THOUGHTS ON MODERN
LITERATURE
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no better illustration
of the laws by which the world is governed than Literature. There is no
luck in it. It proceeds by Fate. Every scripture is given by the
inspiration of God. Every composition proceeds out of a greater or less
depth of thought, and this is the measure of its effect. The highest class
of books are those which express the moral element; the next, works of
imagination; and the next, works of science; — all dealing in realities,
— what ought to be, what is, and what appears. These, in proportion to
the truth and beauty they involve, remain; the rest perish. They proceed
out of the silent living mind to be heard again by the living mind. Of the
best books it is hardest to write the history. Those books which are for
all time are written indifferently at any time. For high genius is a day
without night, a Caspian Ocean which hath no tides. And yet is literature
in some sort a creature of time. Always the oracular soul is the source of
thought, but always the occasion is administered by the low mediations of
circumstance. Religion, Love, Ambition, War, some fierce antagonism, or it
may be, some petty annoyance must break the round of perfect circulation,
or no spark, no joy, no event can be. The poet rambling through the fields
or the forest, absorbed in contemplation to that degree, that his walk is
but a pretty dream, would never awake to precise thought, if the scream of
an eagle, the cries of a crow or curlew near his head did not break the
sweet continuity. Nay the finest lyrics of the poet come of this unequal
parentage; the imps of matter beget such child on the soul, fair daughter
of God. Nature mixes facts with thoughts to yield a poem. But the gift of
immortality is of the mother's side. In the spirit in which they are
written is the date of their duration, and never in the magnitude of the
facts. Everything lasts in proportion to its beauty. In proportion as it
was not polluted by any wilfulness of the writer, but flowed from his mind
after the divine order of cause and effect, it was not his but nature's,
and shared the sublimity of the sea and sky. That which is truly told,
nature herself takes in charge against the whims and injustice of men. For
ages, Herodotus was reckoned a credulous gossip in his descriptions of
Africa, and now the sublime silent desert testifies through the mouths of
Bruce, Lyons, Caillaud, Burckhardt, Belzoni, to the truth of the
calumniated historian.
And yet
men imagine that books are dice, and have no merit in their fortune; that
the trade and the favor of a few critics can get one book into
circulation, and defeat another; and that in the production of these
things the author has chosen and may choose to do thus and so. Society
also wishes to assign subjects and methods to its writers. But neither
reader nor author may intermeddle. You cannot reason at will in this and
that other vein, but only as you must. You cannot make quaint
combinations, and bring to the crucible and alembic of truth things far
fetched or fantastic or popular, but your method and your subject are
foreordained in all your nature, and in all nature, or ever the earth was,
or it has no worth. All that gives currency still to any book, advertised
in the morning's newspaper in London or Boston, is the remains of faith in
the breast of men that not adroit book makers, but the inextinguishable
soul of the universe reports of itself in articulate discourse to-day as
of old. The ancients strongly expressed their sense of the
unmanageableness of these words of the spirit by saying, that the God made
his priest insane, took him hither and thither as leaves are whirled by
the tempest. But we sing as we are bid. Our inspirations are very
manageable and tame. Death and sin have whispered in the ear of the wild
horse of Heaven, and he has become a dray and a hack. And step by step
with the entrance of this era of ease and convenience, the belief in the
proper Inspiration of man has departed.
Literary
accomplishments, skill in grammar and rhetoric, knowledge of books, can
never atone for the want of things which demand voice. Literature is a
poor trick when it busies itself to make words pass for things. The most
original book in the world is the Bible. This old collection of the
ejaculations of love and dread, of the supreme desires and contritions of
men proceeding out of the region of the grand and eternal, by whatsoever
different mouths spoken, and through a wide extent of times and countries,
seems, especially if you add to our canon the kindred sacred writings of
the Hindoos, Persians, and Greeks, the alphabet of the nations,—and all
posterior literature either the chronicle of facts under very inferior
ideas, or, when it rises to sentiment, the combinations, analogies, or
degradations of this. The elevation of this book may be measured by
observing, how certainly all elevation of thought clothes itself in the
words and forms of speech of that book. For the human mind is not now
sufficiently erect to judge and correct that scripture. Whatever is
majestically thought in a great moral element, instantly approaches this
old Sanscrit. It is in the nature of things that the highest originality
must be moral. The only person, who can be entirely independent of this
fountain of literature and equal to it, must be a prophet in his own
proper person. Shakspeare, the first literary genius of the world, the
highest in whom the moral is not the predominating element, leans on the
Bible: his poetry supposes it. If we examine this brilliant
influence—Shakspeare—as it lies in our minds, we shall find it
reverent not only of the letter of this book, but of the whole frame of
society which stood in Europe upon it, deeply indebted to the traditional
morality, in short, compared with the tone of the Prophets, secondary.
On the other hand, the Prophets do not imply the existence of Shakspeare
or Homer,—advert to no books or arts, only to dread ideas and emotions.
