349 ample, Parisian ladies of quality, all rustling | Teufelsdreck Homily on the Greatness of Great in silks and laces, visit the condemned-cell of Men, it may now be high time to proceed with a fierce Cartouche, and in silver accents, and the matter more in hand; and remark that with the looks of angels, beg locks of hair our much calumniated age, so fruitful in noted from him; as from the greatest, were it only men, is also not without its great. In noted in the profession of highwayman! Still more men, undoubtedly enough, we surpass all ages fatal is that other mistake, the commonest of since the creation of the world; and from two all, whereby the devotional youth, seeking for plain causes: First, that there has been a a great man to worship, finds such within his French Revolution, and that there is now own worthy person, and proceeds with all zeal pretty rapidly proceeding a European Revoluto worship there. Unhappy enough! to realize, tion; whereby every thing, as in the Termin an age of such gas-light illumination, this day of a great city, when all mortals are rebasest superstition of the ages of Egyptian moving, has been, so to speak, set out into darkness. honour, unnoticed, and worth no notice in its the street; and many a foolish vessel of disown dark corner, has become universally recognisable when once mounted on the summit of some furniture-wagon, and tottering there-tor,) with what is put under it, slowly onwards (as committee-president, or other head-directo its new lodging and arrangement, itself, alas, hardly to get thither without breakage. Secondly, that the Printing Press, with stitched and loose leaves, has now come into full ac tion; and makes, as it were, a sort of universal day-light for removal and revolution, and every thing else, to proceed in, far more commodiously, yet also far more conspicuously. A complaint has accordingly been heard that famous men abound, that we are quite overrun with famous men: however, the remedy lies in the disease itself; crowded succession already means quick oblivion. For wagon after wagon rolls off, and either arrives or is overset; and so, in either case the vessel of disho nour, which, at worst, we saw only in crossing some street, will afflict us no more. "Remark, however, and not without emotion, that of all rituals, and divine services, and ordinances ever instituted for the worship of any god, this of Self-worship is the ritual most faithfully observed. has the Hindoo devotee, with his washings, Trouble enough and cookings, and perplexed formularies, tying him up at every function of his existence: but is it greater trouble than that of his German self-worshipping brother; is it trouble even by the devoutest Fakir, so honestly undertaken and fulfilled? I answer, No; for the German's heart is in it. The German worshipper, for whom does he work, and scheme, and struggle, and fight, at his rising up and lying down, in all times and places, but for his god only? Can he escape from that divine presence of Self; can his heart waver, or his hand wax faint in that sacred service? The Hebrew Jonah, prophet as he was, rather than take a message to Nineveh, took ship to Tarshish, hoping to hide there from his Sender; but in what ship-hull or whale's belly, shall the madder German Jonah cherish hope of hiding from-Himself! Consider too the temples he builds, and the services of (shoulder-knotted) priests he ordains and maintains; the smoking sacrifices, thrice a day or oftener, with perhaps a psalmist or two, of broken-winded laureats and literators, if such are to be had. Nor are his votive gifts wanting, of rings, and jewels, and gold embroideries, such as our Lady of Loretto might grow yellower to look upon. A toilsome, perpetual worship, heroically gone through; and then with what issue? Alas, with the worst. tian leek-worshipper had, it is to be hoped, The old Egypseasons of light and faith: his leek-god seems to smile on him; he is humbled, and in humility exalted, before the majesty of something, were it only that of germinative Physical Nature, seen through a germinating, not unnourishing potherb. The Self-worshipper, again, has no seasons of light, which are not of blue sulphur-light; hungry, envious pride, not humility in any sort, is the ashy fruit of his worship; his self-god growls on him with the perpetual wolf-cry, Give! Give! and your devout Byron, as the Frau Hunt, with a wise simplicity (geistreich naiv,) once said, 'must sit sulking like a great schoolboy, in pet because they have given him a plain bun and not a spiced one. His bun was a life-rent of God's universe, with the tasks it offered, and the tools to do them with; à priori, one might have fancied it could be put up with for once." After which wondrous glimpses into the noted men, it is computed that in our time Of great men, among so many millions of there have been two; one in the practical, another, in the speculative province: Napoleon Bonaparte and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In