length, when by a new magic Word the old Soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that un spell is broken, become our slave, and as familiar-spirit do all our bidding. "We are near awakening when we dream that we dream." He that has an eye and a heart can even now say: Why should I falter? Light has come into the world; to such as love Light, so as Light must be loved, with a boundless alldoing, all-enduring love. For the rest, let that vain struggle to read the mystery of the Infinite cease to harass us. It is a mystery which, through all ages, we shall only read here a line of, there another line of. Do we not already know that the name of the Infinite is Goon, is GOD' Here on Earth we are as derstand not the plan of the campaign, and Time is my fair sed-field, of Tune I'm heir." GOETHE'S PORTRAIT.* [FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1832.] Reader! within that head the whole world lies mirrored, in such clear, ethereal harmony, as it has done in none since Shakspeare left us: even this Rag-fair of a world, wherein thou painfully struggiest, and (as is like) stumblest-all lies transfigured here, and revealed authentically to be sull holy, still divine. What alchymy was that: to find a mad universe full of skepticism, discord, desperation; and transmute it into a wise uni verse of belief, and melody, and reverence! Was not there an opus magnum, if one ever was? This, then, is he who, heroically doing and en. during, has accomplished it. READER! thou here beholdest the Eidolon of 1 to be done therein. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. So looks and lives, now in his eighty-third year, afar in the bright little friendly circle of Weimar, "the clearest, most universal man of his time." Strange enough is the cunning that resides in the ten fingers, especially what they bring to pass by pencil and pen! Him who never saw England, England now sees: from Fraser's "Gallery" he looks forth here, wondering, doubtless, how he came into such Lichtstrasse ("light-street," or galaxy ;) yet with kind recognition of all neighbours, even as the moon looks kindly on lesser lights, and, were they but fish-oil cressets, or terrestrial Vauxhall stars, (of clipped tin,) forbids not their shining. Nay, the very soul of the man thou canst like wise behold. Do but look well in those forty volumes of "musical wisdom," which, under the title of Goethe's Werke, Cotta of Tübingen, or Black and Young of Covent Garden-once offer them a trifle of drink-money-will cheerfully hand thee: greater sight, or more profitable, thou wilt not meet with in this generation. The German language, it is presumable, thou knowest; if not, shouldst thou undertake the study thereof for that sole end, it were well worth thy while." Croquis (a man otherwise of rather satirical turn) surprises us, on this occasion, with a fit of enthusiasm. He declares often, that here is the finest of all living heads; speaks much of blended passion and repose; serene depths of eyes; the brow, the temples, royally arched, a very palace of thought:-and so forth. The writer of these Notices is not without decision of character, and can believe what he knows. He answers Brother Croquis, that it is no wonder the head should be royal and a palace; for a most royal work was appointed By Stieler of Munich; the copy in Fraser's Magasine proved a total failure and involuntary caricature, resembling, as was said at the time, a wretched oldclothesman carrying behind his back a hat which he seemed to have stolen. In this distracted time of ours, wherein men have lost their old loadstars, and wandered after night-fires and foolish will-o'-wisps; and all things, in that "shaking of the nations," have been tumbled into chaos, the high made low and the low high, and ever and anon some duke of this, and king of that, is gurgled aloft, to float there for moments; and fancies himself the governor aud head-director of it all, and is but the topmost froth-bell, to burst again and mingle with the wild fermenting mass.— in this so despicable time, we say, there were nevertheless-be the bounteous heavens ever thanked for it!--two great men sent among us. The one, in the island of St. Helena now sleeps "dark and lone, amid the ocean's everlasting lullaby," the other still rejoices in the blessed sunlight, on the banks of the Ilme. Great was the part allotted each, great the talent given him for the same; yet, mark the contrast! Bonaparte walked through the war convulsed world like an all-devouring earthquake, heaving, thundering, hurling kingdota over kingdom; Goethe was as the mild-shining, inaudible light, which, notwithstanding, ca again make that chaos into a creation. Thus, too, we see Napoleon, with his Austertizes, Waterloos, and Borodinos, is quite gone departed, sunk to silence like a tavern-brai While this other!-he still shines with he direct radiance; his inspired words are to akak in living hearts, as the life and inspiration of one counsel to give, the secret of his whole thinkers, born and still unborn. Some fifty poetic alchymy: GEDENKE ZU LEBEN. Yes, years hence, his thinking will be found trans-"think of living!" Thy life, wert thou the lated, and ground down, even to the capacity "pitifullest of all the sons of earth," is no idle of the diurnal press; acts of parliament will dream, but a solemn reality. It is thy own; it be passed in virtue of him:-this man, if we is all thou hast to front eternity with. Work, well consider of it, is appointed to be ruler of then, even as he has done, and does—“LIKE ▲ the world. STAR UNHASTING, YET UNRESTING."