People imagine that the place, which the Bible holds in the world, it owes
to miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it came out of a
profounder depth of thought than any other book, and the effect must be
precisely proportionate. Gibbon fancied that it was combinations of
circumstances that gave Christianity its place in history. But in nature
it takes an ounce to balance an ounce.
All just
criticism will not only behold in literature the action of necessary laws,
but must also oversee literature itself. The erect mind disparages all
books. What are books? it saith: they can have no permanent value. How
obviously initial they are to their authors. The books of the nations, the
universal books, are long ago forgotten by those who wrote them, and one
day we shall forget this primer learning. Literature is made up of a few
ideas and a few fables. It is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an
intuition or two. We must learn to judge books by absolute standards. When
we are aroused to a life in ourselves, these traditional splendors of
letters grow very pale and cold. Men seem to forget that all literature is
ephemeral, and unwillingly entertain the supposition of its utter
disappearance. They deem not only letters in general, but the best books
in particular, parts of a preestablished harmony, fatal, unalterable, and
do not go behind Virgil and Dante, much less behind Moses, Ezekiel, and
St. John. But no man can be a good critic of any book, who does not read
it in a wisdom which transcends the instructions of any book, and treats
the whole extant product of the human intellect as only one age revisable
and reversible by him.
In our
fidelity to the higher truth, we need not disown our debt in our actual
state of culture, in the twilights of experience to these rude helpers.
They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better day. When we flout all
particular books as initial merely, we truly express the privilege of
spiritual nature; but, alas, not the fact and fortune of this low
Massachusetts and Boston, of these humble Junes and Decembers of mortal
life. Our souls are not self-fed, but do eat and drink of chemical water
and wheat. Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to
proceed from a book. We go musing into the vault of day and night; no
constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the
roses brick-colored leaves, and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and wagons creak
along the road. We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine,
and read a few sentences or pages, and lo! the air swarms with life; the
front of heaven is full of fiery shapes; secrets of magnanimity and
grandeur invite us on every hand; life is made up of them. Such is our
debt to a book. Observe, moreover, that we ought to credit literature with
much more than the bare word it gives us. I have just been reading poems
which now in my memory shine with a certain steady, warm, autumnal light.
That is not in their grammatical construction which they give me. If I
analyze the sentences, it eludes me, but is the genius and suggestion of
the whole. Over every true poem lingers a certain wild beauty,
immeasurable; a happiness lightsome and delicious fills the heart and
brain,—as they say, every man walks environed by his proper atmosphere,
extending to some distance around him. This beautiful result must be
credited to literature also in casting its account.
In
looking at the library of the Present Age we are first struck with the
fact of the immense miscellany. It can hardly be characterized by any
species of book, for every opinion old and new, every hope and fear, every
whim and folly has an organ. It prints a vast carcass of tradition every
year, with as much solemnity as a new revelation. Along with these it
vents books that breathe of new morning, that seem to heave with the life
of millions, books for which men and women peak and pine; books which take
the rose out of the cheek of him that wrote them, and give him to the
midnight a sad, solitary, diseased man; which leave no man where they
found him, but make him better or worse; and which work dubiously on
society, and seem to inoculate it with a venom before any healthy result
appears.
In order
to any complete view of the literature of the present age, an inquiry
should include what it quotes, what it writes, and what it wishes to
write. In our present attempt to enumerate some traits of the recent
literature, we shall have somewhat to offer on each of these topics, but
we cannot promise to set in very exact order what we have to say.
In the
first place, it has all books. It reprints the wisdom of the world. How
can the age be a bad one, which gives me Plato and Paul and Plutarch, St.
Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Donne and Sir Thomas
Browne, beside its own riches? Our presses groan every year with new
editions of all the select pieces of the first of mankind,—meditations,
history, classifications, opinions, epics, lyrics, which the age adopts by
quoting them. If we should designate favorite studies in which the age
delights more than in the rest of this great mass of the permanent
literature of the human race, one or two instances would be conspicuous.
First; the prodigious growth and influence of the genius of Shakspeare, in
the last one hundred and fifty years, is itself a fact of the first
importance. It almost alone has called out the genius of the German nation
into an activity, which spreading from the poetic into the scientific,
religious, and philosophical domains, has made theirs now at last the
paramount intellectual influence of the world, reacting with great energy
on England and America. And thus, and not by mechanical diffusion, does an
original genius work and spread himself. Society becomes an immense
Shakspeare. Not otherwise could the poet be admired, nay, not even
seen;—not until his living, conversing, and writing had diffused his
spirit into the young and acquiring class, so that he had multiplied
himself into a thousand sons, a thousand Shakspeares, and so understands
himself.
Secondly;
the history of freedom it studies with eagerness in civil, in religious,
in philosophic history. It has explored every monument of Anglo-Saxon
history and law, and mainly every scrap of printed or written paper
remaining from the period of the English Commonwealth. It has, out of
England, devoted much thought and pains to the history of philosophy. It
has groped in all nations where was any literature for the early poetry
not only the dramatic, but the rudest lyric; for songs and ballads, the
Nibelungen Lied, the poems of Hans Sachs and Henry of Alckmaer in Germany,
for the Cid in Spain, for the rough-cast verse of the interior nations of
Europe, and in Britain for the ballads of Scotland and of Robinhood.
