Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865», sayfa 9

NOËL. ³

 
L'Académie en respect,
Nonobstant l'incorrection,
A la faveur du sujet,
        Ture-lure,
N'y fera point de rature;
Noël! ture-lure-lure.
 

Gui-Barôzai.

1

 
Quand les astres de Noël
Brillaient, palpitaient au ciel,
Six gaillards, et chacun ivre,
Chantaient gaîment dans le givre,
                            "Bons amis,
Allons done chez Agassiz!"
 

2

 
Ces illustres Pèlerins
D'Outre-Mer, adroits et fins,
Se donnant des airs de prêtre,
A l'envi se vantaient d'être
                            "Bons amis
De Jean Rudolphe Agassiz!"
 

3

 
Œil-de-Perdrix, grand farceur,
Sans reproche et sans pudeur,
Dans son patois de Bourgogne,
Bredouillait comme un ivrogne,
                            "Bons amis,
J'ai dansé chez Agassiz!"
 

4

 
Verzenay le Champenois,
Bon Français, point New-Yorquois,
Mais des environs d'Avize,
Fredonne, à mainte reprise,
                            "Bons amis,
J'ai chanté chez Agassiz!"
 

5

 
A côté marchait un vieux
Hidalgo, mais non mousseux;
Dans le temps de Charlemagne
Fut son père Grand d'Espagne!
                            "Bons amis,
J'ai dîné chez Agassiz!"
 

6

 
Derrière eux un Bordelais,
Gascon, s'il en fut jamais,
Parfumé de poésie
Riait, chantait plein de vie,
                            "Bons amis,
J'ai soupé chez Agassiz!"
 

7

 
Avec ce beau cadet roux,
Bras dessus et bras dessous,
Mine altière et couleur terne,
Vint le Sire de Sauterne:
                            "Bons amis,
J'ai couché chez Agassiz!"
 

8

 
Mais le dernier de ces preux
Était un pauvre Chartreux,
Qui disait, d'un ton robuste,
"Bénédictions sur le Juste!
                            Bons amis,
Bénissons Père Agassiz!"
 

9

 
Ils arrivent trois à trois,
Montent l'escalier de bois
Clopin-clopant! quel gendarme
Peut permettre ce vacarme,
                            Bons amis,
A la porte d'Agassiz!
 

10

 
"Ouvrez donc, mon bon Seigneur,
Ouvrez vite et n'ayez peur;
Ouvrez, ouvrez, car nous sommes
Gens de bien et gentilshommes,
                            Bons amis
De la famille Agassiz!"
 

11

 
Chut, ganaches! taisez-vous!
C'en est trop de vos glouglous;
Épargnez aux Philosophes
Vos abominables strophes!
                            Bons amis,
Respectez mon Agassiz!
 

WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP

SECOND PAPER

In a preceding paper I have sought to trace the main lines of spiritual growth, as these appear in Goethe's great picture. But is such growth possible in this world? Do the circumstances in which modern men are placed comport with it? Or is it, perhaps, a cherub only painted with wings, and despite the laws of anatomy? These questions are pertinent. It concerns us little to know what results the crescent powers of life might produce, if, by good luck, Eden rather than our struggling century, another world instead of this world, were here. This world, it happens, is here undoubtedly; our century and our place in it are facts, which decline to take their leave, bid them good morning and show them the door how one may. Let us know, then, what of good sufficing may be achieved in their company. If Goethe's picture be only a picture, and not a possibility, we will be pleased with him, provided his work prove pleasant; we will partake of his literary dessert, and give him his meed of languid praise. But if, on the other hand, his book be written in full, unblinking view of all that is fixed and limitary in man and around him, and if, in face of this, it conduct growth to its consummation, then we may give him something better than any praise,—namely, heed.

Is it, then, written in this spirit of reality? In proof that it is so, I call to witness the most poignant reproach, save one, ever uttered against it by a superior man. Novalis censured it as "thoroughly modern and prosaic." Well, on one side, it is so,—just as modern and prosaic as the modern world and actual European civilization. What is this but to say that Goethe faces the facts? What is it but to say that he accepts the conditions of his problem? He is to show that the high possibilities of growth can be realized here. To run off, get up a fancy world, and then picture these possibilities as coming to fruition there, would be a mere toying with his readers. Here is modern civilization, with its fixed forms, its rigid limits, its traditional mechanisms. Here is this life, where men make, execute, and obey laws, own and manage property, buy and sell, plant, sail, build, marry and beget children and maintain households, pay taxes, keep out of debt, if they are wise, and go to the poorhouse, or beg, or do worse, if they are unwise or unfortunate. Here such trivialities as starched collars, blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. One cannot even go into the street in a wilfully strange costume, without establishing repulsions and balking relations between him and his neighbors which destroy their use to each other. Every man is bound to the actual form of society by his necessities at least, if not by his good-will.

To step violently out of all this puts one in a social vacuum,—a position in which few respire well, while most either perish or become in some degree monstrous. It is necessary that one should live and work with his fellows, if he is to obtain the largest growth. On the other hand, to be merely in and of this—a wheel, spoke, or screw, in this vast social mechanism—makes one, not a man, but a thing, and precludes all growth but such as is obscure and indirect. Thousands, indeed, have no desire but to obtain some advantageous place in this machinery. Meanwhile this enormous conventional civilization strives, and must strive, to make every soul its puppet. Let each fall into the routine, pursue it in some shining manner, asking no radical questions, and he shall have his heart's desire. "Blessed is he," it cries, "who handsomely and with his whole soul reads upwards from man to position and estate,—from man to millionnaire, judge, lord, bishop! Cursed is he who questions, who aims to strike down beneath this great mechanism, and to connect himself with the primal resources of his being! There are no such resources. It is a wickedness to dream of them. Man has no root but in tradition and custom, no blessing but in serving them."

As that assurance is taken, and as that spirit prevails, man forfeits his manhood. His life becomes mechanical. Ideas disappear in the forms that once embodied them; imagination is buried beneath symbol; belief dies of creed, and morality of custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting, and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction, filling all the air with the breath of their foulness.

The earlier part of the eighteenth century found all Europe in this stage. Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery. Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh—with a screaming wail inside it, if one can hear well—rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up, toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true; then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.

Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life. "Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,—momentarily created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."

The noblest type I have ever known of this extra-vagance, this wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity, as of a newborn babe,—with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my observation,—with his indomitable persistency,—by the aid also of that all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his priceless gift,—he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an indescribable charm. In him it came at once to beauty and to consecration.

Yet even he must leave out marriage, to make his scheme of life practicable. He must ignore Nature's demand that humanity continue, or recognize it only with loathing. "Marriage is that!" said he to a friend,—and held up a carrion-flower.

Moreover, the success of his life—nay, the very quality of his being—implied New England and its civilization. To suppose him born among the Flathead Indians were to suppose him, the Thoreau of our love and pride, unborn still. The civilization he slighted was an air that he breathed; it was implied, as impulse and audience, in those books of his, wherein he enshrined his spirit, and whereby he kept its health.

A fixed social order is indirectly necessary even to him who, by rare gifts of Nature, can stand nobly and unfalteringly aside from it. And it is directly, instantly necessary to him who, either by less power of self-support or by a more flowing human sympathy, must live with men, and must comply with the conditions by which social connection is preserved.

The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous, engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The reconciling word,—is there a reconciling word?

Here, now, comes one who answers, Yes. And he answers thus, not by a bald assertion, but by a picture wherein these opposites lose their antagonism,—by a picture which is true to both, yet embraces both, and shapes them into a unity. That is Goethe. This attempt represents the grand nisus of his life. It is most fully made in "Wilhelm Meister."

Above the world he places the growing spirit of man, the vessel of all uses, with his resource in eternal Nature. Then he seizes with a sovereign hand upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization, he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand rolling organ-harmonies of life.

That he succeeds to perfection I do not say. I could find fault enough with his book, if there were either time or need. There is no need: its faults are obvious. In binding himself by such unsparing oaths to recognize and admit all the outward truth of society, he has, indeed, grappled with the whole problem, but also made its solution a little cumbrous and incomplete. Nay, this which he so admits in his picture was also sufficiently, perhaps a touch more than sufficiently, admitted in his own being. He would have been a conventionalist and epicurean, unless he had been a seer. He would have been a mere man of the world, had he not been Goethe. But whereas a man of the world reads up from man to dignity, estate, and social advantage, he reverses the process, and reads up from these to man. Say that he does it with some stammering, with some want of the last nicety. What then? It were enough, if he set forth upon the true road, though his own strength fail before the end is reached. It is enough, if, falling midway, even though it be by excess of the earthly weight he bears, he still point forward, and his voice out of the dust whisper, "There lies your way!" This alone makes him a benefactor of mankind.

This specific aim of Goethe's work makes it, indeed, a novel. Conventional society and the actual conditions of life are, with respect to eternal truth, but the novelties of time. The novelist is to picture these, and, in picturing, subordinate them to that which is perpetual and inspiring. Just so far as he opens the ravishing possibilities of life in commanding reconciliation with the formal civilization of a particular time, he does his true work.

The function of the poet is different. His business it is simply to refresh the spirit of man. To its lip he holds the purest ichors of existence; with ennobling draughts of awe, pity, sympathy, and joy, he quickens its blood and strengthens its vital assimilations. The particular circumstances he uses are merely the cup wherein this wine of life is contained. This he may obtain as most easily he can; the world is all before him where to choose.

The novelist has no such liberty. His business it is to find the ideal possibilities of man here, in the midst of actual society. He shall teach us to free the heart, while respecting the bonds of circumstance. And the more strictly he clings to that which is central in man on the one hand, and the more broadly and faithfully he embraces the existing prosaic limitations on the other, the more his work answers to the whole nature of his function. Goethe has done the latter thoroughly, his accusers themselves being judges; that he has done the other, and how he has done it, I have sought to show in a preceding paper. He looks on actual men and actual society with an eye of piercing observation; he depicts them with remorseless verity; and through and by all builds, builds at the great architectures of spiritual growth.

Hence the difference between him and satirists like Thackeray, who equal him in keenness of observation, are not behind him in verity of report, while surpassing him often in pictorial effect,—but who bring to the picture out of themselves only a noble indignation against baseness. They contemn; he uses. They cry, "Fie!" upon unclean substances; he ploughs the offence into the soil, and sows wheat over it. They see the world as it is; he sees it, and through it. They probe sores; he leads forth into the air and the sunshine. They tinge the cheek with blushes of honorable shame; he paints it with the glow of wholesome activity. Their point of view is that of pathology; his, that of physiology. The great satirists, at best, give a medicine to sickness; Goethe gives a task to health. They open a door into a hospital; he opens a door out of one, and cries, "Lo, the green earth and blue heaven, the fields of labor, the skies of growth!"

On the other hand, by this relentless fidelity to observation, by his stern refusal to give men supposititious qualities and characters, by his resolute acceptance of European civilization, by his unalterable determination to practicable results, by always limiting himself to that which all superior men might be expected not merely to read of with gusto, but to do, he is widely differenced from novelists like the authoress of "Consuelo." He does not propose to furnish a moral luxury, over which at the close one may smack the lips, and cry, "How sweet!" No gardener's manual ever looked more simply to results. His aim is, to get something done, to get all done which he suggests. Accordingly, he does not gratify us with vasty magnanimities, holy beggaries voluntarily assumed, Bouddhistic "missions"; he shows us no more than high-minded, incorruptible men, fixed in their regards upon the high ends of life, established in noble, fruitful fellowship, willing and glad to help others so far as they can clearly see their way, not making public distribution of their property, but managing it so that it shall in themselves and others serve culture, health, and all well-being of body and mind. Wealth here is a trust; it is held for use; its uses are, to subserve the high ends of Nature in the spirit of man. Lothario seeks association with all who can aid him in these applications. So intent is he, that he loves Theresa because she has a genius at once for economizing means and for seeing where they may be applied to the service of the more common natures. He keeps the great-minded, penetrating, providential Abbé in his pay, that this inevitable eye may distinguish for him the more capable natures, and find out whether or how they may be forwarded on their proper paths. Here are no sublime professions, but a steady, modest, resolute, discriminate doing.

For suggestion of what one may really do, and for impelling one toward the practicable best, I find this book worth a moonful of "Consuelos." The latter work has, indeed, beautiful pictures; and simply as a picture of a fresh, sweet, young life, it is charming. But in its aim at a higher import I find it simply an arrow shot into the air, going so high, but at—nothing! If one crave a moral luxury, it is here. If he desire a lash for egoism, this, perhaps, is also here. If he is already praying the heavens for a sufficing worth and work in life, and is asking only the what and how, this book, taken in connection with its sequel, says, "Distribute your property, and begin wandering about and 'doing good.'"

I decline. After due consideration, I have fully determined to own a house, and provide each day a respectable dinner for my table, if the fates agree; to secure, still in submission to the fates, such a competency as will give me leisure for the best work I can do; to further justice and general well-being, so far as is in me to further or hinder, but always on the basis of the existing civilization; to cherish sympathy and good-will in myself, and in others by cherishing them in myself; to help another when I clearly can; and to give, when what I give will obviously do more service toward the high ends of life, in the hands of another than in my own. Toward carrying out these purposes "Consuelo" has not given me a hint, not one; "Wilhelm Meister" has given me invaluable hints. Therefore I feel no great gratitude to the one, and am profoundly grateful to the other.

It is not the mere absence of suffering, it is not a pound of beef on every peasant's plate, that makes life worth living. Health, happiness, even education, however diffused, do not alone make life worth living. Tell me the quality of a man's happiness before I can very rapturously congratulate him upon it; tell me the quality of his suffering before I can grieve over it without solace. Noble pain is worth more than ignoble pleasure; and there is a health in the dying Schiller which beggars in comparison that of the fat cattle on a thousand hills. All the world might be well fed, well clothed, well sheltered, and very properly behaved, and be a pitiful world nevertheless, were this all.

Let us get out of this business of merely improving conditions. There are two things which make life worth living. First, the absolute worth and significance of man's spirit in its harmonious completeness; and hence the absolute value of culture and growth in the deepest sense of the words. Secondly, the relevancy of actual experience and the actual world to these ends. Goethe attends to both these, and to both in a spirit of great sanity. He fixes his eye with imperturbable steadiness on the central fact, then with serene, intrepid modesty suggests the relevancy to this of the world as it is around us, and then trusts the healthy attraction of the higher to modify and better the lower. Give man, he says, something to work for, namely, the high uses of his spirit; give him next something to work with, namely, actual civilization, the powers, limits, and conditions which actually exist in and around him; and if these instruments be poor, be sure he will begin to improve upon them, the moment he has found somewhat inspiring and sufficing to do with them. Actual conditions will improve precisely in proportion as all conditions are utilized, are placed in relations of service to a result which contents the soul of men. And to establish in this relation all the existing conditions of life, natural and artificial, is the task which Goethe has undertaken.

I invite the reader to dwell upon this fact, that, the moment life has an inspiring significance, and the moment also the men, industries, and conditions around us become instrumental toward resolving that, in this moment one must begin, so far as he may, bettering these conditions. If I hire a man to work in my garden, how much is it worth to me, if he bring not merely his hands and gardening skill, but also an appreciable soul, with him! So soon as that fact is apparent, fruitful relations are established between us, and sympathies begin to fly like bees, bearing pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I can make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow anywhere a disserviceable condition, when I could make it serviceable? Not in full view of the fact that all which thwarts the inward being of another thwarts me. If there be in the world a man who might write a grand book, but through ill conditions cannot write it, then in me and you a door will remain closed, which might have opened—who knows upon what treasure? With the high ends of life before him, no man can afford to be selfish. With the fact before him that formal civilization is instrumental, no man can afford to run away from it. With the fact in view that each man needs every other, and needs that every other should do and be the best he can, no one can afford to withhold help, where it can be rendered. Finally, seeing that means are limited, and that the means and services which are crammed into others, without being spiritually assimilated, breed only indigestion, no one must throw his services about at random, but see where Nature has prepared the way for him, and there in modesty do what he can.

To strike the connection, then, between the inward and the outward, between the spiritual and the conventional, between man and society, between moral possibility and formal civilization,—to give growth, with all its immortal issues, a place, and means, and opportunity,—this was Goethe's aim; and if the execution be less than perfect, as I admit, it yet suggests the whole; and if the shortcoming be due in part to his personal imperfections, which doubtless may be affirmed, it yet does not mar the sincerity of his effort. His hand trembles, his aim is not nicely sure, but it is an aim at the right object nevertheless.

There are limits and conditions in man, as well as around him, to which the like justice is done. Such are Special Character, Natural Degree and Vocation, Moral Imperfection, and Limitation of Self-Knowledge. Each of these plays a part of vast importance in life; each is portrayed and used in Goethe's picture. But, though with reluctance, I must merely name and pass them by. Enough to say here, that he sees them and sees through them. Enough that they appear, and as means and material. Nor does he merely distinguish and harp upon them, after the hard analytic fashion one would use here; but, as the violinist sweeps all the strings of his instrument, not to show that one sounds so and another so, but out of all to bring a complete melody, so does this master touch the chords of life, and, in thus recognizing, bring out of them the melodious completeness of a human soul.

One inquiry remains. What of inspirational impulse does Goethe bring to his work? He depicts growth; what leads him to do so? Is it nothing but cold curiosity? and does he leave the reader in a like mood? Or is he commanded by some imperial inward necessity? and does he awaken in the reader a like noble necessity, not indeed to write, but to live?

