Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13: Great Writers

Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach; and we know that, in spite of their hatred of popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity, that they had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans and their De Montforts, their Dominics and their Escobars. Yet, when all circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a useful body.

The Puritans espoused the cause of civil liberty mainly because it was the cause of religion. There was another party, by no means numerous, but distinguished by learning and ability, which acted with them on very different principles. We speak of those whom Cromwell was accustomed to call the Heathens, men who were, in the phraseology of that time, doubting Thomases or careless Gallios with regard to religious subjects, but passionate worshippers of freedom. Heated by the study of ancient literature, they set up their country as their idol, and proposed to themselves the heroes of Plutarch as their examples. They seem to have borne some resemblance to the Brissotines of the French Revolution. But it is not very easy to draw the line of distinction between them and their devout associates, whose tone and manner they sometimes found it convenient to affect, and sometimes, it is probable, imperceptibly adopted.

We now come to the Royalists. We shall attempt to speak of them, as we have spoken of their antagonists, with perfect candor. We shall not charge upon a whole party the profligacy and baseness of the horse-boys, gamblers, and bravoes, whom the hope of license and plunder attracted from the dens of Whitefriars to the standard of Charles, and who disgraced their associates by excesses which, under the stricter discipline of the Parliamentary armies, were never tolerated. We will select a more favorable specimen. Thinking as we do that the cause of the king was the cause of bigotry and tyranny, we yet cannot refrain from looking with complacency on the character of the honest old Cavaliers. We feel a national pride in comparing them with the instruments which the despots of other countries are compelled to employ, with the mutes who throng their antechambers, and the Janizaries who mount guard at their gates. Our Royalist countrymen were not heartless, dangling courtiers, bowing at every step, and simpering at every word. They were not mere machines for destruction, dressed up in uniforms, caned into skill, intoxicated into valor, defending without love, destroying without hatred. There was a freedom in their subserviency, a nobleness in their very degradation. The sentiment of individual independence was strong within them. They were indeed misled, but by no base or selfish motive. Compassion and romantic honor, the prejudices of childhood, and the venerable names of history, threw over them a spell potent as that of Duessa; and, like the Red Cross Knight, they thought that they were doing battle for an injured beauty, while they defended a false and loathsome sorceress. In truth, they scarcely entered at all into the merits of the political question. It was not for a treacherous king or an intolerant church that they fought, but for the old banner which had waved in so many battles over the heads of their fathers, and for the altars at which they had received the hands of their brides. Though nothing could be more erroneous than their political opinions, they possessed, in a far greater degree than their adversaries, those qualities which are the grace of private life. With many of the vices of the Round Table, they had also many of its virtues, courtesy, generosity, veracity, tenderness, and respect for women. They had far more both of profound and of polite learning than the Puritans. Their manners were more engaging, their tempers more amiable, their tastes more elegant, and their households more cheerful.

Milton did not strictly belong to any of the classes which we have described. He was not a Puritan. He was not a freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were combined in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which those finer elements were defiled. Like the Puritans, he lived

     "As ever in his great taskmaster's eye."

Like them, he kept his mind continually fixed on the Almighty Judge and an eternal reward. And hence he acquired their contempt of external circumstances, their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible resolution. But not the coolest sceptic or the most profane scoffer was more perfectly free from the contagion of their frantic delusions, their savage manners, their ludicrous jargon, their scorn of science, and their aversion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a perfect hatred, he had nevertheless all the estimable and ornamental qualities which were almost entirely monopolized by the party of the tyrant. There was none who had a stronger sense of the value of literature, a finer relish for every elegant amusement, or a more chivalrous delicacy of honor and love. Though his opinions were democratic, his tastes and his associations were such as best harmonize with monarchy and aristocracy. He was under the influence of all the feelings by which the gallant Cavaliers were misled. But of those feelings he was the master, and not the slave. Like the hero of Homer, he enjoyed all the pleasures of fascination; but he was not fascinated. He listened to the song of the Sirens; yet he glided by without being seduced to their fatal shore. He tasted the cup of Circe; but he bore about him a sure antidote against the effects of its bewitching sweetness. The illusions which captivated his imagination never impaired his reasoning powers. The statesman was proof against the splendor, the solemnity, and the romance which enchanted the poet. Any person who will contrast the sentiments expressed in his treatises on Prelacy with the exquisite lines on ecclesiastical architecture and music in the Penseroso, which was published about the same time, will understand our meaning. This is an inconsistency which, more than anything else, raises his character in our estimation, because it shows how many private tastes and feelings he sacrificed, in order to do what he considered his duty to mankind. It is the very struggle of the noble Othello. His heart relents; but his hand is firm. He does naught in hate, but all in honor. He kisses the beautiful deceiver before he destroys her.