In its
own books also, our age celebrates its wants, achievements, and hopes. A
wide superficial cultivation, often a mere clearing and whitewashing,
indicate the new taste in the hitherto neglected savage, whether of the
cities or the fields, to know the arts and share the spiritual efforts of
the refined. The time is marked by the multitude of writers. Soldiers,
sailors, servants, nobles, princes, women, write books. The progress of
trade and the facilities for locomotion have made the world nomadic again.
Of course it is well informed. All facts are exposed. The age is not to be
trifled with: it wishes to know who is who, and what is what. Let there be
no ghost stories more. Send Humboldt and Bonpland to explore Mexico,
Guiana, and the Cordilleras. Let Captain Parry learn if there be a
northwest passage to America, and Mr. Lander learn the true course of the
Niger. Puckler Muskau will go to Algiers, and Sir Francis Head to the
Pampas, to the Brunnens of Nassau, and to Canada. Then let us have charts
true and Gazeteers correct. We will know where Babylon stood, and settle
the topography of the Roman Forum. We will know whatever is to be known of
Australasia, of Japan, of Persia, of Egypt, of Timbuctoo, of Palestine.
Thus
Christendom has become a great reading-room; and its books have the
convenient merits of the newspaper, its eminent propriety, and its
superficial exactness of information. The age is well bred, knows the
world, has no nonsense, and herein is well distinguished from the learned
ages that preceded ours. That there is no fool like your learned fool, is
a proverb plentifully illustrated in the history and writings of the
English and European scholars for the half millenium that preceded the
beginning of the eighteenth century. The best heads of their time build or
occupy such card-house theories of religion, politics, and natural
science, as a clever boy would now blow away. What stuff in Kepler, in
Cardan, in Lord Bacon. Montaigne, with all his French wit and downright
sense, is little better: a sophomore would wind him round his finger. Some
of the Medical Remains of Lord Bacon in the book for his own use, "Of
the Prolongation of Life," will move a smile in the unpoetical
practitioner of the Medical College. They remind us of the drugs and
practice of the leeches and enchanters of Eastern romance. Thus we find in
his whimsical collection of astringents:
"A
stomacher of scarlet cloth; whelps or young healthy boys applied to the
stomach; hippocratic wines, so they be made of austere materials.
"8.
To remember masticatories for the mouth.
"9.
And orange flower water to be smelled or snuffed up.
"10.
In the third hour after the sun is risen to take in air from some high and
open place with a ventilation of rosae moschatae and fresh
violets, and to stir the earth with infusion of wine and mint.
"17.
To use once during supper time wine in which gold is quenched.
"26.
Heroic desires.
"28.
To provide always an apt breakfast.
"29.
To do nothing against a man's genius."
To the
substance of some of these specifics we have no objection. We think we
should get no better at the Medical College to-day: and of all astringents
we should reckon the best, "heroic desires," and "doing
nothing against one's genius." Yet the principle of modern
classification is different. In the same place, it is curious to find a
good deal of pretty nonsense concerning the virtues of the ashes of a
hedgehog, the heart of an ape, the moss that groweth upon the skull of a
dead man unburied, and the comfort that proceeds to the system from
wearing beads of amber, coral, and hartshorn;—or from rings of sea horse
teeth worn for cramp;—to find all these masses of moonshine side by side
with the gravest and most valuable observations.
The good
Sir Thomas Browne recommends as empirical cures for the gout:
"To
wear shoes made of a lion's skin.
"Try
transplantation: Give poultices taken from the part to dogs.
"Try
the magnified amulet of Muffetus, of spiders' legs worn in a deer's skin,
or of tortoises' legs cut off from the living tortoise and wrapped up in
the skin of a kid."
Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy is an encyclopædia of authors and of opinions,
where one who should forage for exploded theories might easily load his
panniers. In dæmonology, for example; "The air," he says,
"is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible
devils. They counterfeit suns and moons, and sit on ships' masts. They
cause whirlwinds on a sudden and tempestuous storms, which though our
meteorologists generally refer to natural causes, yet I am of Bodine's
mind, they are more often caused by those aerial devils in their several
quarters. Cardan gives much information concerning them. His father had
one of them, an aerial devil, bound to him for eight and twenty years; as
Aggrippa's dog had a devil tied to his collar. Some think that Paracelsus
had one confined in his sword pommel. Others wear them in rings. At Hammel
in Saxony, the devil in the likeness of a pied piper carried away 130
children that were never after seen."
All this
sky-full of cobwebs is now forever swept clean away. Another race is born.
Humboldt and Herschel, Davy and Arago, Malthus and Bentham have arrived.
If Robert Burton should be quoted to represent the army of scholars, who
have furnished a contribution to his moody pages, Horace Walpole, whose
letters circulate in the libraries, might be taken with some fitness to
represent the spirit of much recent literature. He has taste, common
sense, love of facts, impatience of humbug, love of history, love of
splendor, love of justice, and the sentiment of honor among gentlemen; but
no life whatever of the higher faculties, no faith, no hope, no
aspiration, no question touching the secret of nature.
