Romanism, mesmerism,
or California; and, by detaching the object from its relations, easily
succeed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it, and
they are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept
from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But
let one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated
prodigy in its right neighborhood and bearings,- the illusion vanishes, and
the returning reason of the community thanks the reason of the monitor.

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish with other men to
stand well with his contemporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among
superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy, which is of no import
unless the scholar heed it. In this country, the emphasis of conversation
and of public opinion commends the practical man; and the solid portion of
the community is named with significant respect in every circle. Our people
are of Bonaparte's opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive of
social order and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is
believed, the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna, or the
running up and down to procure a company of subscribers to set a-going five
or ten thousand spindles, or the negotiations of a caucus and the practising
on the prejudices and facility of country-people to secure their votes in
November,- is practical and commendable.

If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of
contemplation, I should not venture to pronounce with much confidence in
favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination,
that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life
of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness and loss of
balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like,- but you do
it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who
has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they
have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act,
which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer
embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends
cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established
Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and
although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is
anti-spiritual. But where are his new things of to-day? In actions of
enthusiasm this drawback appears, but in those lower activities, which have
no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly; in actions
of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative
from the practical faculty and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is
nothing else but drawback and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred
books, "Children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the
practical faculties as two. They are but one, for both obtain the selfsame
end, and the place which is gained by the followers of the one is gained by
the followers of the other. That man seeth, who seeth that the speculative
and the practical doctrines are one." For great action must draw on the
spiritual nature. The measure of action is the sentiment from which it
proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private
circumstance.

This disparagement will not come from the leaders, but from inferior
persons. The robust gentlemen who stand at the head of the practical class,
share the ideas of the time, and have too much sympathy with the speculative
class. It is not from men excellent in any kind that disparagement of any
other is to be looked for. With such, Talleyrand's question is ever the main
one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or
that faculty? is he of the movement? is he of the establishment?- but, Is he
anybody? does he stand for something? He must be good of his kind. That is
all that Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that the common-sense of
mankind asks. Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able
men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A
master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist,
craftsman, or king.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary
class. And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in their recognition
and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still the writer does not stand
with us on any commanding ground. I think this to be his own fault. A pound
passes for a pound. There have been times when he was a sacred person: he
wrote Bibles, the first hymns, the codes, the epics, tragic songs, Sibylline
verses, Chaldean oracles, Laconian sentences, inscribed on temple walls.
Every word was true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without
levity and without choice. Every word was carved before his eyes into the
earth and the sky; and the sun and stars were only letters of the same
purport and of no more necessity. But how can he be honored when he does not
honor himself; when he loses himself in a crowd; when he is no longer the
lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless
public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government, or
must bark, all the year round, in opposition; or write conventional
criticism, or profligate novels, or at any rate write without thought, and
without recurrence by day and by night to the sources of inspiration?

Some reply to these questions may be furnished by looking over the list of
men of literary genius in our age. Among these no more instructive name
occurs than that of Goethe to represent the powers and duties of the scholar
or writer.

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life and
aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man
quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits,
impossible at any earlier time, and taking away, by his colossal parts, the
reproach of weakness which but for him would lie on the intellectual works
of the period. He appears at a time when a general culture has spread itself
and has smoothed down all sharp individual traits; when, in the absence of
heroic characters, a social comfort and cooperation have come in. There is
no poet, but scores of poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of
post-captains, with transit-telescope, barometer and concentrated soup and
pemmican; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number of clever parliamentary
and forensic debaters; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divinity; no
learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms and
book-clubs without number. There was never such a miscellany of facts. The
world extends itself like American trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life,
life in the Middle Ages, to be a simple and comprehensible affair; but
modern life to respect a multitude of things, which is distracting.

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed,
able and happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences,
and by his own versatility to dispose of them with ease; a manly mind,
unembarrassed by the variety of coats of convention with which life had got
encrusted, easily able by his subtlety to pierce these and to draw his
strength from nature, with which he lived in full communion. What is strange
too, he lived in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in
a time when Germany played no such leading part in the world's affairs as to
swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might have
cheered a French, or English, or once, a Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is
no trace of provincial limitation in his muse. He is not a debtor to his
position, but was born with a free and controlling genius.

