Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

Thus, in three leading departments of modern astronomy – solar physics, stellar spectroscopy, and the wide field of photography – the aid of mountain observatories may be pronounced indispensable; while in all there is scarcely a doubt that it will prove eminently useful. There are, indeed, difficulties and drawbacks to their maintenance. The choice of a site, in the first place, is a matter requiring the most careful deliberation. Not all elevated points are available for the purpose. Some act persistently as vapor-condensers, and seldom doff their sullen cap of clouds. From any mountain in the United Kingdom, for instance, it would be folly to expect an astronomical benefit. On Ben Nevis, the chief amongst them, a meteorological observatory has recently been established with the best auguries of success; but it would indeed be a sanguine star-gazer who should expect improved telescopic opportunities from its misty summit.

Even in more favored climates, storms commonly prevail on the heights during several months of the year, and vehement winds give more or less annoyance at all seasons; the direct sunbeams sear the skin like a hot iron; the chill air congeals the blood. Dr. Copeland records that at Vincocaya, one afternoon in June, the black bulb thermometer exposed to solar radiation stood at 199°.1 of Fahrenheit – actually 13° above the boiling-point of water in that lofty spot – while the dry bulb was coated with ice! Still more formidable than these external discomforts is the effect on the human frame itself of transportation into a considerably rarer medium than that for existence in which it was constituted. The head aches; the pulse throbs; every inspiration is a gasp for breath; exertion becomes intolerable. Mr. Whymper’s example seems to show that these extreme symptoms disappear with the resolute endurance of them, and that the system gradually becomes inured to its altered circumstances. But the probationary course is a severe one; and even though life flow back to its accustomed channels, labor must always be painfully impeded by a diminution of the vital supply. And the minor but very sensible inconveniences caused by the difficulty of cooking with water that boils twenty or thirty degrees (according to the height) below 212°, by the reluctance of fires to burn, and of tobacco to keep alight, and we complete a sufficiently deterrent list of the penalties attendant on literal compliance with the magnanimous motto, Altiora petimus.

That they will, nevertheless, not prove deterrent we may safely predict. Enthusiasm for science will assuredly overbear all difficulties that are not impossibilities. Dr. Copeland, taking all into account, ventures to recommend the occupation during the most favorable season – say from October to December – of an “extra-elevated station” 18,500 ft. above the sea, more than one promising site for which might be found in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca. For a permanent mountain observatory, however, he believes that 12,500 ft. would be the outside limit of practical usefulness. It is probable, indeed, that the Rocky Mountains will anticipate the Andes in lending the aid of their broad shoulders to lift astronomers towards the stars. Already a meteorological post has been established on Pike’s Peak in Colorado, at an altitude of 14,151 ft. Telescopic vision there is said to be of rare excellence; we shall be surprised if its benefits be not ere long rendered available.

After all, the present strait of optical astronomy is but the inevitable consequence of its astonishing progress. While instruments remained feeble and imperfect, atmospheric troubles were comparatively little felt; they became intolerable when all other obstacles to a vast increase in the range of distinct vision were removed. The arrival of that stage in the history of the telescope, when the advantages to be derived from its further development should be completely neutralised by the more and more sensibly felt disadvantages of our situation on an air-encompassed globe, was only a question of time. The point was a fixed one: it could be reached later only by a more sluggish advance. Both the difficulty and its remedy were foreseen 167 years ago by the greatest of astronomers and opticians.

“If the theory of making telescopes,” Sir Isaac Newton wrote in 1717,[31 - Optice, p. 107 (2nd ed. 1719.) “Author’s Monitio” dated July 16, 1717.] “could at length be fully brought into practice, yet there would be certain bounds beyond which telescopes could not perform. For the air through which we look upon the stars is in a perpetual tremor as may be seen by the tremulous motion of shadows cast from high towers, and by the twinkling of the fixed stars. The only remedy is a most serene and quiet air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest mountains above the grosser clouds.”

    – Edinburgh Review.

GOETHE

BY PROF. J. R. SEELEY

III

The highest rank in literature belongs to those who combine the properly poetical with philosophical qualities, and crown both with a certain robust sincerity and common sense. The sovereign poet must be not merely a singer, but also a sage; to passion and music he must add large ideas; he must extend in width as well as in height; but, besides this, he must be no dreamer or fanatic, and must be rooted as firmly in the hard earth as he spreads widely and mounts freely towards the sky. Goethe, as we have described him, satisfies these conditions, and as much can be said of no other man of the modern world but Dante and Shakspeare.

Of this trio each is complete in all the three dimensions. Each feels deeply, each knows and sees clearly, and each has a stout grasp of reality. This completeness is what gives them their universal fame, and makes them interesting in all times and places. Each, however, is less complete in some directions than in others. Dante though no fanatic, yet is less rational than so great a man should have been. Shakspeare wants academic knowledge. Goethe, too, has his defects, but this is rather the place for dwelling on his peculiar merits. In respect of influence upon the world, he has for the present the advantage of being the latest, and therefore the least obsolete and exhausted, of the three. But he is also essentially much more of a teacher than his two predecessors. Alone among them he has a system, a theory of life, which he has thought and worked out for himself.

From Shakspeare, no doubt, the world may learn, and has learnt, much, yet he professed so little to be a teacher, that he has often been represented as almost without personality, as a mere undisturbed mirror, in which all Nature reflects itself. Something like a century passed before it was perceived that his works deserved to be in a serious sense studied. Dante was to his countrymen a great example and source of inspiration, but hardly, perhaps, a great teacher. On the other hand, Goethe was first to his own nation, and has since been to the whole world, what he describes his own Chiron, “the noble pedagogue,”[32 - “Der grosse Mann, der edle Pedagog, Der, sich zum Ruhm, ein Heldenvolk erzogen.”] a teacher and wise counsellor on all the most important subjects. To students in almost every department of literature and art, to unsettled spirits needing advice for the conduct of life, to the age itself in a great transition, he offers his word of weighty counsel, and is an acknowledged authority on a greater number of subjects than any other man. It is the great point of distinction between him and Shakspeare that he is so seriously didactic. Like Shakspeare myriad-minded, he has nothing of that ironic indifference, that irresponsibility, which has been often attributed to Shakspeare. He is, indeed, strangely indifferent on many points, which other teachers count important; but the lessons which he himself considers important, he teaches over and over again with all the seriousness of one who is a teacher by vocation. And, as I have said, when we look at his teaching as a whole, we find that it has unity, that, taken together, it makes a system, not, indeed in the academic sense, but in the sense that a great principle or view of life is the root from which all the special precepts proceed. This has, indeed, been questioned. Friedrich Schlegel made it a complaint against Goethe, that he had “no centre;” but a centre he has; only the variety of his subjects and styles is so great, and he abandons himself to each in turn so completely, that in his works, as in Nature itself, the unity is much less obvious than the multiplicity. Now that we have formed some estimate of the magnitude of his influence, and have also distinguished the stages by which his genius was developed, and his influence in Germany and the world diffused, it remains to examine his genius itself, the peculiar way of thinking, and the fundamental ideas through which he influenced the world.