-Sic va Reader to thee thyself, even now, he has leas. BIOGRAPHY.* [FRAZER'S MAGAZINE, 1832.] MAN's sociality of nature evinces itself, in spite of all that can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Biography. It is written, "The proper study of mankind is man;" to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or by false methods, applies himself, nothing loath. "Man is perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it, Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the there is nothing else interesting." How inex- actual course of things, this business of Biopressibly comfortable to know our fellow-graphy is practised and relished. Define to creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practically personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on! his own. Of these millions of living men each individual is a mirror to us: a mirror both scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural and magical;-from which one would so gladly draw aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the image of his own natural face, and the supernatural secrets that prophetically lie under the same! A scientific interest and a poetic one alike inspire us in this matter. A scientific: because every mortal has a Problem of Existence set before him, which, were it only, what for the most it is, the Problem of keeping soul and body together, must be to a certain extent nacl, unlike every other; and yet, at the same time, so like every other; like our own, therefore; instructive, moreover, since we also are indentured to live. A poetic interest still more: for precisely this same struggle of human Free-will against material Necessity, which every man's Life, by the mere circumstance that the man continues alive, will more or less victoriously exhibit,-is that which above all else, or rather inclusive of all else, calls the Sympathy of mortal hearts into action; and whether as acted, or as represented and written of, not only is Poetry, but is the sole Poetry possible. Borne onwards by which wo all-embracing interests, may the earnest Lover of Biography expand himself on all sides, and indefinitely enrich himself. Looking with the eyes of every new neighbour, he can discern a new world different for each: feeling with the heart of every neighbour, he aves with every neighbour's life, even as with The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: including a thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance of these phenomena, named Gossip, Egotism, Personal Narrative, (miraculous or not,) Scandal, Raillery, Slander, and such like; the sumtotal of which (with some fractional addition of a better ingredient, generally too small to be noticeable) constitutes that other grand phenomenon still called "Conversation." Do they not mean wholly: Biography and Autobiography? Not only in the common Speech of men; but in all Art, too, which is or should be the concentrated and conserved essence of what men can speak and show, Biography is almost the one thing needful. Even in the highest works of Art our interest, as the critics complain, is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of a Biographic sort. In the Art, we can nowise forget the Artist: while looking on the Transfiguration, while studying the Iliad, we ever strive to figure to ourselves what spirit dwelt in Raphael; what a head was that of Homer, wherein, woven of Elysian light and Tartarian gloom, that old world fashioned itself together, of which these written Greek characters are but a feeble though perennial copy. The Painter and the Singer are present to us; we partially and for the time become the very Painter and the very Singer, while we enjoy the Picture and the Song. Perhaps, too, let the critic say what he will, this is the highest enjoyment, the clearest recognition, we can have of these. Art indeed is Art; yet Man also is Man. Had the Trans figuration been painted without human hand, had it grown merely on the canvas, say by atmospheric influences, as lichen-pictures do on rocks, it were a grand Picture doubtless: yet nothing like so grand as the Picture, which, on opening our eyes, we everywhere in Heaven and in Earth see painted; and every where pass over with indifference, because could eat the wind, with ever no ♬ disappointthe Painter was not a Man. Think of this; ment. much lies in it. The Vatican is great; yet poor to Chimborazo or the Peake of Teneriffe: its dome is but a foolish Big-endian or Littleendian chip of an egg-shell, compared with that star-fretted Dome where Arcturus and Orion glance for ever; which latter, notwithstanding, who looks at, save perhaps some necessitous star-gazer bent to make Almanacs, some thick-quilted watchman, to see what weather it will prove? The Biographic interest is wanting: no Michael Angelo was He who built that "Temple of Immensity;" therefore do we, pitiful Littlenesses as we are, turn rather to wonder and to worship in the little toybox of a Temple built by our like. as Again, consider the whole class of Fictitious