GOETHE'S PORTRAIT.*

[FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1832.]

in living hearts, as the life and inspiration of one counsel to give, the secret of his whole thinkers, born and still unborn. Some fifty poetic alchymy: GEDENKE ZU LEBEN. Yes, years hence, his thinking will be found trans-"think of living!" Thy life, wert thou the lated, and ground down, even to the capacity" pitifullest of all the sons of earth," is no idle of the diurnal press; acts of parliament will dream, but a solemn reality. It is thy own; it be passed in virtue of him :-this man, if we is all thou hast to front eternity with. Work, well consider of it, is appointed to be ruler of then, even as he has done, and does-"LIKE A the world. STAR UNHASTING, YET UNRESTING.' "-Sic va

scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural and magical;—from which one would so gladly draw aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the image of his own natural face, and the supernatural secrets that prophetically lie under the same!

MAN'S sociality of nature evinces itself, in | his own. Of these millions of living men each spite of all that can be said, with abundant individual is a mirror to us: a mirror both evidence by this one fact, were there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Biography. It is written, "The proper study of mankind is man;" to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or by false methods, applies himself, nothing loath. "Man is perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it, Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the there is nothing else interesting." How inex- actual course of things, this business of Biopressibly comfortable to know our fellow-graphy is practised and relished. Define to creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practically personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on!

thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance
of these phenomena, named Gossip, Egotism,
Personal Narrative, (miraculous or not,) Scan-
dal, Raillery, Slander, and such like; the sum-
total of which (with some fractional addition
of a better ingredient, generally too small to be
noticeable) constitutes that other grand pheno-
menon still called
menon still called "Conversation." Do they
not mean wholly: Biography and Autobiography?
Not only in the common Speech of men; but
in all Art, too, which is or should be the con-
centrated and conserved essence of what men
can speak and show, Biography is almost the
one thing needful.

A scientific interest and a poetic one alike inspire us in this matter. A scientific: because every mortal has a Problem of Existence set before him, which, were it only, what for the most it is, the Problem of keeping soul and body together, must be to a certain extent Even in the highest works of Art our interest, original, unlike every other; and yet, at the as the critics complain, is too apt to be same time, so like every other; like our own, strongly or even mainly of a Biographic sort. therefore; instructive, moreover, since we also In the Art, we can nowise forget the Artist: are indentured to live. A poetic interest still while looking on the Transfiguration, while more for precisely this same struggle of studying the Iliad, we ever strive to figure to human Free-will against material Necessity, ourselves what spirit dwelt in Raphael;, what which every man's Life, by the mere circum- a head was that of Homer, wherein, woven of stance that the man continues alive, will more Elysian light and Tartarian gloom, that old or less victoriously exhibit,-is that which world fashioned itself together, of which these above all else, or rather inclusive of all else, written Greek characters are but a feeble calls the Sympathy of mortal hearts into ac- though perennial copy. The Painter and the tion; and whether as acted, or as represented Singer are present to us; we partially and for and written of, not only is Poetry, but is the the time become the very Painter and the very sole Poetry possible. Borne onwards by which Singer, while we enjoy the Picture and the two all-embracing interests, may the earnest Song. Perhaps, too, let the critic say what he Lover of Biography expand himself on all will, this is the highest enjoyment, the clearest sides, and indefinitely enrich himself. Look-recognition, we can have of these. Art indeed ing with the eyes of every new neighbour, he is Art; yet Man also is Man. Had the Trans can discern a new world different for each: figuration been painted without human hand, feeling with the heart of every neighbour, he had it grown merely on the canvas, say hy lives with every neighbour's life, even as with atmospheric influences, as lichen-pictures do on rocks, it were a grand Picture doubtless; yet nothing like so grand as the Picture, which, on opening our eyes, we everywhere in Heaven and in Earth see painted; and every

*The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. including a Tour to the Hebrides: By James Boswell, Esq. A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes. By John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F. R. S. 5 vols. London, 1831.

where pass over with indifference,-because | could eat the wind, with ever new disappointthe Painter was not a Man. Think of this; ment. much lies in it. The Vatican is great; yet poor to Chimborazo or the Peake of Teneriffe: its dome is but a foolish Big-endian or Littleendian chip of an egg-shell, compared with that star-fretted Dome where Arcturus and Orion glance for ever; which latter, notwithstanding, who looks at, save perhaps some necessitous star-gazer bent to make Almanacs, some thick-quilted watchman, to see what weather it will prove? The Biographic interest is wanting: no Michael Angelo was He who built that "Temple of Immensity;" therefore do we, pitiful Littlenesses as we are, turn rather to wonder and to worship in the little toybox of a Temple built by our like.