Never, perhaps, was a more unfortunate formula invented than when, at a moment of reaction against his ascendancy, it occurred to some one to assert that Goethe had talent but not genius. No doubt the talent is there; perhaps no work in literature exhibits a mastery of so many literary styles as “Faust.” From the sublime lyric of the prologue, which astonished Shelley, we pass through scenes in which the problems of human character are dealt with, scenes in which the supernatural is brought surprisingly near to real life, scenes of humble life startlingly vivid, grotesque scenes of devilry, scenes of overwhelming pathos; then, in the second part, we find an incomparable revival of the Greek drama, and, at the close, a Dantesque vision of the Christian heaven. Such versatility in a single work is unrivalled; and the versatility of which Goethe’s writings, as a whole, gives evidence is much greater still. But to represent him, on this account, as a sort of mocking-bird, or ready imitator, is not merely unjust. Even if we give this representation a flattering turn, and describe him as a being almost superior to humanity, capable of entering fully into all that men think and feel, but holding himself independent of it all, such a being as is described (where, I suppose, Goethe is pointed at) in the Palace of Art, again, I say, it is not merely unjust. Not merely Goethe was not such a being, but we may express it more strongly and say: such a being is precisely what Goethe was not. He had, no doubt, a great power of entering into foreign literatures; he was, no doubt, indifferent to many controversies which in England, when we began to lead him, still raged hotly. But these were characteristic qualities, not of Goethe personally, but of Germany in the age of Goethe. A sort of cosmopolitan characterlessness marked the nation, so that Lessing could say in Goethe’s youth that the character of the Germans was to have no character. Goethe could not but share in the infirmity, but his peculiarity was that from the beginning he felt it as an infirmity, and struggled to overcome it. That unbounded intolerance, that readiness to allow everything and appreciate every one, which was so marked in the Germans of that time that it is clearly perceptible in their political history, and contributed to their humiliation by Napoleon, is just what is satirized in the delineation of Wilhelm Meister. Jarno says to Wilhelm, “I am glad to see you out of temper; it would be better still if you could be for once thoroughly angry.” This sentiment was often in Goethe’s mouth; so far was he from priding himself upon serene universal impartiality. Crabbe Robinson heard him say what an annoyance he felt it to appreciate everything equally and to be able to hate nothing. He flattered himself at that time that he had a real aversion. “I hate,” he said, “everything Oriental” (“Eigentlich hasse ich alles Orientalische”). He goes further in the “West-östlicher Divan,” where, in enumerating the qualities a poet ought to have, he lays it down as indispensable that he should hate many things (“Dann zuletzt ist unerlässlich dass der Dichter manches hasse”). True, no doubt that he found it difficult to hate. An infinite good nature was born in him, and, besides this, he grew up in a society in which all established opinions had been shaken, so that for a rational man it was really difficult to determine what deserved hatred or love. What is wholly untrue in that view of him, which was so fashionable forty years ago – “I sit apart holding no form of creed, but contemplating all” – is that this tolerance was the intentional result of cold pride or self-sufficiency. He does not seem to me to have been either proud or unsympathetic, and among the many things of which he might boast, certainly he would not have included a want of definite opinions – he, who was never tired of rebuking the Germans for their vagueness, and who admired young Englishmen expressly because they seemed to know their own minds, even when they had little mind to know. Distinctness, character, is what he admires, what through life he struggles for, what he and Schiller alike chide the Germans for wanting. But he cannot attain it by a short cut. Narrowness is impossible to him, not only because his mind is large, but because the German public in their good-natured tolerance have made themselves familiar with such vast variety of ideas. He cannot be a John Bull, however much he may admire John Bull, because he does not live in an island. To have distinct views he must make a resolute act of choice, since all ideas have been laid before him, all are familiar to the society in which he lives. This perplexity, this difficulty of choosing what was good out of such a heap of opinions, he often expresses: “The people to be sure are not accustomed to what is best, but then they are so terribly well-read!”[33 - “Zwar sind sie an das Beste nicht gewöhnt, Allein sie haben schrecklich viel gelesen.”] But it is just the struggle he makes for distinctness that is admirable in him. The breadth, the tolerance, he has in common with his German contemporaries; what he has to himself is the resolute determination to arrive at clearness.

Nevertheless, he may seem indifferent even to those whose minds are less contracted than was the English mind half a century ago, for this reason, that his aim, though not less serious than that of others, is not quite the same. He seldom takes a side in the controversies of the time. You do not find him weighing the claims of Protestantism and Catholicism, nor following with eager interest the dispute between orthodoxy and rationalism. Again when all intellectual Germany is divided between the new philosophy of Kant and the old system, and later, when varieties show themselves in the new philosophy, when Fichte and Schelling succeed to the vogue of Kant, Goethe remains undisturbed by all these changes of opinion. He is almost as little affected by political controversy. The French Revolution irritates him, but not so much because it is opposed to his convictions as because it creates disturbance. Even the War of Liberation cannot rouse him. Was he not then a quietest? Did he not hold himself aloof, whether in a proud feeling of superiority or in mere Epicurean indifference, from all the interests and passions of humanity? If this were the case, or nearly the case, Goethe would have no claim to rank in the first class of literature. He might pass for a prodigy of literary expertness and versatility, but he would attract no lasting interest. Such quietism in a man upon whom the eyes of a whole nation were bent, could never be compared to the quietism of Shakspeare, who belonged to the uninfluential classes, and to whom no one looked for guidance.

But in truth the quietism of Goethe was the effect not of indifference or of selfishness, but of preoccupation. He had prescribed to himself in early life a task, and he declined to be drawn aside from it by the controversies of the time. It was a task worthy of the powers of the greatest man; it appeared to him, when he devoted himself to it, more useful and necessary than the special undertakings of theologian or philosopher. At the outset he might fairly claim to be the only earnest man in Germany, and might regard the partisans alike of Church and University as triflers in comparison with himself. The French Revolution changed the appearance of things. He could not deny that the political questions opened by that convulsion were of the greatest importance. But he was now forty years old, and the work of his life had begun so early, had been planned with so much care and prosecuted with so much method, that he was less able than many men might have been to make a new beginning at forty. Hence he was merely disturbed by the change which inspired so many others, and to the end of his life continued to look back upon the twenty odd years between the Seven Years’ War and the Revolution as a golden time, as in a peculiar sense his own time.[34 - “Zwanzig Jahre liess sich gehnUnd genoss was mir beschieden;Eine Reihe völlig schönWie die Zeit der Barmeciden.”– West. Div.] The new events disturbed him in his habits without actually forcing him to form new habits; he found himself able, though with less comfort, to lead the same sort of life as before; and so he passed into the Napoleonic period and arrived in time at the year of liberation, 1813. Then, indeed, his quietism became shocking, and he felt it so himself; but it was now really too late to abandon a road on which he had travelled so long, and which he had honestly selected as the best.