Narratives; from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in Shakspeare and Homer, down to the lowest of froth Prose in the Fashionable Novel. What are all these but so many mimic Biographies? Attempts, here by an inspired Speaker, there by an uninspired Babbler, to deliver himself, more or less inef fectually, of the grand secret wherewith ait hearts labour oppressed: The significance of Man's Life;-which deliverance, even traced in the unfurnished head, and printed at the Minerva Press, finds readers. For, observe, though there is a greatest Fool, as a su perlative in every kind; and the most Foolish man in the Earth is now indubitably living and breathing, and did this morning or lately eat breakfast, and is even now digesting the same; and looks out on the world, with his dim horn-eyes, and inwardly forms some unspeakable theory thereof: yet where shall the authentically Existing be personally met with! Can one of us, otherwise than by guess, know that we have got sight of him, have orally communed with him? To take even the nar rower sphere of this our English metropolis, can any one confidently say to himself, that be has conversed with the identical, individual, Stupidest man now extant in London? No one. Deep as we dive in the Profound, there is ever a new depth opens: where the ultimate bottom may lie, through what new scenes of being we must pass before reaching it, (except that we know it does lie somewhere, and might by human faculty and opportunity be reached,) is altogether a mystery to us. Strange, tantalizing pursuit! We have the fullest assu rance, not only that there is a Stupidest of London men actually resident, with bed and board of some kind, in London; but that seve ral persons have been or perhaps are now speaking face to face with him: while for us, chase it as we may, such scientific blessedness will too probably be for ever denied!—But the thing we meant to enforce was this comforta ble fact, that no known Head was so wooden, but there might be other heads to which it were a genius and Friar Bacon's Oracle. Of no given Book, not even of a Fashionable Novel, can you predicate with certainty that its vacuity is absolute; that there are not other vacuities which shall partially replenish themselves therefrom, and esteem it a plenum. How knowest thou, may the distressed Novelwright exclaim, that I, here where I sit. am the Fool ishest of existing mortals; that this my Long, ear of a Fictitious Biography shall not find one and the other, into whose still longer ears it may be the means, under Providence, of ite stilling somewhat? We answer, None knows, none can certainly know: th_refore, write on, worthy Brother, even as thou canst, as it has been given thee. Still more decisively, still more exclusively does the Biographic interest manifest itself, as we descend into lower regions of spiritual communication; through the whole range of what is called Literature. Of History, for example, the most honoured, if not honourable species of composition, is not the whole purport biographic? "History," it has been said, "is the essence of innumerable Biographies." Such, at least, it should be: whether it is, might admit of question. But, in any case, what hope have we in turning over those old interminable Chronicles, with their garrulities and insipidities; or still worse, in patiently examining those modern Narrations, of the Philosophic kind, where "Philosophy, teaching by Experience," must sit like owl on housetop, seeing nothing, understanding nothing, uttering only, with solemnity enough, her, perpetual most wearisome hoo-hoo:—what hope have we, except for the most part fallacious one of gaining some acquaintance with our fellow-creatures, though dead and vanished, yet dear to us; how they got along in those old days, suffering and doing; to what extent, and under what circumstances, they resisted the Devil and triumphed over him, or struck their colours to him, and were trodden under foot by him; how, in short, the perennial Battle went, which men name Life, which we also in these new days, with indifferent fortune, have to nght, and must bequeath to our sons and grandsons to go on fighting,-till the Enemy one day be quite vanquished and abolished, or else the great Night sink and part the combatants; and thus, either by some Millennium or some new Noah's Deluge, the Volume of Universai History wind itself up! Other hope, in studying such Books, we have none: and that it is a deceitful hope, who that has tried knows not? A feast of widest Biographic insight is spread for us; we enter full of hungry anticipation: alas! like so many other feasts, which Life invites us to, a mere Ossian's "feast of shells," the food and liquor being all emptied out and clean gone, and only the vacant dishes and deceitful emblems thereof left! Your modern Historical Restaurateurs are indeed little better than high-priests of Famine; that Here, however, in regard to " Fictitions Biokeep choicest china dinner-sets, only no din- graphies," and much other matter of like sort, ner to serve therein. Yet such is our Biogra- which the greener mind in these days inditeth, phic appetite, we run trying from shop to we may as well insert some singular sedshop, with ever new hope; and, unless we tences on the importance and significance of Reality, as they stand written for us in