That from which the public character of Milton derives its great and peculiar splendor still remains to be mentioned. If he exerted himself to overthrow a forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted himself in conjunction with others. But the glory of the battle which he fought for the species of freedom which is the most valuable, and which was then the least understood, the freedom of the human mind, is all his own. Thousands and tens of thousands among his contemporaries raised their voices against ship-money and the Star-chamber. But there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits which would result from liberty of the press and the unfettered exercise of private judgment. These were the objects which Milton justly conceived to be the most important. He was desirous that the people should think for themselves as well as tax themselves, and should be emancipated from the dominion of prejudice as well as from that of Charles. He knew that those who, with the best intentions, overlooked these schemes of reform, and contented themselves with pulling down the King and imprisoning the malignants, acted like the heedless brothers in his own poem, who, in their eagerness to disperse the train of the sorcerer, neglected the means of liberating the captive. They thought only of conquering when they should have thought of disenchanting.

     "Oh, ye mistook! Ye should have snatched his wand      And bound him fast. Without the rod reversed,      And backward mutters of dissevering power,      We cannot free the lady that sits here      Bound in strong fetters fixed and motionless."

To reverse the rod, to spell the charm backward, to break the ties which bound a stupefied people to the seat of enchantment, was the noble aim of Milton. To this all his public conduct was directed. For this he joined the Presbyterians; for this he forsook them. He fought their perilous battle; but he turned away with disdain from their insolent triumph. He saw that they, like those whom they had vanquished, were hostile to the liberty of thought. He therefore joined the Independents, and called upon Cromwell to break the secular chain, and to save free conscience from the paw of the Presbyterian wolf. With a view to the same great object, he attacked the licensing system, in that sublime treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes. His attacks were, in general, directed less against particular abuses than against those deeply-seated errors on which almost all abuses are founded, the servile worship of eminent men and the irrational dread of innovation.

That he might shake the foundations of these debasing sentiments more effectually, he always selected for himself the boldest literary services. He never came up in the rear, when the outworks had been carried and the breach entered. He pressed into the forlorn hope. At the beginning of the changes, he wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against the bishops. But when his opinion seemed likely to prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned prelacy to the crowd of writers who now hastened to insult a falling party. There is no more hazardous enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into those dark and infected recesses in which no light has ever shone. But it was the choice and the pleasure of Milton to penetrate the noisome vapors, and to brave the terrible explosion. Those who most disapprove of his opinions must respect the hardihood with which he maintained them. He, in general, left to others the credit of expounding and defending the popular parts of his religious and political creed. He took his own stand upon those which the great body of his countrymen reprobated as criminal, or derided as paradoxical. He stood up for divorce and regicide. He attacked the prevailing systems of education. His radiant and beneficent career resembled that of the god of light and fertility.

     "Nitor in adversum; nec me, qui caetera, vincit      Impetus, et rapido contrarius evehor orbi."

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our time, be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the Paradise Lost has the great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyrical rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic language, "a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."

We had intended to look more closely at these performances, to analyze the peculiarities of the diction, to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of the Areopagitica and the nervous rhetoric of the Iconoclast and to point out some of those magnificent passages which occur in the Treatise of Reformation, and the Animadversions on the Remonstrant. But the length to which our remarks have already extended renders this impossible.

We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely tear ourselves away from the subject. The days immediately following the publication of this relic of Milton appear to be peculiarly set apart, and consecrated to his memory. And we shall scarcely be censured if, on this his festival, we be found lingering near his shrine, how worthless soever may be the offering which we bring to it. While this book lies on our table, we seem to be contemporaries of the writer. We are transported a hundred and fifty years back. We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the faded green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his affliction. We imagine to ourselves the breathless silence in which we should listen to his slightest word, the passionate veneration with which we should kneel to kiss his hand and weep upon it, the earnestness with which we should endeavor to console him, if indeed such a spirit could need consolation, for the neglect of an age unworthy of his talents and his virtues, the eagerness with which we should contest with his daughters, or with his Quaker friend Elwood, the privilege of reading Homer to him, or of taking down the immortal accents which flowed from his lips.