What, then, was this task to which Goethe had so early devoted himself, and which seemed to him too important to be postponed even to the exigencies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods? It was that task about which, since Goethe’s time, so much has been said – self-culture. “From my boyhood,” says Wilhelm, speaking evidently for Goethe himself, “it has been my wish and purpose to develop completely all that is in me.” Elsewhere he says, “to make my own existence harmonious.” Here is the refined form of selfishness of which Goethe has been so often accused. And undoubtedly the phrase is one which will bear a selfish interpretation, just as a Christian may be selfish when he devotes himself to the salvation of his soul. But in the one case, as in the other, it is before all things evident that the task undertaken is very serious, and that the man who undertakes it must be of a very serious disposition. When, as in Goethe’s case it is self-planned and self-imposed, such an undertaking is comparable to those great practical experiments in the conduct of life which were made by the early Greek philosophers. Right or wrong, such an experiment can only be imagined by an original man, and can only be carried into effect by a man of very steadfast will. But we may add that it is no more necessary to give a selfish interpretation to this formula than to the other formulæ by which philosophers have tried to describe the object of a moral life. A harmonious existence does not necessarily mean an existence passed in selfish enjoyment. Nor is the pursuit of it necessarily selfish, since the best way to procure a harmonious existence for others is to find out by an experiment practised on oneself in what a harmonious existence consists, and by what methods it may be attained. For the present, at least, let us content ourselves with remarking that Goethe, who knew his own mind as well as most people, considered himself to carry disinterestedness almost to an extreme. What especially struck him in Spinoza, he says, was the boundless unselfishness that shone out of such sentences as this, “He who loves God must not require that God should love him again.” “For,” he continues, “to be unselfish in everything, especially in love and friendship, was my highest pleasure, my maxim, my discipline, so that that petulant sentence written latter, ‘If I love you, what does that matter to you?’ came from my very heart.”

However this may be, when a man, so richly gifted otherwise, displays the rarest of all manly qualities – viz., the power and persistent will to make his life systematic, and place all his action under the control of a principle freely and freshly conceived, he rises at once into the highest class of men. It is the strenuous energy with which Goethe enters into the battle of life, and fights there for a victory into which others may enter, that makes him great, that makes him the teacher of these later ages, and not some foppish pretension of being above it all, of seeing through it and despising it. But just because he conceived the problem in his own manner, and not precisely as it is conceived by the recognized authorities on the conduct of life, he could take little interest in the controversies which those authorities held among themselves, and therefore passed for indifferent to the problem itself. He did not admit that the question was to form an opinion as to the conditions of the life after death, though he himself hoped for such a future life, for he wanted rather rightly to understand and to deal with the present life; nor did he want what is called in the schools a philosophy, remarking probably that the most approved professors of philosophy lived after all much in the same way as other people. It seemed to him that he was more earnest than either the theologians or the philosophers, just because he disregarded their disputes and grappled directly with the question which they under various pretexts evaded – how to make existence satisfactory.

He grasps it in the rough unceremonious manner of one who means business, and also in the manner which Rousseau had made fashionable. We have desires given us by God or Nature, convertible terms to him; these desires are meant to receive satisfaction, for the world is not a stupid place, and the Maker of the world is not stupid. This notion that human life is not a stupid affair, and that the fault must be ours if it seems so, that for everything wrong there must be a remedy,[35 - “Sicherlich es muss das Beste Irgendwo zu finden sein.”] is a sort of fundamental axiom with him, as it is with most moral reformers. Even when he has death before his mind he still protests. “‘He is no more!’ Ridiculous! Why ‘no more?’ ‘It is all over.’ What can be the meaning of that? Then it might as well never have existed. Give me rather an eternal void.” And this way of thinking brings him at once, or so he thinks, into direct conflict with the reigning system of morality, which is founded not on the satisfaction, but on the mortification of desire. He declares war against the doctrine of self-denial or abstinence. “Abstain, abstain! – that is the eternal song that rings in every ear. In the morning I awake in horror, and am tempted to shed bitter tears at the sight of day, which in its course will not gratify one wish, not one single wish.” So speaks Faust, and Goethe ratifies it in his own person, when he complains that, “we are not allowed to develop what we have in us, and are denied what is necessary to supply our deficiencies; robbed of what we have won by labor or has been allowed us by kindness, and find ourselves compelled, before we can form a clear opinion about it to give up our personality, at first in instalments, but at last completely; also that we are expected to make a more delighted face over the cup the more bitter it tastes, lest the unconcerned spectator should be affronted by any thing like a grimace.” He adds that this system is grounded on the maxim that “All is vanity,” a maxim which characteristically he pronounces false and blasphemous. That “all is not vanity” is indeed almost the substance of Goethe’s philosophy. “His faith,” so he tells the Houri who, at the gate of Paradise, requires him to prove his orthodoxy, “has always been that the world, whichever way it rolls, is a thing to love, a thing to be thankful for.”[36 - “Dass die Welt, wie sie auch kreise,Liebevoll und dankbar sei.”]

This doctrine again, is not in itself or necessarily a doctrine of selfishness, though it may easily be represented so. It may be true that all virtue requires self-denial; but for that very reason we may easily conceive a system of senseless and aimless self-denial setting itself up in the place of virtue. It is not every kind of self-denial that Goethe has in view, but the particular kind by which he has found himself hampered. His indignation is not moved when he sees absistence practised in order to attain some great end; it is the abstinence which leads to nothing and aims at nothing that provokes him. He has given two striking dramatic pictures of it. There is Faust, who cannot tolerate the emptiness of his secluded life; but does it appear that he rebels against it simply because it brings no pleasure to himself, even though it confers benefit upon others and upon the world? The burden of his complaint is that his abstinence does no good to anybody, that the studies for which he foregoes pleasure lead to no real knowledge; and expressly to make this clear, Goethe introduces the story of the plague, which Faust and his father had tried to cure by a drug, which did infinitely more harm than the plague itself. The other picture is that of Brother Martin in “Götz,” the young monk who envies Götz his life so full of movement and emotion, while he is himself miserable under the restraint of his vows. Here, again, the complaint is that no good comes of such abstinence. The life of self-denial is conceived as an utter stagnation, unhealthy even from a moral point of view. It is contrasted with a life not of luxury, but of strenuous energy, at once wholesome and useful to the world.

So far, then, Goethe’s position is identical with that which Protestants take up against monasticism, when they maintain that powers were given to be used, desires implanted in order that they might be satisfied. He does not, any more than they, assert that when some great end is in view it may not be nobler to mortify the desire than to indulge it. But he applies the principle more consistently, and to a greater number of cases than they had applied it. Not against celibacy or useless self-torture only, but against all omission to satisfy desire, against all sluggishness or apathy in enjoyment – understood always that no special end is to be gained by the self-denial – he protests. In his poem, called the “General Confession” (“Generalbeichte”) he calls his followers to repent of the sin of having often let slip an opportunity of enjoyment, and makes them solemnly resolve not to be guilty of such sins in future. Here, at least, the reader may say, selfishness is openly preached; and perhaps this is the interpretation most commonly put upon the poem. Yet it is certainly unjust to pervert in this way an intentional paradox, and, in fact, in that very poem Goethe introduces the most elevated utterance of his philosophy; for the vow which the penitents are required to take is that they will “wean themselves from half-measures and live resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, and the Beautiful!” Goethe, in short, holds, as many other philosophers have done, that an elevated morality may be based on the idea of pleasure not less than on the idea of duty.