The
favorable side of this research and love of facts is the bold and
systematic criticism, which has appeared in every department of
literature. From Wolf's attack upon the authenticity of the Homeric Poems,
dates a new epoch in learning. Ancient history has been found to be not
yet settled. It is to be subjected to common sense. It is to be cross
examined. It is to be seen, whether its traditions will consist not with
universal belief, but with universal experience. Niebuhr has sifted Roman
history by the like methods. Heeren has made good essays towards
ascertaining the necessary facts in the Grecian, Persian, Assyrian,
Egyptian, Ethiopic, Carthaginian nations. English history has been
analyzed by Turner, Hallam, Brodie, Lingard, Palgrave. Goethe has gone the
circuit of human knowledge, as Lord Bacon did before him, writing True or
False on every article. Bentham has attempted the same scrutiny in
reference to Civil Law. Pestalozzi out of a deep love undertook the reform
of education. The ambition of Coleridge in England embraced the whole
problem of philosophy; to find, that is, a foundation in thought for
everything that existed in fact. The German philosophers, Schelling, Kant,
Fichte, have applied their analysis to nature and thought with an antique
boldness. There can be no honest inquiry, which is not better than
acquiescence. Inquiries, which once looked grave and vital no doubt,
change their appearance very fast, and come to look frivolous beside the
later queries to which they gave occasion.
This
skeptical activity, at first directed on circumstances and historical
views deemed of great importance, soon penetrated deeper than Rome or
Egypt, than history or institutions, or the vocabulary of metaphysics,
namely, into the thinker himself, and into every function he exercises.
The poetry and the speculation of the age are marked by a certain
philosophic turn, which discriminates them from the works of earlier
times. The poet is not content to see how "fair hangs the apple from
the rock," "what music a sunbeam awoke in the groves," nor
of Hardiknute, how "stately steppes he east the way, and stately
steppes he west," but he now revolves, What is the apple to me? and
what the birds to me? and what is Hardiknute to me? and what am I? And
this is called subjectiveness, as the eye is withdrawn from the
object and fixed on the subject or mind.
We can
easily concede that a steadfast tendency of this sort appears in modern
literature. It is the new consciousness of the one mind which predominates
in criticism. It is the uprise of the soul and not the decline. It is
founded on that insatiable demand for unity—the need to recognise one
nature in all the variety of objects,—which always characterizes a
genius of the first order. Accustomed always to behold the presence of the
universe in every part, the soul will not condescend to look at any new
part as a stranger, but saith,—"I know all already, and what art
thou? Show me thy relations to me, to all, and I will entertain thee
also."
There is
a pernicious ambiguity in the use of the term subjective. We say,
in accordance with the general view I have stated, that the single soul
feels its right to be no longer confounded with numbers, but itself to sit
in judgment on history and literature, and to summon all facts and parties
before its tribunal. And in this sense the age is subjective.
But, in all
ages, and now more, the narrow-minded have no interest in anything but its
relation to their personality. What will help them to be delivered from
some burden, eased in some circumstance, flattered, or pardoned, or
enriched, what will help to marry or to divorce them, to prolong or to
sweeten life, is sure of their interest, and nothing else. Every form
under the whole heaven they behold in this most partial light or darkness
of intense selfishness, until we hate their being. And this habit of
intellectual selfishness has acquired in our day the fine name of
subjectiveness.
Nor is
the distinction between these two habits to be found in the circumstance
of using the first person singular, or reciting facts and feelings of
personal history. A man may say I, and never refer to himself as
an individual; and a man may recite passages of his life with no feeling
of egotism. Nor need a man have a vicious subjectiveness because he deals
in abstract propositions.
But the
criterion, which discriminates these two habits in the poet's mind, is the
tendency of his composition; namely, whether it leads us to nature, or to
the person of the writer. The great always introduce us to facts; small
men introduce us always to themselves. The great man, even whilst he
relates a private fact personal to him, is really leading us away from him
to an universal experience. His own affection is in nature, in What is,
and, of course, all his communication leads outward to it, starting from
whatsoever point. The great never with their own consent become a load on
the minds they instruct. The more they draw us to them, the farther from
them or more independent of them we are, because they have brought us to
the knowledge of somewhat deeper than both them and us. The great never
hinder us; for, as the Jews had a custom of laying their beds north and
south, founded on an opinion that the path of God was east and west, and
they would not desecrate by the infirmities of sleep the Divine circuits,
so the activity of the good is coincident with the axle of the world, with
the sun and moon, with the course of the rivers and of the winds, with the
stream of laborers in the street, and with all the activity and well being
of the race. The great lead us to nature, and, in our age, to metaphysical
nature, to the invisible awful facts, to moral abstractions, which are not
less nature than is a river or a coal mine; nay, they are far more nature,
but its essence and soul.
But the
weak and evil, led also to analyze, saw nothing in thought but luxury.