which dual number, inconsiderable as it is, our time may, perhaps, specially pride itself, and take precedence of many others; in particular, reckon itself the flower-time of the whole last century and half. Every age will, no doubt, have its superior man or men: but one so superior as to take rank among the man; this rarely makes his appearance, such high of all ages; this is what we call a great bounty of nature and accident must combine to produce and unfold him. Of Napoleon and his works all ends of the world have heard; for such a host marched not in silence through the frighted deep: few heads there are in this Planet which have not formed to themselves some featured or featureless image of him; his history has been written about, on the great scale and on the small, some millions of times, and still remains to be written: one of our highest literary problems. For such a "light-nimbus" of glory and renown encircled the man; the environment he walked in was itself so stupendous that the eye grew dazzled and mistook his proportions; or quite turned away from him in pain and temporary blindness. Thus even among the clear-sighted there is no unanimity about Napoleon; and only here and there does his own greatness begin to be in'erpreted, and accu 2 G rately separated from the mere greatness of his fame and fortune. Goethe, again, though of longer continuance in the world, and intrinsically of much more unquestionable greatness, and even importance there, could not be so noted by the world: for if the explosion of powder-mines and artillery-parks naturally attracts every eye and ear; the approach of a new-created star (dawning on us in new-created radiance, from the eternal Deeps!) though this, and not the artillery-parks, is to shape our destiny and rule the lower earth, is notable at first only to certain star-gazers and weather-prophets. Among ourselves, especially, Goethe had little recognition: indeed, it was only of late that his existence, as a man and not as a mere sound, became authentically known to us: and some shadow of his high endowments and endeavours, and of the high meaning that might lie therein, arose in the general mind of England, even of intelligent England. Five years ago, to rank him with Napoleon, like him as rising unattainable beyond his class, like him and more than he of quite peculiar moment to all Europe, would have seemed a wonderful procedure; candour even, and enlightened liberality, to grant him place beside this and the other home-born readywriter, blessed with that special privilege of "English cultivation," and able thereby to write novels, heart captivating, heart-rending, or of enchaining interest. done. The field, indeed, is large: there are forty volumes of the most significant Writing that has been produced for the last two centuries; there is the whole long Life and heroic Character of him who produced them; all this to expatiate over and inquire into; in both which departments the deepest thinker, and most far-sighted, may find scope enough. Nevertheless, in these days of the ten-pound franchise, when all the world (perceiving now like the Irish innkeeper, that "death and destruction are just coming in ") will have itself represented in parliament; and the wits of so many are gone in this direction to gather wool, and must needs return more or less shorn; it were foolish to invite either young or old into great depths of thought on such a remote malter; the tendency of which is neither for the Reform Bill nor against it, but quietly through it and beyond it; nowise to prescribe this or that mode of electing members, but only to produce a few members worth electing. Not for many years (who knows how many!) in these harassed, hand-to-mouth circumstances, can the world's bleared eyes open themselves to study the true import of such topics; of this topic the highest of such. As things actually stand, some quite cursory glances, and considerations close on the surface, to remind a few (unelected, unelective) parties interested, that it lies over for study, are all that can be attempted here: could we, by any method, in any measure, disclose for such the wondrous wonder-working element it hovers in, the light it is to be studied and inquired after in, what is needfullest at present were accomplished. One class of considerations, near enough the surface, we avoid; all that partakes of an elegiac character. True enough, nothing can be done or suffered, but there is something to be said, wisely or unwisely. The departure of our Greatest contemporary Man could not be other than a great event; fitted to awaken, Since which time, however, let us say, the progress of clearer apprehension has been rapid and satisfactory: innumerable unmusical voices have already fallen silent on this matter; for in fowls of every feather, even in the pertest choughs and thievish magpies, there dwells a singular reverence of the eagle; no Dullness is so courageous, but if you once show it any gleam of a heavenly