This principle, not new in itself, led to very new and important results when it was taken up not by a mere reasoner but by a man of the most various gifts and of the greatest energy. By “pleasure” or “satisfaction of desire” is usually meant something obvious, something passive, merely a supply of agreeable sensations to each of the five senses. In Goethe’s mouth the word takes quite a different meaning. He cannot conceive pleasure without energetic action, and the most necessary of all pleasures to him is that of imaginative creation. The desires, again, for which he claims satisfaction – what are they? Chief among them is the desire to enter into the secret of the universe, to recognize “what it is which holds the world together within.” Such desires as these might be satisfied, such pleasures enjoyed, without any very culpable self-indulgence. And existence would be satisfactory, or, as he calls it, harmonious, if it offered continually and habitually food for desire so understood, which is almost the same thing as capacity. But there are hindrances. The chief of these is the supposition of self denial. Of course every practical man knows that self-denial of a certain kind must be constantly practised in life. The small object must be foregone for the sake of the greater, the immediate pleasure for the sake of the remote, nay, the personal pleasure for the sake of the pleasure which is generous and sympathetic. But the timid superstition which sets up self-denial, divorced from all rational ends, as a thing good and right in itself, which makes us afraid of enjoyment as such, this is the chief hindrance, and against this Goethe launches his chief work “Faust. ” There is another hindrance, less obvious and needing to be dealt with in another way, which Goethe therefore attacks usually in prose rather than in poetry.

Man, as Goethe conceives him, is essentially active. The happiness he seeks is not passive enjoyment, but an occupation, a pursuit adapted to his inborn capacities. It follows that a principal condition of happiness is a just self-knowledge. He will be happy, who knows what he wants and what he can do. Here again Goethe gives importance to a doctrine which in itself is obvious enough by the persistent energy with which he applies it. He has been himself bewildered by the multiplicity of his own tastes and aptitudes. He has wanted to do everything in turn, and he has found himself capable to a certain extent of doing everything. Hence the question – What is my true vocation? has been to him exceptionally difficult. In studying it he has become aware of the numberless illusions and misconceptions which hide from most men the true nature of their own aptitudes, and therefore the path of their happiness. He finds that the circumstances of childhood, and especially our system of education, which “excites wishes, instead of awakening tastes,” have the effect of creating a multitude of unreal ambitions, deceptive impulses and semblances of aptitudes. He finds that most men have been more or less misled by these illusions, have more or less mistaken their true vocation, and therefore missed their true happiness. On this subject he has collected a vast mass of observations, and, in fact, added a new chapter to practical morality. This is the subject of “Wilhelm Meister,” not the most attractive nor the most perfect, but perhaps the most characteristic, of Goethe’s works and, as it were, the text-book of the Goethian philosophy. It is said not to be widely popular in Germany. Most English readers lay it down bewildered, wondering what Goethe’s admirers can see in it so extraordinary, and astonished at the indifference to what we have agreed to call morality – that is, the part of morality that concerns the relations of the sexes – which reigns throughout it. I shall touch on this latter point later. Meanwhile, let me remark, that few books have had a deeper influence upon modern literature than this famous novel. It is the first important instance of a novel which deals principally and on a large scale with opinions or views of life. How Wilhelm mistook his vocation, and how this mistake led to many others; how a secret society, the Society of the Tower, taught a doctrine on the subject of vocations, and of the method by which men are to be assisted in discovering their true vocations; how Wilhelm is assisted and by what stages he arrives at clearness – this is the subject of a long and elaborate narrative. It is throughout most seriously instructive; it is seldom very amusing; and we may add that the moral of the story is not brought out with very convincing distinctness. But it has been the model upon which the novel of the present day is formed. Written twenty years before the Waverley Novels, which are in the opposite extreme, since they make no serious attempt to teach anything and dwell upon everything which Goethe disregards, adventure, surprise, costume, it began to produce its effect among us when the influence of the Waverley Novel was exhausted. The idea now prevalent, which gives to the novel a practical as well as an artistic side, the idea which prompts us, when we wish to preach any kind of social or moral reform, to write a novel about it, seems to have made way chiefly through Goethe’s authority.

But the substance of “Wilhelm Meister” is even more important than the form. It presents the whole subject of morality under a new light, and as in this respect it is only the fullest of a number of utterances to the same effect made by Goethe, it can never be fully appreciated when it is considered by itself, but must be judged in the closest connection with his other works and with his life. Every attempt to treat such a subject as morality in an original manner has something alarming about it. Such attempts ought to be laid only before minds strong enough to consider them calmly, and yet of necessity they come to the knowledge of “the weak brethren,” who are frightened or unsettled by them. Moreover, such attempts are always likely to be one-sided. As it is usually an intense perception of something overlooked into the orthodox morality that prompts them, the innovator is apt to be hurried into the opposite extreme, and to overlook in his turn what the orthodox morality has taught rightly. Goethe laid himself open to the charge of immorality. “Wilhelm Meister” was received with horror by the religious world; it was, if I remember right, publicly burnt by Count Stolberg. In England, Wordsworth spoke of it with disgust, and it still remains the book which chiefly justifies the profound distrust and aversion with which Goethe has been and is regarded among those who are Christian either in the dogmatic or in the larger sense. Not unnaturally it must be confessed.

But I do seriously submit that Christians should learn to be less timid than they are. In their absorbing anxiety for “the weaker brethren” they often seem to run the risk of becoming “weak brethren” themselves. We ought not to come to the consideration of moral questions under the influence of panic and nervous fright. It is true that few books seem at first sight more directly opposed than “Wilhelm Meister” to that practical Christianity which we love to think of as beyond controversy, that spirit which, as it breathes from almost all Christian churches and sects alike, strikes us as undoubtedly the essential part of religion. At first sight the book seems secular, heathenish in an extraordinary degree. Let us, then, if we will, warn young people away from it; but let us ask ourselves at the same time how a man so gifted, so serious and also so good natured – for there is no appearance of rancor in the book, which even contains a picture, tenderly and pleasingly drawn, of Christian pietism – could come to take a view so different from that commonly accepted of questions about which we are all so anxious. Such a course may lead us to see mistakes made by modern Christianity, which may have led Goethe also into mistakes by reaction; whereas the other course, of simply averting our eyes in horror, can lead to no good.

We may distinguish between the positive and the negative part of this moral scheme. All that “Wilhelm Meister” contains on the subject of vocations seems valuable, and the prominence which he gives to the subject is immensely important. In considering how human life should be ordered, Goethe begins with the fact that each man has an occupation, which fills most of his time. It seems to him, therefore, the principal problem to secure that this occupation should be not only worthy, but suited to the capacity of the individual and pursued in a serious spirit. What can be more simple and obvious? And yet, if we reflect, we shall see that moralists have not usually taken this simple view, and that in the accepted morality this whole class of questions is little considered. Duties to this person and to that, to men, to women, to dependents, to the poor, to the State – these are considered; but the greatest of all duties, that of choosing one’s occupation rightly, is overlooked. And yet it is the greatest of duties, because on it depend the usefulness and effectiveness of the man’s life considered as a whole, and, at the same time, his own peace of mind, or, as Goethe calls it, his inward harmony. Nevertheless, it is so much overlooked that in ordinary views of life all moral interest is, as it were, concentrated upon the hours of leisure. The occupation is treated as a matter of course, a necessary routine about which little can be said. True life is regarded as beginning when work is over. In work men may no doubt be honest or dishonest, energetic or slothful, persevering or desultory, successful or unsuccessful, but that is all; it is only in leisure that they can be interesting, highly moral, amiable, poetical. Such a view of life is, to say the least, unfortunate. It surrenders to deadness and dulness more than half of our existence.