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature set
in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master of histories,
mythologies, philosophies, sciences and national literatures, in the
encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition, with its international
intercourse of the whole earth's population, researches into Indian,
Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts; geology, chemistry, astronomy; and every
one of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, by
reason of the multitude. One looks at a king with reverence; but if one
should chance to be at a congress of kings, the eye would take liberties
with the peculiarities of each. These are not wild miraculous songs, but
elaborate forms to which the poet has confided the results of eighty years
of observation. This reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem more
truly the flower of this time. It dates itself. Still, he is a poet,- poet
of a prouder laurel than any contemporary, and, under this plague of
microscopes (for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin), strikes the
harp with a hero's strength and grace.

The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of
this man's wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics
and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. What new
mythologies sail through his head! The Greeks said that Alexander went as
far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day, as far; and one step farther
he hazarded, and brought himself safe back.

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense horizon
which journeys with us lends its majesty to trifles and to matters of
convenience and necessity, as to solemn and festal performances. He was the
soul of his century. If that was learned, and had become, by population,
compact organization and drill of parts, one great Exploring Expedition,
accumulating a glut of facts and fruits too fast for any hitherto-existing
savans to classify,- this man's mind had ample chambers for the distribution
of all. He had a power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law.
He has clothed our modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail,
he detected the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close
beside us, and showed that the dulness and prose we ascribe to the age was
only another of his masks:-

"His very flight is presence in disguise":*(32)

-that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and was not a whit
less vivacious or rich in Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or
Antioch. He sought him in public squares and main streets, in boulevards and
hotels; and, in the solidest kingdom of routine and the senses, he showed
the lurking daemonic power; that, in actions of routine, a thread of
mythology and fable spins itself: and this, by tracing the pedigree of every
usage and practice, every institution, utensil and means, home to its origin
in the structure of man. He had an extreme impatience of conjecture and of
rhetoric. "I have guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him
set down only what he knows." He writes in the plainest and lowest tone,
omitting a great deal more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a
word. He has explained the distinction between the antique and the modern
spirit and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said the best
things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature as the old
philosophers, as the seven wise masters did,- and, with whatever loss of
French tabulation and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us; and they
have some doctoral skill. Eyes are better on the whole than telescopes or
microscopes. He has contributed a key to many parts of nature, through the
rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested the
leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf is the unit
of botany, and that every part of a plant is only a transformed leaf to meet
a new condition; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted
into any other organ, and any other organ into a leaf. In like manner, in
osteology, he assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be considered as
the unit of the skeleton: the head was only the uttermost vertebrae
transformed. "The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at last with the
flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to
knot and closes with the head. Man and the higher animals are built up
through the vertebrae, the powers being concentrated in the head." In optics
again he rejected the artificial theory of seven colors, and considered that
every color was the mixture of light and darkness in new proportions. It is
really of very little consequence what topic he writes upon. He sees at
every pore, and has a certain gravitation towards truth. He will realize
what you say. He hates to be trifled with and to be made to say over again
some old wife's fable that has had possession of men's faith these thousand
years. He may as well see if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here,
he would say, to be the measure and judge of these things. Why should I take
them on trust? And therefore what he says of religion, of passion, of
marriage, of manners, of property, of paper-money, of periods of belief, of
omens, of luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten.

Take the most remarkable example that could occur of this tendency to verify
every term in popular use. The Devil had played an important part in
mythology in all times. Goethe would have no word that does not cover a
thing. The same measure will still serve: "I have never heard of any crime
which I might not have committed." So he flies at the throat of this imp. He
shall be real; he shall be modern; he shall be European; he shall dress like
a gentleman, and accept the manners, and walk in the streets, and be well
initiated in the life of Vienna and of Heidelberg in 1820,- or he shall not
exist. Accordingly, he stripped him of mythologic gear, of horns, cloven
foot, harpoon tail, brimstone and blue-fire, and instead of looking in books
and pictures, looked for him in his own mind, in every shade of coldness,
selfishness and unbelief that, in crowds or in solitude, darkens over the
human thought,- and found that the portrait gained reality and terror by
every thing he added and by every thing he took away. He found that the
essence of this hobgoblin which had hovered in shadow about the habitations
of men ever since there were men, was pure intellect, applied,- as always
there is a tendency,- to the service of the senses: and he flung into
literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic figure that has been
added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus.

I have no design to enter into any analysis of his numerous works. They
consist of translations, criticism, dramas, lyric and every other
description of poems, literary journals and portraits of distinguished men.
Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm Meister.

Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind, called by
its admirers the only delineation of modern society,- as if other novels,
those of Scott for example, dealt with costume and condition, this with the
spirit of life. It is a book over which some veil is still drawn. It is read
by very intelligent persons with wonder and delight. It is preferred by some
such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. I suppose no book of this century can
compare with it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the
mind, gratifying it with so many and so solid thoughts, just insights into
life and manners and characters; so many good hints for the conduct of life,
so many unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and never a trace of
rhetoric or dulness. A very provoking book to the curiosity of young men of
genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of light reading, those who
look in it for the entertainment they find in a romance, are disappointed.
On the other hand, those who begin it with the higher hope to read in it a
worthy history of genius, and the just award of the laurel to its toils and
denials, have also reason to complain. We had an English romance here, not
long ago, professing to embody the hope of a new age and to unfold the
political hope of the party called "Young England,"- in which the only
reward of virtue is a seat in Parliament and a peerage. Goethe's romance has
a conclusion as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its
continuation, has sketched a truer and more dignified picture. In the
progress of the story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand at a
rate that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristocratic convention: they
quit the society and habits of their rank, they lose their wealth, they
become the servants of great ideas and of the most generous social ends;
until at last the hero, who is the centre and fountain of an association for
the rendering of the noblest benefits to the human race, no longer answers
to his own titled name; it sounds foreign and remote in his ear. "I am only
man," he says; "I breathe and work for man"; and this in poverty and extreme
sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has so many weaknesses and
impurities and keeps such bad company, that the sober English public, when
the book was translated, were disgusted. And yet it is so crammed with
wisdom, with knowledge of the world and with knowledge of laws; the persons
so truly and subtly drawn, and with such few strokes, and not a word too
much,- the book remains ever so new and unexhausted, that we must even let
it go its way and be willing to get what good from it we can, assured that
it has only begun its office and has millions of readers yet to serve.

The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using both
words in their best sense. And this passage is not made in any mean or
creeping way, but through the hall door. Nature and character assist, and
the rank is made real by sense and probity in the nobles. No generous youth
can escape this charm of reality in the book, so that it is highly
stimulating to intellect and courage.

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the book as "thoroughly modern and
prosaic; the romantic is completely levelled in it; so is the poetry of
nature; the wonderful. The book treats only of the ordinary affairs of men:
it is a poeticized civic and domestic story. The wonderful in it is
expressly treated as fiction and enthusiastic dreaming":- and yet, what is
also characteristic, Novalis soon returned to this book, and it remained his
favorite reading to the end of his life.

What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a property which
he shares with his nation,- a habitual reference to interior truth. In
England and in America there is a respect for talent; and, if it is exerted
in support of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party, or in
regular opposition to any, the public is satisfied. In France there is even
a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And in all
these countries, men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the
understanding is occupied, the taste propitiated,- so many columns, so many
hours, filled in a lively and creditable way. The German intellect wants the
French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and
the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a
superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public
asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is
it for? What does the man mean? Whence, whence all these thoughts?

Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a
personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set
forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise;
holding things because they are things. If he can not rightly express
himself to-day, the same things subsist and will open themselves to-morrow.
There lies the burden on his mind,- the burden of truth to be declared,-
more or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the
world to see those facts through, and to make them known. What signifies
that he trips and stammers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that his
method or his tropes are inadequate? That message will find method and
imagery, articulation and melody. Though he were dumb it would speak. If
not,- if there be no such God's word in the man,- what care we how adroit,
how fluent, how brilliant he is?

It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether there be a
man behind it or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I
discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some moneyed
corporation, or some dangler who hopes, in the mask and robes of his
paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech
of a right book I meet the eyes of the most determined of men; his force and
terror inundate every word; the commas and dashes are alive; so that the
writing is athletic and nimble,- can go far and live long.

In England and America, one may be an adept in the writings of a Greek or
Latin poet, without any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent years on
Plato and Proclus, does not afford a presumption that he holds heroic
opinions, or under-values the fashions of his town. But the German nation
have the most ridiculous good faith on these subjects: the student, out of
the lecture-room, still broods on the lessons; and the professor can not
divest himself of the fancy that the truths of philosophy have some
application to Berlin and Munich. This earnestness enables them to outsee
men of much more talent. Hence almost all the valuable distinctions which
are current in higher conversation have been derived to us from Germany. But
whilst men distinguished for wit and learning, in England and France, adopt
their study and their side with a certain levity, and are not understood to
be very deeply engaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the part
they espouse,- Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not
speak from talent, but the truth shines through: he is very wise, though his
talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent his sentence is, he has
somewhat better in view. It awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable
independence which converse with truth gives: hear you, or forbear, his fact
abides; and your interest in the writer is not confined to his story and he
dismissed from memory when he has performed his task creditably, as a baker
when he has left his loaf; but his work is the least part of him. The old
Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man
than to any other.