Resplendence, it will, at lowest, shut its eyes and say nothing. So fares it here with the "old estab-in all who with understanding beheld it, feellished British critic;" who, indeed in these days of ours, begins to be strangely situated; so many new things rising on his horizon, black indefinable shapes, magical or not; the old brickfield (where he kneaded insufficient marketable bricks) all stirring under his feet; preternatural, mad-making tones in the earth and air-with all which what shall an oldestablished British critic and brickmaker do, but, at wisest, put his hands in his pockets, and, with the face and heart of a British mastiff, though amid dismal enough forebodings, see what it will turn to? In the younger, more hopeful minds, again, in most minds that can be considered as in a state of growth, German literature is taking its due place in such, and in generations of other such that are to follow them, some thankful appreciation of the greatest in German literature cannot fail: at all events this feeling that he is great and the greatest, whereby appreciation, and, what alone is of much value, appropriation, first becomes rightly possible. To forward such on their way towards appropriating what excellence this man realized and created for them, somewhat has already been done, yet not much; much still waits to be ing sad, but high and sacred, of mortality and immortality, of mourning and of triumph; far lookings into the Past and into the Future; so many changes, fearful and wonderful, of fleeting Time; glimpses too of the Eternity these rest on, which knows no change. At the present date and distance, however, all this pertains not to us; has been uttered elsewhere, or may be left for utterance there. Let us consider the Exequies as past; that the high Rogus, with its sweet scented wood, amid the wail of music eloquent to speechless hearts, has flamed aloft, heavenkissing, in sight of all the Greeks; and that now the ashes of the Hero are gathered into their urn, and the host has marched onwards to new victories and new toils; ever to be mindful of the dead, not to mourn for him any more. The host of the Greeks, in this case, was all thinking Europe: whether their funeral games were appropriate and worthy we stop not to inquire; the time, in regard to such things, is empty or ill provided, and this was what the time could conveniently do. All canonization and solemn cremation are gone by; and as yet nothing suitable, nothing that does not border upon parody, has appeared in their room. A Bentham bequeaths his remains to be lectured over in a school of anatomy; and perhaps, even in this way, finds, as chief of the Utilitarians, a really nobler funeral than any other, which the prosaic age, rich only in crapes and hollow scutcheons, (of timber as of words,) could have afforded him. work treated, with anxious fidelity, I gave the name Wahrheit und Dichtung, (Truth and Fiction ;) deeply convinced that man, in immediate Presence, still more in Remembrance, fashions and models the external world according to his own peculiarities. "The business, as, with historical studying, The matter in hand being Goethe's Works, and otherwise recalling of places and persons, and the greatest work of every man, or rather I had much time to spend on it, busied me the summary and net amount of all his works, wheresoever I went or stood, at home and being the Life he has led, we ask, as the first abroad, to such a degree that my actual con question: How it went with Goethe in that dition became like a secondary matter; though matter; what was the practical basis, of want again, on all hands, when summoned outwards and fulfilment, of joy and sorrow, from which by occasion, I with full force and undivided his spiritual productions grew forth; the char- sense proved myself present."-Werke xxxii. 62. acters of which they must more or less legibly | These Volumes, with what other supplebear? In which sense, those Volumes entitled mentary matter has been added to them, (the by him Dichtung und Wahrheit, wherein his rather as Goethe's was a life of manifold relapersonal history, what he has thought fit to tion, of the widest connection with important mike known of it, stands delineated, will long or elevated persons, not to be carelessly laid be valuable. A noble commentary, instructive before the world, and he had the rare good forin many ways, lies opened there, and yearly tune of arranging all things that regarded even increasing in worth and interest; which all his posthumous concernment with the existing readers, now when the true quality of it is generation, according to his own deliberate ascertained, will rejoice that circumstances judgment,) are perhaps likely to be, for a long induced and allowed him to write: for surely time, our only authentic reference. By the if old Cellini's counsel have any propriety, it last will of the deceased, it would seem, all his is doubly proper in this case; the autobiogra- papers and effects are to lie exactly as they