The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865

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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 nebulae; 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?

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