In primitive times, when the main business of life was war, this was otherwise. Then men gave their hearts to the pursuit to which they gave their time. What was most important was also most interesting, and the poet when he sang of war sang of business too. Hence came the inimitable fire and life of Homeric and Shakspearian poetry. But when war gave place to industry, it seemed that this grand unity of human life is gone. Business, the important half of life, became unpoetical, from the higher point of view uninteresting – for how could the imagination dwell on the labors of the office or the factory? – and all higher interest was confined to that part of life in which energy is relaxed. Goethe’s peculiar realism at once prompts and enables him to introduce a reform here. He denies that business is uninteresting, and maintains that the fault is in our own narrowness and in our slavery to a poetical tradition. It is the distinction of “Wilhelm Meister” that it is actually a novel about business, not merely a realistic novel venturing to approach the edge of that slough of dulness which is supposed to be at the centre of all our lives, but actually a novel about business as such, an attempt to show that the occupation to which a man gives his life is a matter not only for serious thought, but that it is a matter also for philosophy and poetry. That such a novel must at first sight appear tame and dull is obvious; it undertakes to create the taste by which it can be enjoyed, and will be condemned at once by all who are not disposed to give it a serious trial. But the question it raises is the fundamental question of modern life. Comprehensive and practical at once, Goethe’s mind has found out that root of bitterness which is at the bottom of all the uneasy social agitations of the nineteenth century. We live in the industrial ages, and he has asked the question whether industry must of necessity be a form of slavery, or whether it can be glorified and made into a source of moral health and happiness.

It is commonly said that “Wilhelm Meister,” seems to make Art the one object of life; but this is not Goethe’s intention. He was himself an artist, and, as the work is in a great degree autobiographical, art naturally comes into the foreground, and the book becomes especially interesting to artists, but the real subject of it is vocations in general. In the later books, indeed, art drops into the background, and we have a view of feminine vocations. The “Beautiful Soul” represents the pietistic view of life; then Therese appears in contrast, representing the economic or utilitarian view; finally, Natalie hits the golden mean, being practical like Therese but less utilitarian, and, ideal like her aunt, the pietist, but less introspective. On the whole, then, the lesson of the book is that we should give unity to our lives by devoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and that the pursuit is assigned to us by Nature through the capacities she has given us. It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleasure that of the satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different in each individual. His system treats every man as a genius, for it regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which it claims the same sort of tender consideration that is conceded to genius. But in laying down such rules Goethe thinks first of himself. He has spent long years in trying to make out his own vocation. He has had an opportunity of living almost every kind of life in turn. It was not till he returned from Italy that he felt himself to have arrived at clearness. What was Goethe’s vocation? Or, since happiness consists in faithful obedience to a natural vocation, what was Goethe’s happiness? His happiness is a kind of religion, a perpetual rapt contemplation, a beatific vision. The object of this contemplation is Nature, the laws or order of the Universe to which we belong. Of such contemplation he recognizes two kinds, one of which he calls Art and the other Science. He was in the habit of thinking that in Art and Science taken together he possessed an equivalent for what other men call their religion. Thus, in 1817, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Reformation, he writes a poem in which he expresses his devout resolution of showing his Protestantism, as ever, by Art and Science.[37 - “Will ich in Kunst und Wissenschaft,Wie immer, protestiren.”] It was because his view of Art was so realistic, that he was able thus to regard Art as a sort of twin-sister of Science. But the principle involved in this twofold contemplation of Nature is the very principle of religion itself, and in one sense it is true that no man was ever more deliberately and consciously religious than Goethe. No man asserted more emphatically that the energy of action ought to be accompanied by the energy of feeling. It is the consistent principle of his life that the whole man ought to act together, and he pushes it so far that he seems to forbid all division of labor in science. This is the position taken up in “Faust” which perhaps is seldom rightly understood. Science, according to “Faust,” must not be dry analysis pursued at a desk in a close room; it must be direct wondering contemplation of Nature. The secrets of the world must disclose themselves to a loving gaze, not to dry thinking (trocknes Sinnen), man must converse with Nature “as one spirit with another,” “look into her breast as into the bosom of a friend.” How we should not study is conveyed to us by the picture of Wagner, who is treated with so much contempt. He is simply the ordinary man of science, perhaps we may think the modest practical investigator, of the class to which the advance of science is mainly due. But Goethe has no mercy on him – why? Because his nature is divided, because his feelings do not keep pace with his thoughts, because his attention is concentrated upon single points. Such a man is to Goethe “the dry creeper,” “the most pitiable of all the sons of earth.”

Thus it is, then, that Art and Science taken together, the living, loving, worshipping contemplation of Nature, out of which comes the knowledge of Nature, are to Goethe religion. But is not such a religion wholly different from religion as commonly understood, wholly different from Christianity?

It was, indeed, very different from such Christianity as he found professed around him. In his youth Goethe was acquainted with several eminently religious persons, Fräulein von Klettenberg, the Frankfurt friend of his family, Jung Stilling, and Lavater. He listened to these not only with his unfailing good humor, but at times with more conviction than “Dichtung und Wahrheit” would lead us to suppose. In some of his early letters he himself adopts pietistic language. But as his own peculiar ideas developed themselves, they separated him more and more from the religious world of his time. At the time of his Italian journey and for some years afterwards, we find him speaking of Christianity not merely with indifference, but with a good deal of bitterness. This hostility took rather a peculiar form. As the whole disposition of his mind leads him towards religion, as he can no more help being religious than he can help being a poet, he does not reject religion but changes his religion. He becomes, or tries to become, a heathen in the positive sense of the word; for the description of Goethe as the Great Heathen is not a mere epithet thrown at him by his adversaries. He provoked and almost claimed it in his sketch of Winckelmann, where, after enthusiastic praise of the ancients and of Winckelmann as an interpreter of the ancient world, he inserted a chapter entitled, “Heidnisches,” which begins thus: “This picture of the antique spirit, absorbed in this world and its good things, leads us directly to the reflection that such excellences are only compatible with a heathenish way of thinking. The self-confidence, the attention to the present, the pure worship of the gods as ancestors, the admiration of them, as it were, only as works of art, the submission to an irresistible fate, the future hope also confined to this world, since it rests on the preciousness of posthumous fame; all this belongs so necessarily together, makes such an indivisible whole, creates a condition of human life intended by Nature herself, that we become conscious, alike at the height of enjoyment, and in the depth of sacrifice and even of ruin, of an indestructible health.” Clearly when he wrote this (about 1804) Goethe wished and intended to pass for a heathen. And, indeed, the antique attracts him scarcely at all from the historical side – he is no republican, no lover of liberty – but almost exclusively because it offers a religion which is to him the religion of health and joy.

Is it, then, true that Christianity is a system of morbid and melancholy introspectiveness, sacrificing all the freshness and glory of the present life to an awful future? He makes this assumption, and had almost a right to make it, since the Christianity of his time had almost exclusively this character. He was, however, himself half aware that there was all the difference in the world between the Christianity of his time and original Christianity or Christianity as it might be. And even at the time of his greatest bitterness he drops expressions which show that he does not altogether relinquish his interest in Christianity, but keeps open for himself the alternative of appearing as a reformer rather than an assailant of it. In the third period and the old age his tone is a good deal more conciliating than in the passage above quoted. In the Autobiography he appears, on the whole, as a Christian, and even makes faint attempts here and there to write in a style that Christians may find edifying. He tells us expressly that he had little sympathy with the Encyclopædists, and, in a passage of the “West-östlicher Divan,” he declares with real warmth that he “has taken into his heart the glorious image of our sacred books, and, as the Lord’s image was impressed on St. Veronica’s cloth, he refreshes himself in the stillness of the breast in spite of all negation and hindrance with the inspiring vision of faith.” Again, when in the “Wanderjahre” he grapples constructively, but somewhat too late, with the problems of the nineteenth century, we find him assuming a reformed Christianity[38 - “An diese Religion halten wir fest, aber auf eine eigene Weise.”] as the religion of the future.