These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we cannot be ashamed of them; nor shall we be sorry if what we have written shall in any degree excite them in other minds. We are not much in the habit of idolizing either the living or the dead. And we think that there is no more certain indication of a weak and ill-regulated intellect than that propensity which, for want of a better name, we will venture to christen Boswellism. But there are a few characters which have stood the closest scrutiny and the severest tests, which have been tried in the furnace and have proved pure, which have been weighed in the balance and have not been found wanting, which have been declared sterling by the general consent of mankind, and which are visibly stamped with the image and superscription of the Most High. These great men we trust that we know how to prize; and of these was Milton. The sight of his books, the sound of his name, are pleasant to us. His thoughts resemble those celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin Martyr of Massinger sent down from the gardens of Paradise to the earth, and which were distinguished from the productions of other soils, not only by superior bloom and sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy to invigorate and to heal. They are powerful, not only to delight, but to elevate and purify. Nor do we envy the man who can study either the life or the writings of the great poet and patriot without aspiring to emulate, not indeed the sublime works with which his genius has enriched our literature, but the zeal with which he labored for the public good, the fortitude with which he endured every private calamity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down on temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which he bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly kept with his country and with his fame.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE. 5

1749-1832GERMANY'S GREATEST WRITERBY FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE

I. THE MAN

Genius of the supreme order presupposes a nature of equal scope as the prime condition of its being. The Gardens of Adonis require little earth, but the oak will not flourish in a tub; and the wine of Tokay is the product of no green-house, nor gotten of sour grapes. Given a genuine great poet, you will find a greater man behind, in whom, among others, these virtues predominate,–courage, generosity, truth.

Pre-eminent among the poets of the modern world stands Goethe, chief of his own generation, challenging comparison with the greatest of all time. His literary activity embraces a span of nigh seventy years in a life of more than fourscore, beginning, significantly enough, with a poem on "Christ's Descent into Hell" (his earliest extant composition), and ending with Faust's–that is, Man's–ascent into heaven. The rank of a writer–his spiritual import to human kind–may be inferred from the number and worth of the writings of which he has furnished the topic and occasion. "When kings build," says Schiller, speaking of Kant's commentators, "the draymen have plenty to do." Dante and Shakspeare have created whole libraries through the interest inspired by their writings. The Goethe-literature, so-called,–though scarce fifty years have elapsed since the poet's death,–already numbers its hundreds of volumes.

I note in this man, first of all, as a literary phenomenon, the unexampled fact of supreme excellence in several quite distinct provinces of literary action. Had we only his minor poems, he would rank as the first of lyrists. Had he written only "Faust," he would be the first of philosophic poets. Had he written only "Hermann and Dorothea," the sweetest idyllist; if only the "Märchen," the subtlest of allegorists. Had he written never a verse, but only prose, he would hold the highest place among the prose-writers of Germany. And lastly, had he written only on scientific subjects, in that line also–in the field of science–he would be, as he is, an acknowledged leader.

Noticeable in him also is the combination of extraordinary genius with extraordinary fortune. A magnificent person, a sound physique, inherited wealth, high social position, official dignity, with eighty-three years of earthly existence, compose the framework of this illustrious life.

Behind the author, behind the poet, behind the world-renowned genius, a not unreasonable curiosity seeks the original man, the human individual, as he walked among men, his manner of being, his characteristics, as shown in the converse of life. In what soil grew the flowers and ripened the fruits which have been the delight and the aliment of nations? In proportion, of course, to the eminence attained by a writer,–in proportion to the worth of his works, to their hold on the world,–is the interest felt in his personality and behavior, in the incidents of his life. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the person is not always proportioned to the lustre of the name. Of the two great poets to whom the world's unrepealable verdict has assigned the foremost place in their several kinds, we know in one case absolutely nothing, and next to nothing in the other. To the question, Who sung the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of the much-versed Odysseus? tradition answers with a name to which no faintest shadow of a person corresponds. To the question, Who composed "Hamlet" and "Othello"? history answers with a person so indistinct that recent speculation has dared to question the agency of Shakspeare in those creations. What would not the old scholiasts have given for satisfactory proofs of the existence of a Homer identical with the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey? What would not the Shakspeare clubs give for one more authentic anecdote of the world's great dramatist?

Of Goethe we know more–I mean of his externals–than of any other writer of equal note. This is due in part to his wide relations, official and other, with his contemporaries; to his large correspondence with people of note, of which the documents have been preserved by the parties addressed; to the interest felt in him by curious observers living in the day of his greatness. It is due in part also to the fact that, unlike the greatest of his predecessors, he flourished in an all-communicating, all-recording age; and partly it is due to autobiographical notices, embracing important portions of his history.