Professor | far that your Machinery' is avowedly mecha Gottfried Sauerteig's Esthetische Springwürzel: nical and unt elieved,-what is it else, if we a Work, perhaps, as yet new to most English dare tell ourselves the truth, but a miserable, readers. The Professor and Doctor is not a meaningless Deception kept up by old use and man whom we can praise without reservation; neither shall we say that his Springwürzel (a sort of magical pick-locks, as he affectedly names them) are adequate to "start" every bolt that Jocks up an esthetic mystery; nevertheless, in his erabbed, one-sided way, he sometimes hits Lasses of the truth. We endeavour to translate faithfully, and trust the reader will find it worth serious perusal : "The significance, even for poetic purposes," says Sauerteig," that lies in REALITY, is too apt to escape us; is perhaps only now beginning to be discerned. When we named Roussan's Confessions an elegiaco-didactic Poem, we meant more than an empty figure of speech; we meant an historical scientific fact. wont alone? If the gods of an Iliad are to us no longer authentic Shapes of Terror, heartstirring, heart-appalling, but only vague-glit tering Shadows,-what must the dead Pagan gods of an Epigoniad be, the dead-living Pagan-Christian gods of a Lusiad, the concreteabstract, evangelical-metaphysical gods of a Paradise Lost? Superannuated lumber! Cast raiment, at best; in which some por mime, strutting and swaggering, may or may not set forth new noble Human Feelings, (again a Reality,) and so secure, or not secure, our pardon of such hoydenish masking,-for which, in any case, he has a pardon to ask. "True enough, none but the earliest Epic Poems can claim this distinction of entire cre"Fiction, while the feigner of it knows that dibility, of Reality: after an Iliad, a Shaster, a he is feigning, partakes, more than we suspect, Koran, and other the like primitive performof the nature of lying; and has ever an, in some ances, the rest seem, by this rule of mine, to be degree, unsatisfactory character. All Mytho- altogether excluded from the list. Accordingly, logies were once Philosophies; were believed: what are all the rest from Virgil's neid downthe Epic Poems of old time, so long as they wards, in comparison ?-Frosty, artificial, hecontinued epic, and had any complete impres- terogeneous things; more of gumflowers than siveness, were Histories, and understood to be of roses; at best, of the two mixed incoherently Darratives of facts. In so far as Homer em- together: to some of which, indeed, it were ployed his gods as mere ornamental fringes, hard to deny the title of Poems; yet to no one and had not himself, or at least did not expect of which can that title belong in any sense even his hearers to have, a belief that they were resembling the old high one it, in those old days, real agents in those antique doings; so far did conveyed,-when the epithet divine' or 'sahe fail to be genuine; so far was he a partially cred,' as applied to the uttered Word of man, hollow and false singer; and sang to please only was not a vain metaphor, a vain sound, but a a portion of man's mind, not the whole thereof. real name with meaning. Thus, too, the farther "Imagination is, after all, but a poor matter we recede from those early days, when Poetry, when it must part company with Understand-as true Poetry is always, was still sacred or ing, and even front it hostilely in flat contradiction. Our mind is divided in twain: there is contest; wherein that which is weaker must Leeds come to the worse. Now of all feelings, states, principles, call it what you will, in man's mind, is not Belief the clearest, strongest; against which all others contend in vain Belief is, indeed, the beginning and first condition of all spiritual Force whatsoever: only in so far as Imagination, were it but momentarily, is believed, can there be any use or meaning in it, any enjoyment of it. And what is momentary Belief! The enjoyment of a moment Whereas a perennial Belief were enjoyment perennially, and with the whole united soul. divine, and inspired, (what ours, in great part, only pretends to be,)-the more impossible becomes it to produce any, we say not true Poetry, but tolerable semblance of such; the hollower, in particular, grow all manner of Epics; till at length, as in this generation, the very name of Epic sets men a-yawning, the announcement of a new Epic is received as a public calamity. "But what if the impossible being once for all quite discarded, the probable be well adhered to; how stands it with fiction then? Why, then, I would say, the evil is much mended, but no wise completely cured. We have then, in place of the wholly dead modern Epic, the partially living modern Novel; to which latter it is much "It is thus that I judge of the Supernatural easier to lend that above-mentioned, so essenin an Epic Poem; and would say, the instant tial momentary credence,' than to the former: it had ceased to be authentically supernatural, indeed infinitely easier: for the former being and become what you call Machinery;' sweep flatly incredible, no mortal can for a moment it out of sight (schaff’es mir vom Halse)! Of a credit it, for a moment enjoy it. Thus, here truth, that same Machinery,' about which the and there, a Tom Jones, a Meister, a Crusoe, will critics make such hubbub, was well named