Thought for the selfish became selfish. They invited us to contemplate
nature, and showed us an abominable self. Would you know the genius of the
writer? Do not enumerate his talents or his feats, but ask thyself, What
spirit is he of? Do gladness and hope and fortitude flow from his page
into thy heart? Has he led thee to nature because his own soul was too
happy in beholding her power and love; or is his passion for the
wilderness only the sensibility of the sick, the exhibition of a talent,
which only shines whilst you praise it; which has no root in the
character, and can thus minister to the vanity but not to the happiness of
the possessor; and which derives all its eclat from our conventional
education, but would not make itself intelligible to the wise man of
another age or country? The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor
does fire, or wind, or tree. Neither does the noble natural man: he yields
himself to your occasion and use; but his act expresses a reference to
universal good.
Another
element of the modern poetry akin to this subjective tendency, or rather
the direction of that same on the question of resources, is, the Feeling
of the Infinite. Of the perception now fast becoming a conscious fact, —
that there is One Mind, and that all the powers and privileges which lie
in any, lie in all; that I as a man may claim and appropriate whatever of
true or fair or good or strong has anywhere been exhibited; that Moses and
Confucius, Montaigne and Leibnitz are not so much individuals as they are
parts of man and parts of me, and my intelligence proves them my
own,—literature is far the best expression. It is true, this is not the
only nor the obvious lesson it teaches. A selfish commerce and government
have caught the eye and usurped the hand of the masses. It is not to be
contested that selfishness and the senses write the laws under which we
live, and that the street seems to be built, and the men and women in it
moving not in reference to pure and grand ends, but rather to very short
and sordid ones. Perhaps no considerable minority, perhaps no one man
leads a quite clean and lofty life. What then? We concede in sadness the
fact. But we say that these low customary ways are not all that survives
in human beings. There is that in us which mutters, and that which groans,
and that which triumphs, and that which aspires. There are facts on which
men of the world superciliously smile, which are worth all their trade and
politics, the impulses, namely, which drive young men into gardens and
solitary places, and cause extravagant gestures, starts, distortions of
the countenance, and passionate exclamations; sentiments, which find no
aliment or language for themselves on the wharves, in court, or market,
but which are soothed by silence, by darkness, by the pale stars, and the
presence of nature. All over the modern world the educated and susceptible
have betrayed their discontent with the limits of our municipal life, and
with the poverty of our dogmas of religion and philosophy. They betray
this impatience by fleeing for resource to a conversation with nature —
which is courted in a certain moody and exploring spirit, as if they
anticipated a more intimate union of man with the world than has been
known in recent ages. Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect,
still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes. The very
child in the nursery prattles mysticism, and doubts and philosophizes. A
wild striving to express a more inward and infinite sense characterizes
the works of every art. The music of Beethoven is said by those who
understand it, to labor with vaster conceptions and aspirations than music
has attempted before. This Feeling of the Infinite has deeply colored the
poetry of the period. This new love of the vast, always native in Germany,
was imported into France by De Stael, appeared in England in Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and finds a most genial
climate in the American mind. Scott and Crabbe, who formed themselves on
the past, had none of this tendency; their poetry is objective. In Byron,
on the other hand, it predominates; but in Byron it is blind, it sees not
its true end — an infinite good, alive and beautiful, a life nourished
on absolute beatitudes, descending into nature to behold itself reflected
there. His will is perverted, he worships the accidents of society, and
his praise of nature is thieving and selfish.
Nothing
certifies the prevalence of this taste in the people more than the
circulation of the poems,—one would say, most incongruously united by
some bookseller,—of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. The only unity is in
the subjectiveness and the aspiration common to the three writers.
Shelley, though a poetic mind, is never a poet. His muse is uniformly
imitative; all his poems composite. A good English scholar he is, with
ear, taste, and memory, much more, he is a character full of noble and
prophetic traits; but imagination, the original, authentic fire of the
bard, he has not. He is clearly modern, and shares with Richter,
Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Wordsworth, the feeling of the infinite, which
so labors for expression in their different genius. But all his lines are
arbitrary, not necessary. When we read poetry, the mind asks,—Was this
verse one of twenty which the author might have written as well; or is
this what that man was created to say? But, whilst every line of the true
poet will be genuine, he is in a boundless power and freedom to say a
million things. And the reason why he can say one thing well, is because
his vision extends to the sight of all things, and so he describes each as
one who knows many and all.
The
fame of Wordsworth is a leading fact in modern literature, when it is
considered how hostile his genius at first seemed to the reigning taste,
and with what feeble poetic talents his great and steadily growing
dominion has been established. More than any other poet his success has
been not his own, but that of the idea which he shared with his coevals,
and which he has rarely succeeded in adequately expressing. The Excursion
awakened in every lover of nature the right feeling. We saw stars shine,
we felt the awe of mountains, we heard the rustle of the wind in the
grass, and knew again the ineffable secret of solitude. It was a great
joy. It was nearer to nature than anything we had before. But the interest
of the poem ended almost with the narrative of the influences of nature on
the mind of the Boy, in the first book. Obviously for that passage the
poem was written, and with the exception of this and of a few strains of
the like character in the sequel, the whole poem was dull. Here was no
poem, but here was poetry, and a sure index where the subtle muse was
about to pitch her tent and find the argument of her song. It was the
human soul in these last ages striving for a just publication of itself.
Add to this, however, the great praise of Wordsworth, that more than any
other contemporary bard he is pervaded with a reverence of somewhat higher
than (conscious) thought. There is in him that property common to all
great poets, a wisdom of humanity, which is superior to any talents which
they exert. It is the wisest part of Shakspeare and of Milton. For they
are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which
through their eyes beholdeth again and blesseth the things which it hath
made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works.
With
the name of Wordsworth rises to our recollection the name of his
contemporary and friend, Walter Savage Landor—a man working in a very
different and peculiar spirit, yet one whose genius and accomplishments
deserve a wiser criticism than we have yet seen applied to them, and the
rather that his name does not readily associate itself with any school of
writers. Of Thomas Carlyle, also we shall say nothing at this time, since
the quality and the energy of his influence on the youth of this country
will require at our hands ere long a distinct and faithful acknowledgment.
But
of all men he, who has united in himself and that in the most
extraordinary degree the tendencies of the era, is the German poet,
naturalist, and philosopher, Goethe. Whatever the age inherited or
invented, he made his own. He has owed to Commerce and to the victories of
the Understanding, all their spoils. Such was his capacity, that the
magazines of the world's ancient or modern wealth, which arts and
intercourse and skepticism could command — he wanted them all. Had there
been twice so much, he could have used it as well. Geologist, mechanic,
merchant, chemist, king, radical, painter, composer,—all worked for him,
and a thousand men seemed to look through his eyes. He learned as readily
as other men breathe. Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so
much at home in it as he. He was not afraid to live. And in him this
encyclopædia of facts, which it has been the boast of the age to compile,
wrought an equal effect. He was knowing; he was brave; he was clean from
all narrowness; he has a perfect propriety and taste,—a quality by no
means common to the German writers. Nay, since the earth, as we said, had
become a reading-room, the new opportunities seem to have aided him to be
that resolute realist he is, and seconded his sturdy determination to see
things for what they are. To look at him, one would say, there was never
an observer before. What sagacity, what industry of observation! to read
his record is a frugality of time, for you shall find no word that does
not stand for a thing, and he is of that comprehension, which can see the
value of truth. His love of nature has seemed to give a new meaning to
that word. There was never man more domesticated in this world than he.
And he is an apology for the analytic spirit of the period, because, of
his analysis, always wholes were the result. All conventions, all
traditions he rejected. And yet he felt his entire right and duty to stand
before and try and judge every fact in nature. He thought it necessary to
dot round with his own pen the entire sphere of knowables; and for many of
his stories, this seems the only reason: Here is a piece of humanity I had
hitherto omitted to sketch;—take this. He does not say so in
syllables,—yet a sort of conscientious feeling he had to be up
to the universe, is the best account and apology for many of them. He
shared also the subjectiveness of the age, and that too in both the senses
I have discriminated. With the sharpest eye for form, color, botany,
engraving, medals, persons, and manners, he never stopped at surface, but
pierced the purpose of a thing, and studied to reconcile that purpose with
his own being. What he could so reconcile was good; what he could not, was
false. Hence a certain greatness encircles every fact he treats; for to
him it has a soul, an eternal reason why it was so, and not otherwise.
This is the secret of that deep realism, which went about among all
objects he beheld, to find the cause why they must be what they are. It
was with him a favorite task to find a theory of every institution,
custom, art, work of art, which he observes. Witness his explanation of
the Italian mode of reckoning the hours of the day, as growing out of the
Italian climate; of the obelisk of Egypt, as growing out of a common
natural fracture in the granite parallelopiped in Upper Egypt; of the
Doric architecture, and the Gothic; of the Venetian music of the gondolier
originating in the habit of the fishers' wives of the Lido singing to
their husbands on the sea; of the Amphitheatre, which is the enclosure of
the natural cup of heads that arranges itself round every spectacle in the
street; of the coloring of Titian and Paul Veronese, which one may verify
in the common daylight in Venice every afternoon; of the Carnival at Rome;
of the domestic rural architecture in Italy; and many the like examples.
But also
that other vicious subjectiveness, that vice of the time, infected him
also. We are provoked with his Olympian self-complacency, the patronizing
air with which he vouchsafes to tolerate the genius and performances of
other mortals, "the good Hiller," "our excellent
Kant," "the friendly Wieland," &c. &c. There is a
good letter from Wieland to Merck, in which Wieland relates that Goethe
read to a select party his journal of a tour in Switzerland with the Grand
Duke, and their passage through Valois and over the St. Gothard. "It
was," says Wieland, "as good as Xenophon's Anabasis. The piece
is one of his most masterly productions, and is thought and written with
the greatness peculiar to him. The fair hearers were enthusiastic at the
nature in this piece; I liked the sly art in the composition, whereof they
saw nothing, still better. It is a true poem, so concealed is the art too.