Two seemingly opposite factors–limiting and qualifying the one the other–determined the course and topics of his life. One was the aim which he proposed to himself as the governing principle and purpose of his being,–to perfect himself, to make the most of the nature which God had given him; the other was a constitutional tendency to come out of himself, to lose himself in objects, especially in natural objects, so that in the study of nature–to which he devoted a large part of his life–he seems not so much a scientific observer as a chosen confidant, to whom the discerning Mother revealed her secrets.

In no greatest genius are all its talents self-derived. Countless influences mould our intellect and mould our heart. One of these, and often one of the most potent, is heredity. Consciously or unconsciously, for good or for evil, physically and mentally, the father and mother are in the child, as indeed all his ancestors are in every man.

Of Goethe's father we know only what the son himself has told us in his memoirs. A man of austere presence, from whom Goethe, as he tells us, inherited his bodily stature and his serious treatment of life,–

     "Vom Vater hab ich die Statur,      Des Lebens ernstes führen."

By profession a lawyer, but without practice, living in grim seclusion amid his books and collections; a man of solid acquirements and large culture, who had travelled in Italy and first awakened in Wolfgang the longing for that land; a man of ample means, inhabiting a stately mansion. For the rest, a stiff, narrow-minded, fussy pedant, with small toleration for any methods or aims but his own; who, while he appreciated the superior gifts of his son, was obstinately bent on guiding them in strict professional grooves, and teased him with the friction of opposing wills.

The opposite, in most respects, of this stately and pedantic worthy was the Frau Räthin, his youthful wife, young enough to have been his daughter,–a jocund, exuberant nature, a woman to be loved; one who blessed society with her presence, and possessed uncommon gifts of discourse. She was but eighteen when Wolfgang was born,–a companion to him and his sister Cornelia; one in whom they were sure to find sympathy and ready indulgence. Goethe was indebted to her, as he tells us, for his joyous spirit and his narrative talent,–

     "Von Mütterchen die Frohnatur      Und Lust zu fabuliren."

Outside of the poet's household, the most important figure in the circle of his childish acquaintance was his mother's father, from whom he had his name, Johann Wolfgang Textor, the Schultheiss, or chief magistrate, of the city. From him Goethe seems to have inherited the superstition of which some curious examples are recorded in his life. He shared with Napoleon and other remarkable men, says Von Müller, the conceit that little mischances are prophetic of greater evils. On a journey to Baden-Baden with a friend, his carriage was upset and his companion slightly injured. He thought it a bad omen, and instead of proceeding to Baden-Baden chose another watering-place for his summer resort. If in his almanac there happened to be a blot on any date, he feared to undertake anything important on the day so marked. He had noted certain fatal days; one of these was the 22d of March. On that day he had lost a valued friend; on that day the theatre to which he had devoted so much time and labor was burned; and on that day, curiously enough, he died. He believed in oracles; and as Rousseau threw stones at a tree to learn whether or no he was to be saved (the hitting or not hitting the tree was to be the sign), so Goethe tossed a valuable pocket-knife into the river Lahn to ascertain whether he would succeed as a painter. If behind the bushes which bordered the stream, he saw the knife plunge, it should signify success; if not, he would take it as an omen of failure. Rousseau was careful, he tells us, to choose a stout tree, and to stand very near. Goethe, more honest with himself, adopted no such precaution; the plunge of the knife was not seen, and the painter's career was abandoned.

Wordsworth's saying, "the child is the father of the man,"–a saying which owes its vitality more to its form than its substance,–is not always verified, or its truth is not always apparent in the lives of distinguished men. I find not much in Goethe the child prophetic of Goethe the man. But the singer and the seeker, the two main tendencies of his being, are already apparent in early life. Of moral traits, the most conspicuous in the child is a power of self-control,–a moral heroism, which secured to him in after life a natural leadership unattainable by mere intellectual supremacy. An instance of this self-control is recorded among the anecdotes of his boyhood. At one of the lessons which he shared with other boys, the teacher failed to appear. The young people awaited his coming for a while, but toward the close of the hour most of them departed, leaving behind three who were especially hostile to Goethe. "These," he says, "thought to torment, to mortify, and to drive me away. They left me a moment, and returned with rods taken from a broom which they had cut to pieces. I perceived their intention, and, supposing the expiration of the hour to be near, I immediately determined to make no resistance until the clock should strike. Unmercifully, thereupon, they began to scourge in the cruellest manner my legs and calves. I did not stir, but soon felt that I had miscalculated the time, and that such pain greatly lengthens the minutes." When the hour expired, his superior activity enabled him to master all three, and to pin them to the ground.