yield no little solacement to the minds of men Machinery for it is in very deed mechanical, no- though still immeasurably less than a Reality wise inspired oretical. Neither for us is would, were the significance thereof as im there the smallest æsthetic enjoyment in it; pressively unfolded, were the genius that could save only in this way: that we believe it to have so unfold it once given us by the kind Heavens. been believed, by the Singer or his Hearers; into Neither say thou that proper Realities are whose case we now laboriously struggle to wanting: for Man's Life, now as of old, is the transport curselves; and so, with stinted genuine work of God; wherever there is a enough result, catch some reflex of the Bea- Man, a God also is revealed, and all that is Godlity, which for them was wholly real, and vi- like a whole epitome of the Infinite, with its ible tace to face. Whenever it has come so meanings, lies enfolded in the Life of every Man. Only, alas, that the Seer to discern this | Truth, what we can call a Revelation; which same Godlike, and with fit utterance unfold it These notable, and not unfounded, though partial and deep-seeing rather than wide-seeing observations on the great import of REALITY, considered even as a poetic material, we have inserted the more willingly, because a transient feeling to the same purpose may often have suggested itself to many readers; and, on the whole, it is good that every reader and every writer understand, with all intensity of conviction, what quite infinite worth lies in Truth; how all-pervading, omnipotent, in man's mind, is the thing we name Belief. For the rest, Herr Sauerteig, though one-sided, on this matter of Reality, seems heartily persuaded, and is not perhaps so ignorant as he looks. It cannot be unknown to him, for example, what noise is made about "Invention;" what a supreme rank this faculty is reckoned to hold in the poetic endowment. Great truly is Invention; nevertheless, that is but a poor exercise of it with which Belief is not concerned. "Ar Irishman with whisky in his head," as poor Byron said, will invent you, in his kind, till there is enough and to spare. Nay, perhaps, if we consider well, the highest exercise of Invention has, in very deed, nothing do with Fiction; but is an invention of new, last does undoubtedly transcend all other poetic efforts, nor can Herr Sauerteig be too loud in its praises. But, on the other hand, whether such effort is still possible for man, Herr Sauerteig and the bulk of the world are probably at issue,-and will probably continue so till that same "Revelation" or new "Inven tion of Reality," of the sort he desiderates, shall itself make its appearance. Meanwhile, quitting these airy regions, let any one bethink him how impressive the smallest historical fact may become, as contrasted with the grandest fictitious event; what an incalculable force lies for us in this consi deration: The Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually occur; was, in very truth, an element in the system of the All, whereof I too form part; had therefore, and has, through all time, an authentic being; is not a dream, but a reality! We ourselves can remember reading in Lord Clarendon, with feelings perhaps somehow accidentally opened to it, certainly with a depth of impression strange to us then and now,-that insignificant looking passage, where Charles, after the battle of Worcester, glides down, with Squire Careless, from the Royal Oak, at night-fall, being hungry: how, "making a shift to get over hedges and ditches, after walking at least eight or nine miles, which were the more grievous to the King by the weight of his boots, (for he could not put them off, when he cut off his hair, for want of shoes,) before morning they came to a poor cottage, the orner whereof being a Roman Catholic was known to Care, less." How this poor drudge, being knocked up from his snoring, "carried them into a little barn full of hay, which was a better lodg ing than he had for himself;" and by and by, not without difficulty, brought his Majesty “a piece of bread and a great pot of butter-milk," saying candidly that "he himself lived by his daily labour, and that what he had brought him was the fare he and his wife had :” on which nourishing diet his Majesty, "staying upon the haymow," feeds thankfully for two days; and then departs, under new guidance, having first changed clothes down to the very shirt and "old pair of shoes," with his land. lord; and so as worthy Bunyan has it, "goes on his way, and sees him no more." Singlar enough if we will think of it! This then was a genuine flesh-and-blood Rustic of the year 1651: he did actually swallow bread and butter-milk (not having ale and bacon,) and do field labour; with these hob-nailed "shoes" has sprawled through mud-roads in winter, and, jocund or not, driven his team a-fiel Ji summer; he made bargains; had chafferings and higglings, now a sore heart, now a glad one; was born; was a son, was a fathertoiled in many ways, being forced to it, till the strength was all worn ont of him: and thenlay down "to rest his galled back," and sleep there till the long-distant morning !—Bow comes it, that he alone of all the British rus tics who tilled and lived along with him on whom the blessed sun on that same "* fift” History of the Rebellion iii. 625 |