The inspiration which he feels and communicates is art infinite, unspeakable reverence for Personality, for the completed, spiritual reality of man. Literally unspeakable, it is the silent spirit in which he writes, sovereign in him and in his work,—the soul of every sentence, and professed in none. You find it scarcely otherwise than in his manner of treating his material. But there you may find it: the silent, majestic homage that he pays to every real grace and spiritual accomplishment of man or woman. Any smallest trait of this is delineated with a heed that makes no account of time or pains, with a venerating fidelity and religious care that unutterably imply its preciousness. Indeed, it is one point of his art to bestow elaborate, reverential attention upon some minor grace of manhood or womanhood, that one may say, "If this be of such price, how priceless is the whole!" He resorts habitually to this inferential suggestion,—puzzling hasty readers, who think him frivolously exalting little things, rather than hinting beyond all power of direct speech at the worth of the greater. In landscape paintings a bush in the foreground may occupy more space than a whole range of mountains in the distance: perhaps the bush is there to show the scale of the drawing, and intimate the greatness, rather than littleness, of the mountains.

The undertone of every page, should we mask its force in hortatives, would be,—"Buy manhood; buy verity and completeness of being; buy spiritual endowment and accomplishment; buy insight and clearness of heart and wholeness of spirit; pay ease, estimation, estate,—never consider what you pay: for though pleasure is not despicable, though wealth, leisure, and social regard are good, yet there is no tint of inherent grace, no grain nor atom of man's spiritual substance, but it outweighs kingdoms, outweighs all that is external to itself."

But hortatives and assertions represent feebly, and without truth of tone, the subtile, sovereign persuasion of the book. This is said sovereignly by not being said expressly. We are at pains to affirm only that which may be conceived of as doubtful, therefore admit a certain doubtfulness by the act of asserting. When one begins to asseverate his honesty, his hearers begin to question it. The last persuasion lies in assumptions,—not in assumptions made consciously and with effort, but in those which one makes because he cannot help it, and even without being too much aware what he does. All that a man of power assumes utterly, so that he were not himself without assuming it, he will impress upon others with a persuasion that has in it somewhat of the infinite. Jesus never said, "There is a God,"—nor even, "God is our Father,"—nor even, "Man is immortal"; he took all this as implicit basis of labor and prayer. Implicit assumptions rule the world; they build and destroy cities, make and unmake empires, open and close epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new truth to this degree,—made it for him an inevitable assumption—then there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and is a soul of eloquence in his book.

Nor can we set this aside as a piece of blind and gratuitous sentiment. Blind and gratuitous sentiment is clearly not his forte. Every line of every page exhibits to us a man who has betaken himself, once for all, to the use of his eyes. All sentiment, as such, he ruled back, with a sovereign energy, into his heart,—and then, as it were, compelling his heart into his eyes, made it an organ for discerning truth. His head was an observatory, and every power of his soul did duty there. He enjoyed, he suffered, intensely; but behind joy and pain alike lay the sleepless questioner, demanding of each its message. And this, the supreme function, the exceeding praise and preciousness of the man, the one thing that he was born to do, and religiously did, this has been made his chief reproach.

No zealot, then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the fact is. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad; if good, he will perceive and respect its goodness. A man, for once, equal to the act of seeing! Having, as the indispensable preliminary, encountered himself, and victoriously fought on all the fields of his being the battle against self-deception, he now comes armed with new and strange powers of vision to encounter life and the world,—ready either to soar of dive,—above no fact, beneath none, by none appalled, by none dazzled,—a falcon, whose prey is truth, and whose wing and eye are well mated. And he it is who sets that ineffable price on the being of a real man.

This is manifested in many ways, all of them silent, rather than obstreperous and obtrusive. It is shown by a certain gracious, ineffable expectation with which for the first time he approaches any human soul, as if unknown and incalculable possibilities were opening here; by a noble ceremonial which he ever observes toward his higher characters, standing uncovered in their presence; by the space in his eye, not altogether measurable, which a man of worth is perceived to fill. Each of his principal characters has an atmosphere about him, like the earth itself; each has a vast perspective, and rounds off into mystery and depths of including sky.

The common novelist holds his characters in the palm of his hand, as he would his watch; winds them up, regulates, pockets them, is exceedingly handy with them. He may continue some little, pitiful puzzle about them for his readers; but he can see over, under, around them, and can make them stop or go, tick or be silent, altogether at pleasure. To Goethe his characters are as intelligible and as mysterious as Nature herself. He sees them, studies them, and with an eye how penetrating, how subtile and sure! But over, under, and around them he would hold it for no less than a profanity to pretend that he sees. They come upon the scene to prove what they are; he and the reader study them together; and when best known, their possibilities are obviously unexhausted, the unknown remains in them still. They go forward into their future, with a real future before them, with an unexplained life to live: not goblets whose contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of very definite limitations, and yet also of possibilities which the future will ever be defining.