But what most remarkably in this as in all his other works distinguishes
him from Homer and Shakspeare, is, that the Me, the Ille ego,
everywhere glimmers through, although without any boasting and with an
infinite fineness." This subtle element of egotism in Goethe
certainly does not seem to deform his compositions, but to lower the moral
influence of the man. He differs from all the great in the total want of
frankness. Whoso saw Milton, whoso saw Shakspeare, saw them do their best,
and utter their whole heart manlike among their brethren. No man was
permitted to call Goethe brother. He hid himself, and worked always to
astonish, which is an egotism, and therefore little.
If we
try Goethe by the ordinary canons of criticism, we should say that his
thinking is of great altitude, and all level;—not a succession of
summits, but a high Asiatic table land. Dramatic power, the rarest talent
in literature, he has very little. He has an eye constant to the fact of
life, and that never pauses in its advance. But the great felicities, the
miracles of poetry, he has never. It is all design with him, just thought
and instructed expression, analogies, allusion, illustration, which
knowledge and correct thinking supply; but of Shakspeare and the
transcendant muse, no syllable. Yet in the court and law to which we
ordinarily speak, and without adverting to absolute standards, we claim
for him the praise of truth, of fidelity to his intellectual nature. He is
the king of all scholars. In these days and in this country, where the
scholars are few and idle, where men read easy books and sleep after
dinner, it seems as if no book could so safely be put in the hands of
young men as the letters of Goethe, which attest the incessant activity of
this man to eighty years, in an endless variety of studies with uniform
cheerfulness and greatness of mind. They cannot be read without shaming us
into an emulating industry. Let him have the praise of the love of truth.
We think, when we contemplate the stupendous glory of the world, that it
were life enough for one man merely to lift his hands and cry with St.
Augustine, "Wrangle who pleases, I will wonder." Well, this he
did. Here was a man, who, in the feeling that the thing itself was so
admirable as to leave all comment behind, went up and down from object to
object, lifting the veil from everyone, and did no more. What he said of
Lavater, may trulier be said of him, that "it was fearful to stand in
the presence of one, before whom all the boundaries within which nature
has circumscribed our being were laid flat." His are the bright and
terrible eyes, which meet the modern student in every sacred chapel of
thought, in every public enclosure.
But now,
that we may not seem to dodge the question which all men ask, nor pay a
great man so ill a compliment as to praise him only in the conventional
and comparative speech, let us honestly record our thought upon the total
worth and influence of this genius. Does he represent not only the
achievement of that age in which he lived, but that which it would be and
is now becoming? And what shall we think of that absence of the moral
sentiment, that singular equivalence to him of good and evil in action,
which discredits his compositions to the pure? The spirit of his
biography, of his poems, of his tales, is identical, and we may here set
down by way of comment on his genius the impressions recently awakened in
us by the story of Wilhelm Meister.
All
great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain. They knew that the
intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them. So did Dante,
so did Machiavel. Goethe has done this in Meister. We can fancy him saying
to himself; — There are poets enough of the ideal; let me paint the
Actual, as, after years of dreams, it will still appear and reappear to
wise men. That all shall right itself in the long Morrow, I may well
allow, and my novel may easily wait for the same regeneration. The age,
that can damn it as false and falsifying, will see that it is deeply one
with the genius and history of all the centuries. I have given my
characters a bias to error. Men have the same. I have let mischances
befall instead of good fortune. They do so daily. And out of many vices
and misfortunes, I have let a great success grow, as I had known in my own
and many other examples. Fierce churchmen and effeminate aspirants will
chide and hate my name, but every keen beholder of life will justify my
truth, and will acquit me of prejudging the cause of humanity by painting
it with this morose fidelity. To a profound soul is not austere truth the
sweetest flattery?
Yes, O
Goethe! but the ideal is truer than the actual. That is ephemeral, but
this changes not. Moreover, because nature is moral, that mind only can
see, in which the same order entirely obtains. An interchangeable Truth,
Beauty, and Goodness, each wholly interfused in the other, must make the
humors of that eye, which would see causes reaching to their last effect
and reproducing the world forever. The least inequality of mixture, the
excess of one element over the other, in that degree diminishes the
transparency of things, makes the world opaque to the observer, and
destroys so far the value of his experience. No particular gifts can
countervail this defect. In reading Meister, I am charmed with the
insight; to use a phrase of Ben Jonson's, "it is rammed with
life." I find there actual men and women even too faithfully painted.
I am, moreover, instructed in the possibility of a highly accomplished
society, and taught to look for great talent and culture under a grey
coat. But this is all. The limits of artificial society are never quite
out of sight. The vicious conventions, which hem us in like prison walls,
and which the poet should explode at his touch, stand for all they are
worth in the newspaper. I am never lifted above myself. I am not
transported out of the dominion of the senses, or cheered with an infinite
tenderness, or armed with a grand trust.
Goethe,
then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not of the Ideal; the
poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this world, and not of religion
and hope; in short, if I may say so, the poet of prose, and not of poetry.