May we then regard Goethe as one who in reality only opposed the corruptions of Christianity even when he seemed to oppose Christianity itself? Certainly other worldliness does not now appear, at least in England, as a necessary part of Christianity. Surely that contrast between the healthy spirit of antiquity and the morbidness of Christianity, which was like a fixed idea in the mind of Goethe’s generation, need not trouble us now. Those sweeping generalizations belonged to the infancy of the historical sciences. Mediævalism does not now seem identical with Christianity. The sombre aspect of our religion is clearing away. Christian self-denial now appears not as the aimless, fruitless mortification of desire which Goethe detested, but as the heroic strenuousness which he practiced. The world which Christians renounce now appears to be, not the universe nor the present life, but only conventionalism and tyrannous fashion. With such a religion, Goethe’s philosophy is sufficiently in harmony. According to these definitions the spirit even of “Wilhelm Meister” is not secular. Even his avowal of heathenism comes to wear a different aspect, when we find him writing thus of the religion of the old Testament: “Among all heathen religions, for to this class belongs that of Israel as much as any, this one has great points of superiority,” &c. (he mentions particularly its “excellent collection of sacred books”). So that, after all, Goethe may only have been a heathen as the prophet Isaiah was a heathen!

Thus hindrance after hindrance to our regarding Goethe as a great prophet of the higher life and of the true religion disappears. There remains one which is not so easily removed. What surprises the English reader in “Wilhelm Meister” is not merely the prominence given to Art, or the serious devotion to things present and to the present life, but also the extraordinary levity with which it treats the relations of men and women. The book might, in fact, be called thoroughly immoral, if the use of that word which is common among us were justifiable. More correctly speaking, it is immoral throughout on one point; immoral, in Goethe’s peculiar, inimitable, good-natured manner. The levity is the more startling in a book otherwise so remarkably grave. Every subject but one is discussed with seriousness; in parts the solemnity of the writer’s wisdom becomes quite oppressive; but on the relations of men and women he speaks in a thoroughly worldly tone. Just where most moralists grow serious, he becomes wholly libertine, indifferent, and secular. There is nothing in this novel of the homely domestic morality of the Teutonic races; a French tone pervades it, and this tone is more or less perceptible in the other writings of Goethe, especially those of the second period, with the exception of “Hermann und Dorothea.” On this subject, the great and wise thinker descends to a lower level; he seems incapable of regarding it with seriousness; or if he does treat it seriously, as in the Elective Affinities, he startles us still more by a certain crude audacity.

It seems possible to trace how Goethe fell into this extraordinary moral heresy. Starting from the idea of the satisfaction of desire, and with a strong prejudice against all systems of self-denial, he perceived, further, that chastity is the favorite virtue of mediævalism, that it is peculiarly Catholic and monastic. Then, as his mind turned more and more to the antique, he found himself in a world of primitive morals, where the woman is half a slave. He found that in the ancient world friendship is more and love less than in the modern – to this point, too, Winckelmann had called his attention – and, since he had adopted it as a principle that the ancients were healthy-minded and that the moderns are morbid, he jumped to the conclusion that the sentimental view of love is but a modern illusion. He accustomed his imagination to the lower kind of love which we meet with in classical poetry, the love of Achilles for Briseis, of Ajax for Tecmessa. In his early pamphlet against Wieland (“Götter, Helden und Wieland,” 1773), we find him already upon this train of reasoning, and his conclusions are announced with the most unceremonious plainness. How seriously they were adopted may be seen from the “Roman Elegies,” written fifteen years later. Among the many reactions which the eighteenth century witnessed against the spirit of Christianity, scarcely any is so startling and remarkable as that which comes to light in these poems. Here the woman has sunk again to her ancient level, and we find ourselves once more among the Hetaeræ of old Greek cities. After reading these wonderful poems, if we go through the list of Goethe’s female characters we shall note how many among them belong to the class of Hetaeræ – Clärchen. Marianne, Philine, Gretchen, the Bayadere. And if we turn to his life, we find the man, who shrank more than once from a worthy marriage, taking a Tecmessa to his tent. The woman who became at last his wife was spoken of by him in a letter to the Frau von Stein, as “that poor creature.” She is the very beauty celebrated in the “Roman Elegies.”

This strange moral theory could not but have strange consequences. Love, as Goethe knows it, is very tender, and has a lyric note as fresh as that of a song-bird; but it passes away like the songs of spring. In his Autobiography, one love-passage succeeds another, each is charmingly described, but each comes speedily to an end. How far in each case he was to blame is matter of controversy. But he seems to betray a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental Sultan. “I was in that agreeable phase,” he writes, “when a new passion had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared.” About Friederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating, bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the deepest impressions and to receive new ones; and he never looks back. A curious insensibility, which seems imitated from the apparent insensibility of Nature herself, shows itself in his works by the side of the deepest pathos. Faust never once mentions Gretchen again, after that terrible prison scene; her remembrance does not seem to trouble him; she seems entirely forgotten, until, just at the end, among the penitents who surround the Mater Gloriosa, there appears one who has borne the name of Gretchen. In like manner – this shocked Schiller – when Mignon dies she seems instantly forgotten, and the business of the novel scarcely pauses for a moment.

We are also to remember that Goethe was a man of the old régime. If he who had such an instinctive comprehension of feminine character, at the same time treats women in this Oriental fashion, we are to remember that he lived in a country of despotic Courts, and also that he was entirely outside the movement of reform. Had he entered into the reforming movement of his age, he might have striven to elevate women, as he might have heralded and welcomed some of the ideas of 1789, and the nationality movements of 1808 and 1813. He certainly felt at times that all was not right in the status of women (“Der Frauen Schicksal ist beklagenswerth”), and how narrowly confined was their happiness (“Wie enggebunden ist des Weibes Glück,”), as he certainly felt how miserable was the political conditions of Germany. Nevertheless he did not take the path either of social or of political reform. He worked in another region, a deeper region. He was a reformer on the great scale in literature, art, education, that is, in culture, but he was not a reformer of institutions. And as he did not look forward to a change in institutions, his views and his very morality rested on the assumption of a state of society in many respects miserably bad.

But the effect of this aberration upon Goethe’s character as a teacher and upon his influence has been most disastrous. And inevitably, for as it has been the practice in the Christian world to lay all the stress of morality upon that very virtue which Goethe almost entirely repudiates, he appears not only to be no moralist but an enemy of morality. And as he once brought a devil upon the stage, we identify him with his own Mephistopheles, though, in fact, the tone of cold irony is not by any means congenial to him. He has the reputation of a being awfully wise, who has experienced all feelings good and bad, but has survived them, and from whose writings there rises a cold unwholesome exhalation, the odor of moral decay. It is thought that he offers culture, art, manifold intellectual enjoyment, but at the price of virtue, faith, patriotism.

