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Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it
is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and
that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the
consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these are
the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects
are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent
recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce
in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own
nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of
inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet
becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences
under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately
organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his
own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this difference.
And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny when he neglects to observe
the circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and
flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty,
envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil have never formed
any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to
my mind by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of observing
the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which they contain
be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the arguers
against poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the
subject. I can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of
some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel with certain
versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling to be stunned by
the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Maevius
undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But it belongs
to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits
assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a restricted
sense, has a common source with all other forms of order and of beauty,
according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being
arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.
The second part [Footnote: It was never written.] will have for its
object an application of these principles to the present state of the
cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the
modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a
subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the
literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever
preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national
will, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth. In spite of the low-
thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will
be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among
such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have
appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious
liberty. The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the
awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or
institution is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the
power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions
respecting men and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may
often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little
apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled
to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul.
It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers
of the present day without being startled with the electric life which
burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the
depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit,
and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its
manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the
age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present;
the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which
sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which
is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
the world.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
(1795-1881.)
X. GOETHE.
The brief account here given of the work of Goethe was originally
published as part of the introduction to the volume of translations
called _German Romance_, which was published in 1827. It is now commonly
printed as an appendix to the first volume of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_.
Carlyle was probably never at his best when he gave himself to the
study of a particular author. His genius rather lay in the more general
aspects of his work, and in the force with which he gave an entirely
new turn to the currents of English criticism. Of his studies upon
particular authors, the essay on Burns is perhaps the most complete
and the most penetrating. But it is too long for the purposes of this
selection. Nor is it amiss that he should here be represented by a
work which may remind us that, among his services to English letters,
to have opened the stores of German poetry and thought was by no means
the least memorable.
Of a nature so rare and complex as Goethe's it is difficult to form
a true comprehension; difficult even to express what comprehension one
has formed. In Goethe's mind, the first aspect that strikes us is its
calmness, then its beauty; a deeper inspection reveals to us its
vastness and unmeasured strength. This man rules, and is not ruled.
The stern and fiery energies of a most passionate soul lie silent in
the centre of his being; a trembling sensibility has been inured to
stand, without flinching or murmur, the sharpest trials. Nothing
outward, nothing inward, shall agitate or control him. The brightest
and most capricious fancy, the most piercing and inquisitive intellect,
the wildest and deepest imagination; the highest thrills of joy, the
bitterest pangs of sorrow: all these are his, he is not theirs. While
he moves every heart from its steadfastness, his own is firm and still:
the words that search into the inmost recesses of our nature, he
pronounces with a tone of coldness and equanimity; in the deepest
pathos he weeps not, or his tears are like water trickling from a rock
of adamant. He is king of himself and of his world; nor does he rule
it like a vulgar great man, like a Napoleon or Charles Twelfth, by the
mere brute exertion of his will, grounded on no principle, or on a
false one: his faculties and feelings are not fettered or prostrated
under the iron sway of Passion, but led and guided in kindly union
under the mild sway of Reason; as the fierce primeval elements of
Nature were stilled at the coming of Light, and bound together, under
its soft vesture, into a glorious and beneficent Creation.
This is the true Rest of man; no stunted unbelieving callousness, no
reckless surrender to blind Force, no opiate delusion; but the
harmonious adjustment of Necessity and Accident, of what is changeable
and what is unchangeable in our destiny; the calm supremacy of the
spirit over its circumstances; the dim aim of every human soul, the
full attainment of only a chosen few. It comes not unsought to any;
but the wise are wise because they think no price too high for it.
Goethe's inward home has been reared by slow and laborious efforts;
but it stands on no hollow or deceitful basis: for his peace is not
from blindness, but from clear vision; not from uncertain hope of
alteration, but from sure insight into what cannot alter. His world
seems once to have been desolate and baleful as that of the darkest
sceptic: but he has covered it anew with beauty and solemnity, derived
from deeper sources, over which Doubt can have no sway. He has inquired
fearlessly, and fearlessly searched out and denied the False; but he
has not forgotten, what is equally essential and infinitely harder,
to search out and admit the True. His heart is still full of warmth,
though his head is clear and cold; the world for him is still full of
grandeur, though he clothes it with no false colours; his
fellow-creatures are still objects of reverence and love, though their
basenesses are plainer to no eye than to his. To reconcile these
contradictions is the task of all good men, each for himself, in his
own way and manner; a task which, in our age, is encompassed with
difficulties peculiar to the time; and which Goethe seems to have
accomplished with a success that few can rival. A mind so in unity
with itself, even though it were a poor and small one, would arrest
our attention, and win some kind regard from us; but when this mind
ranks among the strongest and most complicated of the species, it
becomes a sight full of interest, a study full of deep instruction.
Such a mind as Goethe's is the fruit not only of a royal endowment by
nature, but also of a culture proportionate to her bounty. In Goethe's
original form of spirit we discern the highest gifts of manhood, without
any deficiency of the lower: he has an eye and a heart equally for the
sublime, the common, and the ridiculous; the elements at once of a
poet, a thinker, and a wit. Of his culture we have often spoken already;
and it deserves again to be held up to praise and imitation. This, as
he himself unostentatiously confesses, has been the soul of all his
conduct, the great enterprise of his life; and few that understand him
will be apt to deny that he has prospered. As a writer, his resources
have been accumulated from nearly all the provinces of human intellect
and activity; and he has trained himself to use these complicated
instruments with a light expertness which we might have admired in the
professor of a solitary department. Freedom, and grace, and smiling
earnestness are the characteristics of his works: the matter of them
flows along in chaste abundance, in the softest combination; and their
style is referred to by native critics as the highest specimen of the
German tongue. On this latter point the vote of a stranger may well
be deemed unavailing; but the charms of Goethe's style lie deeper than
the mere words; for language, in the hands of a master, is the express
image of thought, or rather it is the body of which thought is the
soul; the former rises into being together with the latter, and the
graces of the one are shadowed forth in the movements of the other.
Goethe's language, even to a foreigner, is full of character and
secondary meanings; polished, yet vernacular and cordial, it sounds
like the dialect of wise, ancient, and true-hearted men: in poetry,
brief, sharp, simple, and expressive; in prose, perhaps still more
pleasing; for it is at once concise and full, rich, clear, unpretending
and melodious; and the sense, not presented in alternating flashes,
piece after piece revealed and withdrawn, rises before us as in
continuous dawning, and stands at last simultaneously complete, and
bathed in the mellowest and ruddiest sunshine. It brings to mind what
the prose of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Browne, would have been, had they
written under the good, without the bad influences, of that French
precision, which has polished and attenuated, trimmed and impoverished,
all modern languages; made our meaning clear, and too often shallow
as well as clear.
But Goethe's culture as a writer is perhaps less remarkable than his
culture as a man. He has learned not in head only, but also in heart:
not from Art and Literature, but also by action and passion, in the
rugged school of Experience. If asked what was the grand characteristic
of his writings, we should not say knowledge, but wisdom. A mind that
has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried
and conquered. A gay delineation will give us notice of dark and
toilsome experiences, of business done in the great deep of the spirit;
a maxim, trivial to the careless eye, will rise with light and solution
over long perplexed periods of our own history. It is thus that heart
speaks to heart, that the life of one man becomes a possession to all.
Here is a mind of the most subtle and tumultuous elements; but it is
governed in peaceful diligence, and its impetuous and ethereal faculties
work softly together for good and noble ends. Goethe may be called a
Philosopher; for he loves and has practised as a man the wisdom which,
as a poet, he inculcates. Composure and cheerful seriousness seem to
breathe over all his character. There is no whining over human woes:
it is understood that we must simply all strive to alleviate or remove
them. There is no noisy battling for opinions; but a persevering effort
to make Truth lovely, and recommend her, by a thousand avenues, to the
hearts of all men. Of his personal manners we can easily believe the
universal report, as often given in the way of censure as of praise,
that he is a man of consummate breeding and the stateliest presence:
for an air of polished tolerance, of courtly, we might almost say
majestic repose, and serene humanity, is visible throughout his works.
In no line of them does he speak with asperity of any man; scarcely
ever even of a thing. He knows the good, and loves it; he knows the
bad and hateful, and rejects it; but in neither case with violence:
his love is calm and active; his rejection is implied, rather than
pronounced; meek and gentle, though we see that it is thorough, and
never to be revoked. The noblest and the basest he not only seems to
comprehend, but to personate and body forth in their most secret
lineaments: hence actions and opinions appear to him as they are, with
all the circumstances which extenuate or endear them to the hearts
where they originated and are entertained. This also is the spirit of
our Shakespeare, and perhaps of every great dramatic poet. Shakespeare
is no sectarian; to all he deals with equity and mercy; because he
knows all, and his heart is wide enough for all. In his mind the world
is a whole; he figures it as Providence governs it; and to him it is
not strange that the sun should be caused to shine on the evil and the
good, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
Goethe has been called the German Voltaire; but it is a name which
does him wrong, and describes him ill. Except in the corresponding
variety of their pursuits and knowledge, in which, perhaps, it does
Voltaire wrong, the two cannot be compared. Goethe is all, or the best
of all, that Voltaire was, and he is much that Voltaire did not dream
of. To say nothing of his dignified and truthful character as a man,
he belongs, as a thinker and a writer, to a far higher class than this
_enfant gate du monde qu'il gata_. He is not a questioner and a
despiser, but a teacher and a reverencer; not a destroyer, but a
builder-up; not a wit only, but a wise man. Of him Montesquieu could
not have said, with even epigrammatic truth: _Il a plus que personne
l'esprit que tout le monde a_. Voltaire was the _cleverest_ of all
past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he
surely was not.
As poets, the two live not in the same hemisphere, not in the same
world. Of Voltaire's poetry, it were blindness to deny the polished
intellectual vigour, the logical symmetry, the flashes that from time
to time give it the colour, if not the warmth, of fire: but it is in
a far other sense than this that Goethe is a poet; in a sense of which
the French literature has never afforded any example. We may venture
to say of him, that his province is high and peculiar; higher than any
poet but himself, for several generations, has so far succeeded in,
perhaps even has steadfastly attempted. In reading Goethe's poetry,
it perpetually strikes us that we are reading the poetry of our own
day and generation. No demands are made on our credulity; the light,
the science, the scepticism of the age, are not hid from us. He does
not deal in antiquated mythologies, or ring changes on traditionary
poetic forms; there are no supernal, no infernal influences, for _Faust_
is an apparent rather than a real exception: but there is the barren
prose of the nineteenth century, the vulgar life which we are all
leading; and it starts into strange beauty in his hands; and we pause
in delighted wonder to behold the flower of Poesy blooming in that
parched and rugged soil. This is the end of his _Mignons_ and _Harpers_,
of his _Tassos_ and _Meisters_. Poetry, as he views it, exists not in
time or place, but in the spirit of man; and Art, with Nature, is now
to perform for the poet, what Nature alone performed of old. The
divinities and demons, the witches, spectres, and fairies, are vanished
from the world, never again to be recalled: but the Imagination which
created these still lives, and will forever live in man's soul; and
can again pour its wizard light over the Universe, and summon forth
enchantments as lovely or impressive, and which its sister faculties
will not contradict. To say that Goethe has accomplished all this,
would be to say that his genius is greater than was ever given to any
man: for if it was a high and glorious mind, or rather series of minds,
that peopled the first ages with their peculiar forms of poetry, it
must be a series of minds much higher and more glorious that shall so
people the present. The angels and demons that can lay prostrate our
hearts in the nineteenth century must be of another and more cunning
fashion than those that subdued us in the ninth. To have attempted,
to have begun this enterprise, may be accounted the greatest praise.
That Goethe ever meditated it, in the form here set forth, we have no
direct evidence: but indeed such is the end and aim of high poetry at
all times and seasons; for the fiction of the poet is not falsehood,
but the purest truth; and if he would lead captive our whole being,
not rest satisfied with a part of it, he must address us on interests
that _are_, not that _were_, ours; and in a dialect which finds a
response, and not a contradiction, within our bosoms.
How Goethe has fulfilled these conditions in addressing us, an
inspection of his works, but no description, can inform us. Let me
advise the reader to study them, and see. If he come to the task with
an opinion that poetry is an amusement, a passive recreation; that its
highest object is to supply a languid mind with fantastic shows and
indolent emotions, his measure of enjoyment is likely to be scanty,
and his criticisms will be loud, angry, and manifold. But if he know
and believe that poetry is the essence of all science, and requires
the purest of all studies; if he recollect that the new may not always
be the false; that the excellence which can be seen in a moment is not
usually a very deep one; above all, if his own heart be full of feelings
and experiences, for which he finds no name and no solution, but which
lie in pain imprisoned and unuttered in his breast, till the Word be
spoken, the spell that is to unbind them, and bring them forth to
liberty and light; then, if I mistake not, he will find that in this
Goethe there is a new world set before his eyes; a world of Earnestness
and Sport, of solemn cliff and gay plain; some such temple--far
inferior, as it may well be, in magnificence and beauty, but a temple
of the same architecture--some such temple for the Spirit of our age,
as the Shakespeares and Spensers have raised for the Spirit of theirs.
This seems a bold assertion: but it is not made without deliberation,
and such conviction as it has stood within my means to obtain. If it
invite discussion, and forward the discovery of the truth in this
matter, its best purpose will be answered. Goethe's genius is a study
for other minds than have yet seriously engaged with it among us. By
and by, apparently ere long, he will be tried and judged righteously;
he himself, and no cloud instead of him; for he comes to us in such
a questionable shape, that silence and neglect will not always serve
our purpose. England, the chosen home of justice in all its senses,
where the humblest merit has been acknowledged, and the highest fault
not unduly punished, will do no injustice to this extraordinary man.
And if, when her impartial sentence has been pronounced and sanctioned,
it shall appear that Goethe's earliest admirers have wandered too far
into the language of panegyric, I hope it may be reckoned no
unpardonable sin. It is spirit-stirring rather than spirit-sharpening,
to consider that there is one of the Prophets here with us in our own
day: that a man who is to be numbered with the Sages and _Sacri Vates_,
the Shakespeares, the Tassos, the Cervanteses of the world, is looking
on the things which we look on, has dealt with the very thoughts which
we have to deal with, is reigning in serene dominion over the
perplexities and contradictions in which we are still painfully
entangled.
That Goethe's mind is full of inconsistencies and shortcomings, can
be a secret to no one who has heard of the Fall of Adam. Nor would it
be difficult, in this place, to muster a long catalogue of darknesses
defacing our perception of this brightness: but it might be still less
profitable than it is difficult; for in Goethe's writings, as in those
of all true masters, an apparent blemish is apt, after maturer study,
to pass into a beauty. His works cannot be judged in fractions, for
each of them is conceived and written as a whole; the humble and common
may be no less essential there than the high and splendid: it is only
Chinese pictures that have no shade. There is a maxim, far better known
than practised, that to detect faults is a much lower occupation than
to recognize merits. We may add also, that though far easier in the
execution, it is not a whit more certain in the result. What is the
detecting of a fault, but the feeling of an incongruity, of a
contradiction, which may exist in ourselves as well as in the object?
Who shall say in which? None but he who sees this object as it is, and
himself as he is. We have all heard of the critic fly; but none of us
doubts the compass of his own vision. It is thus that a high work of
art, still more that a high and original mind, may at all times
calculate on much sorriest criticism. In looking at an extraordinary
man, it were good for an ordinary man to be sure of _seeing_ him,
before attempting to _oversee_ him. Having ascertained that Goethe is
an object deserving study, it will be time to censure his faults when
we have clearly estimated his merits; and if we are wise judges, not
till then.
WALTER PATER.
(1839-1894)
XI.--SANDRO BOTTICELLI.
Of the critics who have written during the last sixty years, Mr. Pater
is probably the most remarkable. His work is always weighted with
thought, and his thought is always fused with imagination. He unites,
in a singular degree of intensity, the two crucial qualities of the
critic, on the one hand a sense of form and colour and artistic
utterance, on the other hand a speculative instinct which pierces
behind these to the various types of idea and mood and character that
underlie them. He is equally alive to subtle resemblances and to subtle
differences, and art is to him not merely an intellectual enjoyment,
but something which is to be taken into the spirit of a man and to
become part of his life. Of the _history_ of literature, and the
problems that rise out of it, he takes but small account. But for the
other function assigned by Carlyle to criticism, for criticism as a
"creative art, aiming to reproduce under a different shape the existing
product of the artist, and painting to the intellect what already lay
painted to the heart and the imagination"--for this no man has done
more than Mr. Pater. With wider knowledge and a clearer consciousness
of the deeper issues involved, he may be said to have taken up the
work of Lamb and to have carried it forward in a spirit which those
who best love Lamb will be the most ready to admire.
Of Mr. Pater's literary criticisms, those on Wordsworth and Coleridge
are perhaps the most striking. But he was probably still more at home
in interpreting the work of the great painters. And of his
"appreciations" of painters none is more characteristic than his study
of Botticelli. It was written in 1870, and published in _The
Renaissance_ in 1873.
In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned
by name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance
only, but to some it will appear a result of deliberate judgment; for
people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his
name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.
In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much
of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to
the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion
which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the
simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and
flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the
modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings
of his own of classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents,
painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment, which touches
you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible
subject. What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality
of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and
which we cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to
speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question
which a critic has to answer.
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