He accepts the base doctrine of Fate, and gleans what straggling joys may
yet remain out of its ban. He is like a banker or a weaver with a passion
for the country, he steals out of the hot streets before sunrise, or after
sunset, or on a rare holiday, to get a draught of sweet air, and a gaze at
the magnificence of summer, but dares not break from his slavery and lead
a man's life in a man's relation to nature. In that which should be his
own place, he feels like a truant, and is scourged back presently to his
task and his cell. Poetry is with Goethe thus external, the gilding of the
chain, the mitigation of his fate; but the muse never essays those
thunder-tones, which cause to vibrate the sun and the moon, which
dissipate by dreadful melody all this iron network of circumstance, and
abolish the old heavens and the old earth before the free-will or Godhead
of man. That Goethe had not a moral perception proportionate to his other
powers, is not then merely a circumstance, as we might relate of a man
that he had or had not the sense of tune or an eye for colors; but it is
the cardinal fact of health or disease; since, lacking this, he failed in
the high sense to be a creator, and with divine endowments drops by
irreversible decree into the common history of genius. He was content to
fall into the track of vulgar poets, and spend on common aims his splendid
endowments, and has declined the office proffered to now and then a man in
many centuries in the power of his genius — of a Redeemer of the human
mind. He has written better than other poets, only as his talent was
subtler, but the ambition of creation he refused. Life for him is
prettier, easier, wiser, decenter, has a gem or two more on its robe, but
its old eternal burden is not relieved; no drop of healthier blood flows
yet in its veins. Let him pass. Humanity must wait for its physician still
at the side of the road, and confess as this man goes out that they have
served it better, who assured it out of the innocent hope in their hearts
that a Physician will come, than this majestic Artist, with all the
treasuries of wit, of science, and of power at his command.
The
criticism, which is not so much spoken as felt in reference to Goethe,
instructs us directly in the hope of literature. We feel that a man gifted
like him should not leave the world as he found it. It is true, though
somewhat sad, that every fine genius teaches us how to blame himself.
Being so much, we cannot forgive him for not being more. When one of these
grand monads is incarnated, whom nature seems to design for eternal men
and draw to her bosom, we think that the old wearinesses of Europe and
Asia, the trivial forms of daily life will now end, and a new morning
break on us all. What is Austria? What is England? What is our graduated
and petrified social scale of ranks and employments? Shall not a poet
redeem us from these idolatries, and pale their legendary lustre before
the fires of the Divine Wisdom which burn in his heart? All that in our
sovereign moments each of us has divined of the powers of thought, all the
hints of omnipresence and energy which we have caught, this man should
unfold and constitute facts.
And
this is the insatiable craving which alternately saddens and gladdens men
at this day. The Doctrine of the Life of Man established after the truth
through all his faculties;—this is the thought which the literature of
this hour meditates and labors to say. This is that which tunes the tongue
and fires the eye and sits in the silence of the youth. Verily it will not
long want articulate and melodious expression. There is nothing in the
heart but comes presently to the lips. The very depth of the sentiment,
which is the author of all the cutaneous life we see, is guarantee for the
riches of science and of song in the age to come. He, who doubts whether
this age or this country can yield any contribution to the literature of
the world, only betrays his own blindness to the necessities of the human
soul. Has the power of poetry ceased, or the need? Have the eyes ceased to
see that which they would have, and which they have not? Have they ceased
to see other eyes? Are there no lonely, anxious, wondering children, who
must tell their tale? Are we not evermore whipped by thoughts;
"In sorrow steeped and
steeped in love
Of thoughts not yet incarnated?"
The heart beats in this age as of
old, and the passions are busy as ever. Nature has not lost one ringlet of
her beauty, one impulse of resistance and valor. From the necessity of
loving none are exempt, and he that loves must utter his desires. A charm
as radiant as beauty ever beamed, a love that fainteth at the sight of its
object, is new to-day.
"The world does not run
smoother than of old,
There are sad haps that must be told."
Man is not so far lost but that
he suffers ever the great Discontent, which is the elegy of his loss and
the prediction of his recovery. In the gay saloon he laments that these
figures are not what Raphael and Guercino painted. Withered though he
stand and trifler though he be, the august spirit of the world looks out
from his eyes. In his heart he knows the ache of spiritual pain, and his
thought can animate the sea and land. What then shall hinder the Genius of
the time from speaking its thought? It cannot be silent, if it would. It
will write in a higher spirit, and a wider knowledge, and with a grander
practical aim, than ever yet guided the pen of poet. It will write the
annals of a changed world, and record the descent of principles into
practice, of love into Government, of love into Trade. It will describe
the new heroic life of man, the now unbelieved possibility of simple
living and of clean and noble relations with men. Religion will bind again
these that were sometime frivolous, customary, enemies, skeptics,
self-seekers, into a joyful reverence for the circumambient Whole, and
that which was ecstasy shall become daily bread.
A
Note on the Text:
-
1st
published in The Dial (October 1840) pp. 138-158.
-
Source:
The Dial (July 1840) pp. 138-158.
-
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