If I have taken a just view, the good and bad characteristics of his writings stand in a different relation. It is not morality itself that he regards with indifference, but one important section of morality. And he is an indifferentist here, partly because he is a man formed in the last years of the old régime, partly because he is borne too far on the tide of reaction against Catholic and monastic ideas. Nevertheless, he remains a moralist; and in his positive teaching he is one of the greatest moral teachers the world has ever seen. In his life he displayed some of the greatest and most precious virtues, a nobly conscientious use of great powers, a firm disregard of popularity, an admirable capacity for the highest kind of friendship. His view of life and literature is, in general, not ironical and not enervating, but sincere, manly, and hopeful. And his view of morality and religion, if we consider it calmly and not in that spirit of agonized timidity which reigns in the religious world, will perhaps appear to be not now very dangerous where it is wrong, and full of fresh instruction where it is right. The drift of the nineteenth century, the progress of those reforms in which Goethe took so little interest, have tended uniformly to the elevation of woman, so that it seems now scarcely credible that at the end of the last century great thinkers can seriously have preferred to contemplate her in the half servile condition in which classical poetry exhibits her. On this point at least the world is not likely to become pagan again. On the other hand Carlyle himself scarcely exaggerated the greatness of Goethe as a prophet of new truth alike in morals and in religion. Just at the moment when the supernaturalist theory, standing alone, seemed to have exhausted its influence, and to be involving religion in its own decline, Goethe stood forth as a rapt adorer of the God in Nature.[39 - “Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen,Als dass ihm Gott-Natur sich offenbare?”] Naturalism in his hands appeared to be no dull system of platitudes, no empty delusive survival of an exploded belief, but a system as definite and important as Science, as rich and glorious as Art. Morality in his hands appeared no longer morbid, unnaturally solemn, unwholesomely pathetic, but robust, cheerful, healthy, a twin-sister of happiness. In his hands also morality and religion appeared inseparably united, different aspects of that free energy, which in him was genius, and in every one who is capable of it resembles genius. Lastly, his bearing towards Christianity, when he had receded from the exaggerations of his second period, was better, so long as it seemed hopeless to purge Christianity of its other-worldliness, than that of the zealots on either side. He entered into no clerical or anti-clerical controversies; but, while he spoke his mind with great frankness, did not forget to distinguish between clericalism and true Christianity, cherished no insane ambition of destroying the Church or founding a new religion,[40 - “Von der Société St. Simonien bitte Dich fern zu halten;” so he writes to Carlyle.] and counselled us in founding our future society to make Christianity a principal element in its religion, and not to neglect the “excellent collection of sacred books” left us by the Hebrews. —Contemporary Review.

BYGONE CELEBRITIES AND LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS

BY CHARLES MACKAY

I. Daniel O’Connell – Serjeant Talfourd – Robert Carruthers

The three gentlemen whose names appear at the head of this chapter of my reminiscences, breakfasted together at the table of Mr. Rogers, along with our host and myself, in the summer of 1845. They were all remarkable and agreeable men, and played a part more or less distinguished in the social life of the time. Mr. O’Connell called himself, and was called by his friends, the Liberator, but was virtually the Dictator, or uncrowned king, of the Irish people. Serjeant, afterwards Judge, Talfourd, was an eminent lawyer – a very eloquent speaker, and a poet of some renown. Mr. Robert Carruthers was the editor of the Inverness Courier, a paper of much literary influence; a man of varied acquirements and extensive reading, particularly familiar with the literature and history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and more especially with the writings of Pope, his contemporaries and predecessors. Whenever Mr. Macaulay, while engaged on the “History of England,” which, unfortunately, he did not live to complete, was in doubt about an incident, personal or national, that occurred during the reigns of James II., William and Mary, or Queen Anne, and was too busy to investigate for himself, he had only to appeal for information to Mr. Carruthers, and the information was at once supplied from the abundant stores of that gentleman’s memory. I was well acquainted with all of these notables, but had never before met the three together.

Mr. O’Connell had long passed his prime in 1845 – being then in his 70th year – but appeared to be in full bodily and mental vigor, and in the height of his power, popularity, and influence. He had for years been extravagantly praised by one half of the nation and as extravagantly blamed and denounced by the other, and his support had been so absolutely necessary to the existence of the Whig and Liberal Ministry in England, that when this support seemed to be of doubtful continuance, or any indications of his present lukewarmness or future opposition were apparent, the baits of power, place, or high professional promotion were constantly dangled before his eyes, to keep him true to the cause to which he had never promised allegiance, but to which he had always adhered with more or less of zeal and consistency. For upwards of a quarter of a century his name figured more frequently in the leading columns of all the most prominent journals of London and the provinces than that of any statesman or public character of the time. As he jocularly but truly said of himself, he was the best abused man in the country; but though he did not choose to confess it, he was, at the same time, the most belauded. He was a man of a fine personal presence, of a burly and stalwart build, with quick glancing eyes full of wit, humor and of what may be called “rollicking” fun; and of a homely, persuasive, and telling eloquence, that no man of his day could be truly said to have equalled. The speeches of his great contemporary and countryman, Richard Lalor Shiel, were more elegant, scholarly, and ambitious; but they were above the heads of the commonalty, and often failed of their effect by being “caviare to the general,” and sometimes tired or “bored” those who could understand and even appreciate them, by their great length and too obvious straining after effect. No exception of the kind could be taken to the speeches of Daniel – or, as he was affectionately called, “Dan” O’Connell. They were all clear as day, logical as a mathematical demonstration, and warm as midsummer. If he had many of the faults he had all the virtues of his Celtic countrymen, and even in his strongest denunciations of his political opponents there was always a touch of humor that forced a laugh or a smile from the persons he attacked. He once, in Parliament, spoke of the great Duke of Wellington as “a stunted corporal with two left legs,” and the Duke of Wellington, who was said to be proud of his legs, remarking to Lucas, the artist who had painted his portrait, pointing to his legs – without taking notice of the facial likeness – “those are my legs,” had sense enough to laugh. The description, however, was not quite original, inasmuch as Pope, more than a hundred years previously, had applied the same epithet to Lintot the bookseller. Daniel O’Connell could excite at will the laughter or the indignation of the multitude, and was not in reality an ill-tempered or an ill-conditioned man, though he often appeared to be so when it suited his purpose. But though choleric he was never malicious.

On this occasion the conversation was almost entirely literary. O’Connell’s voice was peculiarly sweet and musical, and in the recitation of poetry, of which he had a keen and critical appreciation, it was impossible to excel, and difficult to equal him, in either comic or pathetic passages. The manner in which he declaimed “The Minstrel Boy to the War Has Gone,” “The Last Rose of Summer,” and other favorite songs of Thomas Moore was perfect, and had almost as pleasant an effect upon the hearer’s mind as if they had been sung by a well-trained singer. He was, in short, a delightful companion, and fascinated every society in which he felt himself sufficiently at ease to be induced to give free play to his wit, his humor, his imagination, and his wonderful power of mimicry.