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius
has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a
self-surrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poetry
than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is
purer, and more touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men. His is
not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the sake of culture.
He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of
universal truth, to be his portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived,
nor overawed; of a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having one test
for all men,- What can you teach me? All possessions are valued by him for
that only; rank, privileges, health, time, Being itself.

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences and events;
artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing
he had not right to know: there is no weapon in the armory of universal
genius he did not take into his hand, but with peremptory heed that he
should not be for a moment prejudiced by his instruments. He lays a ray of
light under every fact, and between himself and his dearest property. From
him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him, and
the saint who saw the daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form.
"Piety itself is no aim, but only a means whereby through purest inward
peace we may attain to highest culture." And his penetration of every secret
of the fine arts will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affections help
him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of conspirators.
Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,- if so you shall teach him
aught which your good-will can not, were it only what experience will accrue
from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He can not hate
anybody; his time is worth too much. Temperamental antagonisms may be
suffered, but like feuds of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across kingdoms.

His autobiography, under the title of Poetry and Truth out of my Life, is
the expression of the idea- now familiar to the world through the German
mind, but a novelty to England, Old and New, when that book appeared- that a
man exists for culture; not for what he can accomplish, but for what can be
accomplished in him. The reaction of things on the man is the only
noteworthy result. An intellectual man can see himself as a third person;
therefore his faults and delusions interest him equally with his successes.
Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history
and destiny of man; whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are
only interested in a low success.

This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahrheit and directs the selection of
the incidents; and nowise the external importance of events, the rank of the
personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of course the book affords slender
materials for what would be reckoned with us a Life of Goethe;- few dates,
no correspondence, no details of offices or employments, no light on his
marriage; and a period of ten years, that should be the most active in his
life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime certain
love affairs that came to nothing, as people say, have the strangest
importance: he crowds us with details:- certain whimsical opinions,
cosmogonies and religions of his own invention, and especially his relations
to remarkable minds and to critical epochs of thought:- these he magnifies.
His Daily and Yearly Journal, his Italian Travels, his Campaign in France
and the historical part of his Theory of Colors, have the same interest. In
the last, he rapidly notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire,
etc.; and the charm of this portion of the book consists in the simplest
statement of the relation betwixt these grandees of European scientific
history and himself; the mere drawing of the lines from Goethe to Kepler,
from Goethe to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the line is, for
the time and person, a solution of the formidable problem, and gives
pleasure when Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any cost of invention
comparable to that of Iphigenia and Faust.

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it that he knew too much, that
his sight was microscopic and interfered with the just perspective, the
seeing of the whole? He is fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems and of
an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he sits down to write a drama or a tale,
he collects and sorts his observations from a hundred sides, and combines
them into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate:
this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals,
or the like. A great deal still is left that will not find any place. This
the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to; and hence, notwithstanding
the looseness of many of his works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs,
aphorisms, Xenien,*(33) etc.

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations of
self-culture. It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the
world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries, architecture,
laboratories, savans and leisure were to be had, and who did not quite trust
the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Socrates loved Athens;
Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said she was only vulnerable on that
side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. All the geniuses are
usually so ill-assorted and sickly that one is ever wishing them somewhere
else. We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. There is a
slight blush of shame on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a spice
of caricature. But this man was entirely at home and happy in his century
and the world. None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed the game.
In this aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is their power.
The idea of absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my own enlargement
by it, is higher. The surrender to the torrent of poetic inspiration is
higher; but compared with any motives on which books are written in England
and America, this is very truth, and has the power to inspire which belongs
to truth. Thus has he brought back to a book some of its ancient might and
dignity.

Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original talent
was oppressed under the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and the
distracting variety of claims, taught men how to dispose of this mountainous
miscellany and make it subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being both
representatives of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue
of conventions,- two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have
severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this
time and for all time. This cheerful laborer, with no external popularity or
provocation, drawing his motive and his plan from his own breast, tasked
himself with stints for a giant, and without relaxation or rest, except by
alternating his pursuits, worked on for eighty years with the steadiness of
his first zeal.

It is the last lesson of modern science that the highest simplicity of
structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
Man is the most composite of all creatures; the wheel-insect, volvox
globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn to draw rents and revenues
from the immense patrimony of the old and the recent ages. Goethe teaches
courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any
epoch exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and
music close by the darkest and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will
hold on men or hours. The world is young: the former great men call to us
affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the
earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us;
to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts,
in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality and a purpose;
and first, last, midst and without end, to honor every truth by use.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philosophy & Classics

The Uncle Taz Library

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