phic practice he recommends (of which the are, till after another twenty years. last century in particular has seen so many worthy and worthless examples) was never so much in place as here. "All men, of what rank soever," thus counsels the brave Benvenuto, "who have accomplished aught virtuous or virtuous-like, should, provided they be conscious of really good purposes, write down their own life; nevertheless, not put hand to so worthy an enterprise till after they have reached the age of forty." All which ukase-regulations Goethe had abundantly fulfilled-the last as abundantly as any, for he had now reached the age of sixty-two. Looking now into these magically-recalled scenes of childhood and manhood, the student of human nature will, under all manner of shapes, from first to last, note one thing: The singularly complex Possibility offered from without, yet along with it the deep never-failing Force from within, whereby all this is conquered and realized. It was as if accident and primary endowment had conspired to produce a character on the great scale; a will is cast abroad into the widest, wildest element, and gifted also in an extreme degree, to prevail "This year, 1811," says he, "distinguishes over this, to fashion this to its own form: in itself for me by persevering outward activity. which subordinating and self-fashioning of its The Life of Philip Hackert went to press; the circumstances, a character properly consists. papers committed to me all carefully elaborated In external situations, it is true, in occurrences as the case required. By this task I was once such as could be recited in the Newspapers, more attracted to the South: the occurrences Goethe's existence is not more complex than which, at that period, had befallen me there, in other men's; outwardly rather a pacific smooth Hackert's company or neighbourhood, became existence: but in his inward specialities and alive in the imagination; I had cause to ask, depth of faculty and temper, in his position Why this which I was doing for another spiritual and temporal towards the world as it should not be attempted for myself? Iturned, was and the world as he could have wished it, accordingly, before completion of that volume, the observant eye may discern complexity, to my own earliest personal history; and, in perplexity enough; an extent of data greater, truth, found here that I had delayed too long. perhaps, than had lain in any life-problem for The work should have been undertaken while some centuries. And now, as mentioned, the my mother yet lived; thereby had I got nigher force for solving this was, in like manner, those scenes of childhood, and been, by her granted him in extraordinary measure; so that great strength of memory, transported into the we must say, his possibilities were faithfully midst of them. Now, however, must these and with wonderful success turned into acquivanished apparitions be recalled by my own sitions; and this man fought the good fight, not help; and, first, with labour, many an incite-only victorious, as all true men are, but victoment to recollection, like a necessary magic-rious without damage, and with an ever-inapparatus be devised. To represent the de- creasing strength for new victory, as only velopment of a child who had grown to be remarkable, how this exhibited itself under given circumstances, and yet how in general it could content the student of human nature and his views: such was the thing I had to do. “In this sense, unpretendingly enough, to a great and happy men are. Not wounds and loss (beyond fast-healing, skin-deep wounds) has the unconquerable to suffer; only everenduring toil; weariness- from which, after rest, he will rise stronger than before. Good fortune, what the world calls good for tune, awaits him from beginning to end; but withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, also a far deeper felicity than this. Such has his whole life to guide, without goal or worldly gifts of good fortune are what we | barrier, save of his own choosing; and, tempted called possibilities: happy he that can rule as we have seen, is too likely to guide it ill; over them; but doubly unhappy he that cannot. | often, instead of walking straight forward, as Only in virtue of good guidance does that same he might, does but, like Jeshurun, wax fat and good fortune prove good. Wealth, health, fiery kick; in which process, it is clear, not the light with Proteus manysidedness of mind, adamantine circle of Necessity whereon the peace, honour, length of days: with all this World is built, but only his own limb-bones you may make no Goethe, but only some Vol- must go to pieces!