Though seemingly at this time in the full high noon of his power and popularity, his influence was in reality on the wane, and circumstances over which he had no control, and which he had done nothing to produce, were at work to divert from his person and his cause the attention and the love of the Irish people. The first symptoms of the mysterious disease in the potato, which was unfortunately the chief food of the Irish millions, began to make themselves apparent, and to divert the attention of the Irish from political to more urgent questions of life and death. The too probable consequences of this great calamity tended necessarily to diminish the rent or tribute collected from the needy as well as the prosperous to recompense the “Liberator” for the sacrifices he had made in relinquishing the practice of his profession to devote his time, talent, and energies entirely to the parliamentary service of the people. Added to this, a race of younger and more impulsive men, fired by his example, had arisen to agitate the question of the Repeal of the Union on which he had set his heart, and scorning, in their impatience, the peaceful and legal methods which he employed, did their best to goad the impulsive people into open rebellion. Foremost among these were Mr. Smith O’Brien, whose futile treason came to an inglorious collapse in a cabbage garden; and next, the members of the party of Young Ireland, and the gifted poets of the “Nation,” among whom were Mr. D’Arcy McGee, and Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, whose tuneful violence was far more agreeable to the youthful agitators of the new generation than the more prudent strategy of O’Connell. The potato disease and the fearful famine that followed on its devastating track, which sent at least a million of people to the United States and two millions into untimely graves in Ireland, preyed upon the spirit of the great agitator, impaired his health, and ultimately led to his death of a broken heart, at Genoa, in 1847, in the 72nd year of his age. He was, at the time, on a pilgrimage to Rome to crave the blessing of the Pope, but was not destined to reach the, to him, “holy city,” the capital of his faith. His heart, however, was embalmed and taken to Rome, and his corpse conveyed to his native country for interment. I little thought on that joyous morning of 1845, when we sat seriously merry and intellectually sportive at the social board of Mr. Rogers in St. James’s Place, that the end was so near, and that the light which shone so brilliantly was so speedily to be extinguished, and the sceptre of democratic authority to be so shattered that none could take it up when it fell from the hands which had so long wielded it.

The second of the guests this morning was also an orator, not celebrated for his power over crowds, but highly distinguished in the Senate and the Forum. Serjeant Talfourd did not speak often in Parliament or at public meetings, but when he did he was listened to with pleasure and attention. The scenes of his triumphs were the law courts, and especially the Court of Common Pleas, where he was the leading practitioner. He was noted among the members of the Bar and the attorneys for his power over the minds of jurymen, and his winning ways of extorting a favorable verdict for the client who was fortunate enough to have him for an advocate. He had room enough in his head both for law and literature – the law for his profit and his worldly advancement, and literature for the charm and consolation of his life. He was well known too, and highly esteemed by the leading literary men of his time, and took especial interest in the laws affecting artistic, musical, and literary copyright. He was largely instrumental in extending the previously allotted term of twenty-eight years to forty-two years, and for seven years after the death of the artist, composer, or author. This measure put considerable and well-deserved profits into the pockets of the heirs of Sir Walter Scott, and was said at the time to have been specially devised and enacted for that purpose and for that only. This, however, was an error which Serjeant Talfourd emphatically contradicted whenever it was hinted or asserted. It had, incidentally, that effect, which no one was churlish and ungrateful enough to grudge or lament, but was advocated in the interest of all men of letters, and of literature itself in its widest extent, and if it erred at all, only erred on the side of undue restriction to so short a period as forty-two years. It ought to have been extended to the third generation of the benefactors of their country, and probably will be so extended at a future time, when the rights of authors will be as strictly protected – and will be thought of at least as much importance – as the right of landlords to their acres; of butchers, bakers, and tailors to be paid for their commodities; or those of doctors and lawyers to be paid for their time and talents.

Mr. Charles Dickens dedicated to Serjeant Talfourd the “Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” – the early work by which his great fame was established – in grateful acknowledgment of the Serjeant’s services to the cause of all men of genius, in the enactment of the new law of copyright. “Many a fevered head,” he said, “and palsied hand will gather new vigor in the hour of sickness and distress, from your exalted exertions; many a widowed mother and orphaned child, who would otherwise reap nothing from the fame of departed genius but its too pregnant legacy of sorrow and suffering, will bear in their altered condition higher testimony to the value of your labors than the most lavish encomiums from lip or pen could ever afford.”

Serjeant Talfourd was raised to the Bench in 1848, being then in his fifty-third year. This promotion had the natural consequence of removing him from the House of Commons. He was a singularly amiable man – of gentle, almost feminine character – of delicate health and fragile form. He possessed little or none of the staid or stern gravity popularly associated with the idea of a judge, and looked more like the poet that he undoubtedly was, than the busy lawyer or magistrate. He died suddenly in the year 1854, under circumstances peculiarly sad and pathetic. After attending Divine Service on Sunday, the 11th March, in the Assize town of Stafford, apparently in his usual health, he took his seat on the bench on the following morning, and proceeded to address the grand jury on the state of the calendar. It contained a list of more than one hundred prisoners, an unusually large number of whom were charged with atrocious offences, many of which were to be directly traced to intemperance. He took occasion, in the course of his remarks, to comment upon the growing estrangement in England between the upper and lower classes of society, and the want of interest and sympathy exhibited between the former and the latter, which he regarded as of evil augury for the future peace and prosperity of the country. While uttering these words he became flushed and excited – his speech became thick and incoherent, and he suddenly fell forward with his face on the desk at which he was sitting. He was removed at once to his lodgings in the immediate vicinity of the court, but life was found to be extinct on his arrival. Thus perished a singularly able and estimable man, universally beloved by his contemporaries.

Mr. Carruthers, who resided in the little town of Inverness, sometimes called by its inhabitants the “Capital of the Highlands,” was often blamed by his intimate friends for hiding his great abilities in so small a sphere, and not launching boldly forth upon the great sea of London, which they considered a more suitable arena for the exercise of his talents and the acquirement of fame and fortune by the pursuits of literature. But he was not to be persuaded. He loved quiet; he loved the grand and solemn scenery of his beautiful native country, and perhaps if all the truth were told, he preferred to be a great man in a provincial town, than a comparatively small one in a mighty metropolis. In Inverness he shone as a star of the first magnitude. In London, though his light might have been as great, it might have failed to attract equal recognition. In addition to all these considerations, the atmosphere of great cities did not agree with his health, and the fine, free, fresh invigorating air of the sea and the mountains was necessary to his physical well-being. This he enjoyed to the full in Inverness. The editing of the weekly journal, which supplied him with even greater pecuniary results than were necessary to supply the moderate wants of himself and his household, left him abundant leisure for other and congenial work. He soon made his mark in literature, and became noted not only for the vigor and elegance of his style, but for his remarkable accuracy of statement, even in the minutest details of his literary and historical work. He edited, with copious and accurate notes, an edition of Pope, and of Johnson and Boswell’s “Tour to the Hebrides,” and greatly added to the value of those interesting books by notes descriptive and anecdotical of all the places and persons mentioned in them. He also contributed largely to the valuable “Cyclopædia of English Literature” edited by Messrs. Chambers, of Edinburgh; besides contributing essays and criticisms to many popular serials and reviews, published in London and Edinburgh. He was one of the most admirable story tellers of his time, or indeed of any time, had a most retentive and abundantly furnished memory, and never missed the point of a joke, or overlaid it with inappropriate or unnecessary words or phrases. His fund of Scottish anecdotes – brimful of wit and humor – was apparently inexhaustible, and his stories followed each other with such rapidity as to suggest to the mind of the listener the beautiful lines of Samuel Rogers:

Couched in the hidden chambers of the brain
Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain,
Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise,