Juliana Horatia Ewing - "Jan of the Windmill"

Mrs. Cecil Hall - "A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba"

Robert Louis Stevenson - "Lay Morals"

Horace Walpole - "The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3"

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

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Books: Literary and Philosophical Essays

V >> Various >> Literary and Philosophical Essays




Concluding Remark

The speculative employment of reason with respect to nature leads to
the absolute necessity of some supreme cause of the world: the
practical employment of reason with a view to freedom leads also to
absolute necessity, but only of the laws of the actions of a
rational being as such. Now it is an essential principle of reason,
however employed, to push its knowledge to a consciousness of its
necessity (without which it would not be rational knowledge). It is
however an equally essential restriction of the same reason that it
can neither discern the necessity of what is or what happens, nor of
what ought to happen, unless a condition is supposed on which it is
or happens or ought to happen. In this way, however, by the constant
inquiry for the condition, the satisfaction of reason is only
further and further postponed. Hence it unceasingly seeks the
unconditionally necessary, and finds itself forced to assume it,
although without any means of making it comprehensible to itself,
happy enough if only it can discover a conception which agrees with
this assumption. It is therefore no fault in our deduction of the
supreme principle of morality, but an objection that should be made
to human reason in general, that it cannot enable us to conceive the
absolute necessity of an unconditional practical law (such as the
categorical imperative must be). It cannot be blamed for refusing to
explain this necessity by a condition, that is to say, by means of
some interest assumed as a basis, since the law would then cease to
be a moral law, i. e. a supreme law of freedom. And thus while we do
not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral
imperative, we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility, and this is
all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which strives to
carry its principles up to the very limit of human reason.




BYRON AND GOETHE

BY GIUSEPPE MAZZINI


INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Giuseppe Mazzini, the great political idealist of the Italian
struggle for independence, was born at Genoa, June 22, 1805. His
faith in democracy and his enthusiasm for a free Italy he inherited
from his parents; and while still a student in the University of
Genoa he gathered round him a circle of youths who shared his
dreams. At the age of twenty-two he joined the secret society of the
Carbonari, and was sent on a mission to Tuscany, where he was
entrapped and arrested. On his release, he set about the formation,
among the Italian exiles in Marseilles, of the Society of Young
Italy, which had for its aim the establishment of a free and united
Italian republic. His activities led to a decree for his banishment
from France, but he succeeded in outwitting the spies of the
Government and going on with his work. The conspiracy for a national
rising planned by Young Italy was discovered, many of the leaders
were executed, and Mazsini himself condemned to death.

Almost at once, however, he resumed operations, working this time
from Geneva; but another abortive expedition led to his expulsion
from Switzerland. He found refuge, but at first hardly a livelihood,
in London, where he continued his propaganda by means of his pen. He
went back to Italy when the revolution of 1848 broke out, and fought
fiercely but in vain against the French, when they besieged Rome and
ended the Roman Republic in 1849.

Defeated and broken, he returned to England, where he remained till
called to Italy by the insurrection of 1857. He worked with
Garibaldi for some time; but the kingdom established under Victor
Emmanuel by Cavour and Garibaldi was far from the ideal Italy for
which Mazsini had striven. The last years of his life were spent
mainly in London, but at the end he returned to Italy, where he died
on March 10,1872. Hardly has any age seen a political martyr of a
purer or nobler type.

Massini's essay on Byron and Goethe is more than literary criticism,
for it exhibits that philosophical quality which gives so remarkable
a unity to the writings of Massini, whether literary, social, or
political.




BYRON AND GOETHE

I stood one day in a Swiss village at the foot of the Jura, and
watched the coming of the storm. Heavy black clouds, their edges
purpled by the setting sun, were rapidly covering the loveliest sky
in Europe, save that of Italy. Thunder growled in the distance, and
gusts of biting wind were driving huge drops of rain over the
thirsty plain. Looking upwards, I beheld a large Alpine falcon, now
rising, now sinking, as he floated bravely in the very midst of the
storm and I could almost fancy that he strove to battle with it. At
every fresh peal of thunder, the noble bird bounded higher aloft, as
if in answering defiance. I followed him with my eyes for a long
time, until he disappeared in the east. On the ground, about fifty
paces beneath me, stood a stork; perfectly tranquil and impassive in
the midst of the warring elements. Twice or thrice she turned her
head towards the quarter from whence the wind came, with an
indescribable air of half indifferent curiosity; but at length she
drew up one of her long sinewy legs, hid her head beneath her wing,
and calmly composed herself to sleep.

I thought of Byron and Goethe; of the stormy sky that overhung both;
of the tempest-tossed existence, the lifelong struggle, of the one,
and the calm of the other; and of the two mighty sources of poetry
exhausted and closed by them.

Byron and Goethe--the two names that predominate, and, come what
may, ever will predominate, over our every recollection of the fifty
years that have passed away. They rule; the master-minds, I might
almost say the tyrants, of a whole period of poetry; brilliant, yet
sad; glorious in youth and daring, yet cankered by the worm in the
bud, despair. They are the two representative poets of two great
schools; and around them we are compelled to group all the lesser
minds which contributed to render the era illustrious. The qualities
which adorn and distinguish their works are to be found, although
more thinly scattered, in other poets their contemporaries; still
theirs are the names that involuntarily rise to our lips whenever we
seek to characterize the tendencies of the age in which they lived.
Their genius pursued different, even opposite routes; and yet very
rarely do our thoughts turn to either without evoking the image of
the other, as a sort of necessary complement to the first. The eyes
of Europe were fixed upon the pair, as the spectators gaze on two
mighty wrestlers in the same arena; and they, like noble and
generous adversaries, admired, praised, and held out the hand to
each other. Many poets have followed in their footsteps; none have
been so popular. Others have found judges and critics who have
appreciated them calmly and impartially; not so they: for them there
have been only enthusiasts or enemies, wreaths or stones; and when
they vanished into the vast night that envelops and transforms alike
men and things--silence reigned around their tombs. Little by
little, poetry had passed away from our world, and it seemed as if
their last sigh had extinguished the sacred flame.

A reaction has now commenced; good, in so far as it reveals a desire
for and promise of new life; evil, in so far as it betrays narrow
views, a tendency to injustice towards departed genius, and the
absence of any fixed rule or principle to guide our appreciation of
the past. Human judgment, like Luther's drunken peasant, when saved
from falling on one side, too often topples over on the other. The
reaction against Goethe, in his own country especially, which was
courageously and justly begun by Menzel during his lifetime, has
been carried to exaggeration since his death. Certain social
opinions, to which I myself belong, but which, although founded on a
sacred principle, should not be allowed to interfere with the
impartiality of our judgment, have weighed heavily in the balance;
and many young, ardent, and enthusiastic minds of our day have
reiterated with Bonne that Goethe is the worst of despots; the
cancer of the German body.

The English reaction against Byron--I do not speak of that mixture
of cant and stupidity which denies the poet his place in Westminster
Abbey, but of literary reaction--has shown itself still more
unreasoning. I have met with adorers of Shelley who denied the
poetic genius of Byron; others who seriously compared his poems with
those of Sir Walter Scott. One very much overrated critic writes
that "Byron makes man after his own image, and woman after his own
heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave."
The first forgot the verses in which their favorite hailed

"The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent;"
[Footnote: Adonais.]

the second, that after the appearance of "The Giaour" and "Childe
Harold," Sir Walter Scott renounced writing poetry. [Footnote:
Lockhart.] The last forgot that while he was quietly writing
criticisms, Byron was dying for new-born liberty in Greece. All
judged, too many in each country still judge, the two poets, Byron
and Goethe, after an absolute type of the beautiful, the true, or
the false, which they had formed in their own minds; without regard
to the state of social relations as they were or are; without any
true conception of the destiny or mission of poetry, or of the law
by which it, and every other artistic manifestation of human life,
is governed.

There is no absolute type on earth: the absolute exists in the
Divine Idea alone; the gradual comprehension of which man is
destined to attain; although its complete realization is impossible
on earth; earthly life being but one stage of the eternal evolution
of life, manifested in thought and action; strengthened by all the
achievements of the past, and advancing from age to age towards a
less imperfect expression of that idea. Our earthly life is one
phase of the eternal aspiration of the soul towards progress, which
is our law ascending in increasing power and purity from the finite
towards the infinite; from the real towards the Ideal; from that
which is, towards that which is to come. In the immense storehouse
of the past evolutions of life constituted by universal tradition,
and in the prophetic instinct brooding in the depths of the human
soul, does poetry seek inspiration. It changes with the times, for
it is their expression; it is transformed with society, for--
consciously or unconsciously--it sings the lay of Humanity;
although, according to the individual bias or circumstances of the
singer, it assumes the hues of the present, or of the future in
course of elaboration, and foreseen by the inspiration of genius. It
sings now a dirge and now a cradle song; it initiates or sums up.

Byron and Goethe summed up. Was it a defect in them? No; it was the
law of the times, and yet society at the present day, twenty years
after they have ceased to sing, assumes to condemn them for having
been born too soon. Happy indeed are the poets whom God raises up at
the commencement of an era, under the rays of the rising sun. A
series of generations will lovingly repeat their verses, and
attribute to them the new life which they did but foresee in the
germ.

Byron and Goethe summed up. This is at once the philosophical
explanation of their works, and the secret of their popularity. The
spirit of an entire epoch of the European world became incarnate in
them ere its decease, even as--in the political sphere--the spirit
of Greece and Rome became incarnate before death in Caesar and
Alexander. They were the poetic expression of that principle, of
which England was the economic, France the political, and Germany
the philosophic expression: the last formula, effort, and result of
a society founded on the principle of individuality. That epoch, the
mission of which had been, first through the labors of Greek
philosophy, and afterwards through Christianity, to rehabilitate,
emancipate, and develop individual man--appears to have concentrated
in them, in Fichte, in Adam Smith, and in the French school des
drolls de l'homme, its whole energy and power, in order fully to
represent and express all that it had achieved for mankind. It was
much; but it was not the whole; and therefore it was doomed to pass
away. The epoch of individuality was deemed near the goal; when low
immense horizons were revealed; vast unknown lands in whose
untrodden forests the principle of individuality was an insufficient
guide. By the long and painful labors of that epoch the human
unknown quantity had been disengaged from the various quantities of
different nature by which it had been surrounded; but only to be
left weak, isolated, and recoiling in terror from the solitude in
which it stood. The political schools of the epoch had proclaimed
the sole basis of civil organization to be the right to liberty and
equality (liberty for all), but they had encountered social anarchy
by the way. The philosophy of the epoch had asserted the sovereignty
of the human Ego, and had ended in the mere adoration of fact, in
Hegelian immobility. The Economy of the epoch imagined it had
organized free competition, while it had but organized the
oppression of the weak by the strong; of labor by capital; of
poverty by wealth. The Poetry of the epoch had represented
individuality in its every phase; had translated in sentiment what
science had theoretically demonstrated; and it had encountered the
void. But as society at last discovered that the destinies of the
race were not contained in a mere problem of liberty, but rather in
the harmonization of liberty with association--so did poetry
discover that the life it had hitherto drawn from individuality
alone was doomed to perish for want of aliment; and that its future
existence depended on enlarging and transforming its sphere. Both
society and poetry uttered a cry of despair: the death-agony of a
form of society produced the agitation we have seen constantly
increasing in Europe since 1815: the death-agony of a form of poetry
evoked Byron and Goethe. I believe this point of view to be the only
one that can lead us to a useful and impartial appreciation of these
two great spirits.

There are two forms of individuality; the expressions of its
internal and external, or--as the Germans would say--of its
subjective and objective life. Byron was the poet of the first,
Goethe of the last. In Byron the Ego is revealed in all its pride of
power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled plenitude of all its
faculties; inhaling existence at every pore, eager to seize "the
life of life." The world around him neither rules nor tempers him.
The Byronian Ego aspires to rule it; but solely for dominion's sake,
to exercise upon it the Titanic force of his will. Accurately
speaking, he cannot be said to derive from it either color, tone, or
image; for it is he who colors; he who sings; he whose image is
everywhere reflected and reproduced. His poetry emanates from his
own soul; to be thence diffused upon things external; he holds his
state in the centre of the universe, and from thence projects the
light radiating from the depths of his own mind; as scorching and
intense as the concentrated solar ray. Hence that terrible unity
which only the superficial reader could mistake for monotony.

Byron appears at the close of one epoch, and before the dawn of the
other; in the midst of a community based upon an aristocracy which
has outlived the vigor of its prime; surrounded by a Europe
containing nothing grand, unless it be Napoleon on one side and Pitt
on the other, genius degraded to minister to egotism; intellect
bound to the service of the past. No seer exists to foretell the
future: belief is extinct; there is only its pretence: prayer is no
more; there is only a movement of the lips at a fixed day or hour,
for the sake of the family, or what is called the people; love is no
more; desire has taken its place; the holy warfare of ideas is
abandoned; the conflict is that of interests. The worship of great
thoughts has passed away. That which is, raises the tattered banner
of some corpse-like traditions; that which would be, hoists only the
standard of physical wants, of material appetites: around him are
ruins, beyond him the desert; the horizon is a blank. A long cry of
suffering and indignation bursts from the heart of Byron: he is
answered by anathemas. He departs; he hurries through Europe in
search of an ideal to adore; he traverses it distracted,
palpitating, like Mazeppa on the wild horse; borne onwards by a
fierce desire; the wolves of envy and calumny follow in pursuit. He
visits Greece; he visits Italy; if anywhere a lingering spark of the
sacred fire, a ray of divine poetry, is preserved, it must be there.
Nothing. A glorious past, a degraded present; none of life's poetry;
no movement, save that of the sufferer turning on his couch to
relieve his pain. Byron, from the solitude of his exile, turns his
eyes again towards England; he sings. What does he sing? What
springs from the mysterious and unique conception which rules, one
would say in spite of himself, over all that escapes him in his
sleepless vigil? The funeral hymn, the death-song, the epitaph of
the aristocratic idea; we discovered it, we Continentalists; not his
own countrymen. He takes his types from amongst those privileged by
strength, beauty, and individual power. They are grand, poetical,
heroic, but solitary; they hold no communion with the world around
them, unless it be to rule, over it; they defy alike the good and
evil principle; they "will bend to neither." In life and in death
"they stand upon their strength;" they resist every power, for their
own is all their, own; it was purchased by

"Superior science--penance--daring-
And length of watching-strength of mind--and skill
In knowledge of our fathers."

Each of them is the personification, slightly modified, of a single
type, a single idea--the individual; free, but nothing more than
free; such as the epoch now closing has made him; Faust, but without
the compact which submits him to the enemy; for the heroes of Byron
make no such compact. Cain kneels not to Arimanes; and Manfred,
about to die, exclaims:

"The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good and evil thoughts-
Is its own origin of ill, and end-
And its own place and time, its innate sense,
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No color from the fleeting things without,
But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy;
Born from the knowledge of its own desert."

They have no kindred: they live from their own life only they
repulse humanity, and regard the crowd with disdain. Each of them
says: "I have faith in myself"; never, "I have faith in ourselves."
They all aspire to power or to happiness. The one and the other
alike escape them; for they bear within them, untold, unacknowledged
even to themselves, the presentiment of a life that mere liberty can
never give them. Free they are; iron souls in iron frames, they
climb the Alps of the physical world as well as the Alps of thought;
still is their visage stamped with a gloomy and ineffaceable
sadness; still is their soul-whether, as in Cain and Manfred, it
plunge into the abyss of the infinite, "intoxicated with eternity,"
or scour the vast plain and boundless ocean with the Corsair and
Giaour--haunted by a secret and sleepless dread. It seems as if they
were doomed to drag the broken links of the chain they have burst
asunder, riveted to their feet. Not only in the petty society
against which they rebel does their soul feel fettered and
restrained; but even in the world of the spirit. Neither is it to
the enmity of society that they succumb; but under the assaults of
this nameless anguish; under the corroding action of potent
faculties "inferior still to their desires and their conceptions";
under the deception that comes from within. What can they do with
the liberty so painfully won? On whom, on what, expend the exuberant
vitality within them? They are alone; this is the secret of their
wretchedness and impotence. They "thirst for good"--Cain has said it
for them all--but cannot achieve it; for they have no mission, no
belief, no comprehension even of the world around them. They have
never realized the conception of Humanity in the multitudes that
have preceded, surround, and will follow after them; never thought
on their own place between the past and future; on the continuity of
labor that unites all the generations into one whole; on the common
end and aim, only to be realized by the common effort; on the
spiritual post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual,
through the thoughts he transmits to his fellows; and, it may be--
when he lives devoted and dies. in faith--through the guardian
agency he is allowed to exercise over the loved ones left on earth.

Gifted with a liberty they know not how to use; with a power and
energy they know not how to apply; with a life whose purpose and aim
they comprehend not; they drag through their useless and convulsed
existence. Byron destroys them one after the other, as if he were
the executioner of a sentence decreed in heaven. They fall unwept,
like a withered leaf into the stream of time.

"Nor earth nor sky shall yield a single tear,
Nor cloud shall gather more, nor leaf shall fall,
Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all."

They die, as they have lived, alone; and a popular malediction
hovers round their solitary tombs.

This, for those who can read with the soul's eyes, is what Byron
sings; or rather what humanity sings through him. The emptiness of
the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so
powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron. The
crowd do not comprehend him: they listen; fascinated for an instant;
then repent, and avenge their momentary transport by calumniating
and insulting the poet. His intuition of the death of a form of
society they call wounded self-love; his sorrow for all is
misinterpreted as cowardly egotism. They credit not the traces of
profound suffering revealed by his lineaments; they credit not the
presentiment of a new life which from time to time escapes his
trembling lips; they believe not in the despairing embrace in which
he grasps the material universe--stars, lakes, alps, and sea--and
identifies himself with it, and through it with God, of whom--to him
at least--it is a symbol. They do, however, take careful count of
some unhappy moments, in which, wearied out by the emptiness of
life, he has raised--with remorse I am sure--the cup of ignoble
pleasures to his lips, believing he might find forgetfulness there.
How many times have not his accusers drained this cup, without
redeeming the sin by a single virtue; without--I will not say
bearing--but without having even the capacity of appreciating the
burden which weighed on Byron! And did he not himself dash into
fragments the ignoble cup, so soon as he beheld something worthy the
devotion of his life?

Goethe--individuality in its objective life--having, like Byron, a
sense of the falsehood and evil of the world round him-followed
exactly the opposite path. After having--he, too, in his youth--
uttered a cry of anguish in his Werther; after having laid bare the
problem of the epoch in all its terrific nudity, in Faust; he
thought he had done enough, and refused to occupy himself with its
solution. It is possible that the impulse of rebellion against
social wrong and evil which burst forth for an instant in Werther
may long have held his soul in secret travail; but that he despaired
of the task of reforming it as beyond his powers. He himself
remarked in his later years, when commenting on the exclamation made
by a Frenchman on first seeing him: "That is the face of a man who
has suffered much": that he should rather have said: "That is the
face of a man who has struggled energetically;" but of this there
remains no trace in his works. Whilst Byron writhed and suffered
under the sense of the wrong and evil around him, he attained the
calm--I cannot say of victory--but of indifference. In Byron the man
always ruled, and even at times, overcame the artist: the man was
completely lost in the artist in Goethe. In him there was no
subjective life; no unity springing either from heart or head.
Goethe is an intelligence that receives, elaborates, and reproduces
the poetry affluent to him from all external objects: from all
points of the circumference; to him as centre. He dwells aloft
alone; a mighty watcher in the midst of creation. His curious
scrutiny investigates, with equal penetration and equal interest,
the depths of the ocean and the calyx of the floweret. Whether he
studies the rose exhaling its Eastern perfume to the sky, or the
ocean casting its countless wrecks upon the shore, the brow of the
poet remains equally calm: to him they are but two forms of the
beautiful; two subjects for art.