-Truly, in plain prose, if taire; with the most that was fortuitous in all we bethink us what a road many a Byron and this, make only some short-lived, unhappy, Mirabeau, especially in these latter generations, unprofitable Byron. have gone, it is proof of an uncommon inward wealth in Goethe; that the outward wealth, whether of money or other happiness which Fortune offered him, did in no case exceed the power of Nature to appropriate and wholesomely assimilate; that all outward blessedness grew to inward strength, and produced only blessed effects for him. Those "gold mountains" of Jean Paul, to the giant that can rise above them, are excellent, both fortified and speculatory, heights; and do in fact become a throne, where happily they have not been a tomb. At no period of the World's History can a gifted man be born when he will not find enough to do; in no circumstances come into life but there will be contradictions for him to reconcile, difficulties which it will task his whole strength to surmount, if his whole strength suffice. Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlastingly hostile empires, Necessity and Freewill. A pious adage says, "the back is made for the burden:" we might with no less truth invert it, and say, the burden was made for the back. Nay, so perverse is the nature of man, it has in all times been found that an external allotment superior to the common was more dangerous than one inferior; thus for a hundred that can bear adversity, there is hardly one that can bear prosperity. Goethe's childhood is throughout of riant, joyful character: kind plenty, in every sense, security, affection, manifold excitement, instruction, encircles him: wholly an element of sun and azure, wherein the young spirit, awakening and attaining, can on all hands richly unfold itself. A beautiful boy, of earnest, lucid, serenely deep nature, with the peaceful completeness yet infinite incessant expansive Of riches, in particular, as of the grossest species of prosperity, the perils are recorded by all moralists; and ever, as of old, must theness of a boy, has, in the fittest environment, sad observation from time to time occur: begun to be: beautiful he looks and moves; "Easier for a camel to pass through the eye rapid, gracefully prompt, like the son of Maia; of a needle!" Riches in a cultured community wise, noble, like Latona's son: nay (as all men are the strangest of things: a power all-mov- may now see) he is, in very truth, a miniature ing, yet which any the most powerless and incipient world-poet; of all heavenly figures skilless can put in motion; they are the readicst the beautifullest we know of that can visit this of possibilities; the readiest to become a great lower earth. Lovely enough shine for us blessing or a great curse. "Beneath gold those young years in old Teutonic Frankfort; hrones and mountains," says Jean Paul, "who mirrored in the far remembrance of the SelfKnows how many giant spirits lie entombed!" historian, real yet ideal, they are among our The first fruit of riches, especially for the man most genuine poetic Idyls. No smallest matborn rich, is to teach him faith in them, and all ter is too small for us, when we think who it but hide from him that there is any other faith: was that did it or suffered it. The little longthus is he trained up in the miserable eye-ser- clothed urchin, mercurial enough with all his vice of what is called Honour, Respectability; stillness, can throw a whole cargo of newinstead of a man we have but a gigman,-one marketed crockery, piece by piece, from the who "always kept a gig," two-wheeled or four- balcony into the street, (once the feat is sugwheeled. Consider too what this same gig-gested to him;) and comically shatters cheap manhood issues in; consider that first and most stupendous of gigmen, Phaeton, the son of Sol, who drove the brightest of all conceivable gigs, yet with the sorrowfullest result. Alas, Phaeton was his father's heir; born to attain the highest fortune without earning it: he had built no sun-chariot, (could not build the simplest wheelbarrow,) but could and would insist on driving one; and so broke his own stiff neck, sent gig and horses spinning through infinite space, and set the universe on fire!-wavering in the Mayn waters, is awakening Or, to speak in more modest figures, Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which, if they mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him and force on him a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten though a circuitous course; great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is delf-ware with the same right hand, which tragically wrote and hurled forth the demonic scorn of Mephistophiles, or as "right hand" of Faust," smote the universe to ruins." Neither smile more than enough (if thou be wise) that the gray-haired, all-experienced man remembers how the boy walked on the Mayn bridge, and "liked to look at the bright weather-cock" on the barrier there. That foolish piece of gilt wood, there glittering sun-lit, with its reflex quite another glitter in the young gifted soul: is not this foolish sun-lit splendour also, now when there is an eye to behold it, one of Nature's doings? The eye of the young seer is here, through the paltriest chink, looking into the infinite Splendours of Nature-where, one day, himself is to enter and dwell. 353 tokens of the battle, in a row of wagons, whereon wounded men, ful dismemberment and gesture, were driven softly past us to the Liebfrauen-Kloster, which in all sorts of sorrow. had been changed into a hospital. The compassion of the citizens forth with awoke. Beer, wine, bread, money were given to such as had still power of receiving. But when, ere long, wounded and captive Germans also were noticed in that train, the pity had no limits; it seemed as if each were bent to strip himself of whatever movable thing he had, to aid his countrymen therewith in their extremity. Goethe's mother appears to have been the more gifted of the parents; a woman of altogether genial character, great spiritual faculty and worth; whom the son, at an after time, put old family friends in mind of. It is gratifying for us that she lived to witness his maturity in works and honours; to know that the little infant she had nursed was grown to be a mighty man, the first man of his nation and time. In the father, as prosperous citizen of Frankfort, skilled in many things, improved by travel, by studies both practical and ornamental; decorated with some diplomatic title, but passing, among his books, paintings, collections and household possessions, social or tom of a battle unprosperous for the Allies. "The prisoners, meanwhile, were the symp intellectual, spiritual or material, a quite undi- My father, in his partiality, quite certain that plomatic independent life, we become quainted with a German (not country) but to go out to meet the expected visitors; not ac- these would gain, had the passionate rashness city gentleman of the last century; a character reflecting that the beaten side would in that scarcely ever familiar in our Islands; now case have to run over him. He went first into perhaps almost obsolete among the Germans his garden, at the Friedberg Gate, where he found all quiet and solitary; then ventured forth to the Bornheim Heath, where soon, however, various scattered outrunners and baggage-men came in sight, who took the satisfaction, as they passed, of shooting at the boundary-stones, and sent our eager wanderer the reverberated lead singing about his ears. He reckoned it wiser, therefore, to come back; and learned on some inquiry, what the sound of the firing might already have taught him, treat was thought of. Arriving home full of that for the French all went well, and no reblack humour, he quite, at sight of his wounded and prisoner countrymen, lost all composure. From him also many a gift went out for the passing wagons, but only Germans were to taste of it; which arrangement, as Fate had so huddled friends and foes together, could not always be adhered to. too. A positive, methodical man, soundheaded, honest-hearted, sharp-tempered; with an uncommon share of volition, among other things, so that scarcely any obstacle would turn him back, but whatsoever he could not mount over he would struggle round, and in any case be at the end of his journey: many or all of whose good qualities passed also over by inheritance; and, in fairer combination, on nobler objects, to the whole world's profit, were seen a second time in action. Family incidents; house-buildings, or rebuildings; arrivals, departures; in any case, new-year's-days and birth-days, are not wanting: nor city-incidents; many coloured tumult of Frankfort fairs; Kaisers' coronations, expected and witnessed; or that glorious ceremonial of the yearly Pfeiffergericht, wherein the grandfather himself plays so imperial a part. World incidents too roll forth their billows into the remotest creek, and alter the current there. The Earthquake of Lisbon hurls the little Frankfort boy into wondrous depths of another sort; enunciating dark theological problems, which no theology of his will solve, Direction, instruction, in like manner, awaits him in the Great Frederic's Seven Years' War; especially in that long billetting of King's Lieutenant Comte de Thorane, with his serjeants and adjutants, with his painters and picture-easels, his quick precision and decision, his "dry gallantry" and stately Spanish bearing;though collisions with the "house-father," whose German house-stairs (though he silently endures the inevitable) were not new-built to be made a French highway of; who besides loves not the French, but the great invincible Fritz they are striving to beat down. Think, for example, of that singular congratulation on the victory at Bergen: "So then, at last, after a restless Passionweek, Passion-Friday, 1759, arrived. A deep stillness announced the approaching storm. We children were forbidden to leave the house; our father had no rest, and went out. The battle began; I mounted to the top story, where the field, indeed, was still out of my sight, but the thunder of the cannon and the volleys of the small arms could be fully diseerned. After some hours, we saw the first 45 from the first built upon the Count's word, and our good father, who could not participate 2@2 |