No

Again, consider the whole class of Fictitious Narratives; from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in Shakspeare and Homer, down to the lowest of froth Prose in the Fashionable Novel. What are all these but so many mimic Biographies? Attempts, here by an inspired Speaker, there by an uninspired Babbler, to deliver himself, more or less ineffectually, of the grand secret wherewith all hearts labour oppressed: The significance of Man's Life;-which deliverance, even as traced in the unfurnished head, and printed at the Minerva Press, finds readers. For, observe, though there is a greatest Fool, as a superlative in every kind; and the most Foolish man in the Earth is now indubitably living and breathing, and did this morning or lately eat breakfast, and is even now digesting the same; and looks out on the world, with his dim horn-eyes, and inwardly forms some unspeakable theory thereof: yet where shall the authentically Existing be personally met with! Can one of us, otherwise than by guess, know that we have got sight of him, have orally communed with him? To take even the narrower sphere of this our English metropolis, can any one confidently say to himself, that he has conversed with the identical, individual, Stupidest man now extant in London? one. Deep as we dive in the Profound, there is ever a new depth opens: where the ultimate bottom may lie, through what new' scenes of being we must pass before reaching it, (except that we know it does lie somewhere, and might by human faculty and opportunity be reached,) is altogether a mystery to us. Strange, tantalizing pursuit! We have the fullest assurance, not only that there is a Stupidest of London men actually resident, with bed and board of some kind, in London; but that several persons have been or perhaps are now speaking face to face with him: while for us, chase it as we may, such scientific blessedness will too probably be for ever denied!-But the thing we meant to enforce was this comfortable fact, that no known Head was so wooden, but there might be other heads to which it were a genius and Friar Bacon's Oracle. Of no given Book, not even of a Fashionable Novel, can you predicate with certainty that its vacuity is absolute; that there are not other vacuities which shall partially replenish themselves therefrom, and esteem it a plenum. How knowest thou, may the distressed Novelwright exclaim, that I, here where I sit, am the Foolishest of existing mortals; that this my Longear of a Fictitious Biography shall not find one and the other, into whose still longer ears it may be the means, under Providence, of instilling somewhat? We answer, None knows, none can certainly know: therefore, write on, worthy Brother, even as thou canst, as it has been given thee.

Still more decisively, still more exclusively does the Biographic interest manifest itself, as we descend into lower regions of spiritual communication; through the whole range of what is called Literature. Of History, for example, the most honoured, if not honourable species of composition, is not the whole purport biographic? History," it has been said, "is the essence of innumerable Biographies." Such, at least, it should be: whether it is, might admit of question. But, in any case, what hope have we in turning over those old interminable Chronicles, with their garrulities and insipidities; or still worse, in patiently examining those modern Narrations, of the Philosophic kind, where "Philosophy, teaching by Experience," must sit like owl on housetop, seeing nothing, understanding nothing, uttering only, with solemnity enough, her perpetual most wearisome hoo-hoo: what hope have we, except for the most part fallacious one of gaining some acquaintance with our fellow-creatures, though dead and vanished, yet dear to us; how they got along in those old days, suffering and doing; to what extent, and under what circumstances, they resisted the Devil and triumphed over him, or struck their colours to him, and were trodden under foot by him; how, in short, the perennial Battle went, which men name Life, which we also in these new days, with indifferent fortune, have to fight, and must bequeath to our sons and grandsons to go on fighting,-till the Enemy one day be quite vanquished and abolished, or else the great Night sink and part the combatants; and thus, either by some Millennium or some new Noah's Deluge, the Volume of Universal History wind itself up! Other hope, in studying such Books, we have none: and that it is a deceitful hope, who that has tried knows not? A feast of widest Biographic insight is spread for us; we enter full of hungry anticipation: alas! like so many other feasts, which Life invites us to, a mere Ossian's "feast of shells,”—the food and liquor being all emptied out and clean gone, and only the vacant dishes and deceitful emblems thereof left! Your modern Historical Restaurateurs are indeed little better than high-priests of Famine; that Here, however, in regard to "Fictitious Biokeep choicest china dinner-sets, only no din-graphies," and much other matter of like sort, ner to serve therein. Yet such is our Biographic appetite, we run trying from shop to shop, with ever new hope; and, unless we

which the greener mind in these days inditeth, we may as well insert some singular sentences on the importance and significance of

Reality, as they stand written for us in Professor | far that your 'Machinery' is avowedly mechaGottfried Sauerteig's Esthetische Springwürzel: nical and unbelieved,-what is it else, if we a Work, perhaps, as yet new to most English dare tell ourselves the truth, but a miserable, readers. The Professor and Doctor is not a meaningless Deception kept up by old use and man whom we can praise without reservation; wont alone? If the gods of an Iliad are to us neither shall we say that his Springwürzel (a sort no longer authentic Shapes of Terror, heartof magical pick-locks, as he affectedly names stirring, heart-appalling, but only vague-glitthem) are adequate to "start" every bolt that tering Shadows,-what must the dead Palocks up an æsthetic mystery; nevertheless, in gan gods of an Epigoniad be, the dead-living his crabbed, one-sided way, he sometimes hits Pagan-Christian gods of a Lusiad, the concretemasses of the truth. We endeavour to trans-abstract, evangelical-metaphysical gods of a late faithfully, and trust the reader will find it worth serious perusal :

"The significance, even for poetic purposes," says Sauerteig," that lies in REALITY, is too apt to escape us; is perhaps only now beginning to be discerned. When we named Rousseau's Confessions an elegiaco-didactic Poem, we meant more than an empty figure of speech; we meant an historical scientific fact.

Paradise Lost? Superannuated lumber! Cast raiment, at best; in which some poor mime, strutting and swaggering, may or may not set forth new noble Human Feelings, (again a Reality,) and so secure, or not secure, our pardon of such hoydenish masking,-for which, in any case, he has a pardon to ask.

"True enough, none but the earliest Epic Poems can claim this distinction of entire cre“Fiction, while the feigner of it knows that dibility, of Reality: after an Iliad, a Shaster, a he is feigning, partakes, more than we suspect, Koran, and other the like primitive performof the nature of lying; and has ever an, in some ances, the rest seem, by this rule of mine, to be degree, unsatisfactory character. All Mytho- altogether excluded from the list. Accordingly, logies were once Philosophies; were believed: what are all the rest from Virgil's Eneid downthe Epic Poems of old time, so long as they wards, in comparison ?-Frosty, artificial, hecontinued epic, and had any complete impres- terogeneous things; more of gumflowers than siveness, were Histories, and understood to be of roses; at best, of the two mixed incoherently narratives of facts. In so far as Homer em- together: to some of which, indeed, it were ployed his gods as mere ornamental fringes, hard to deny the title of Poems; yet to no one and had not himself, or at least did not expect of which can that title belong in any sense even his hearers to have, a belief that they were resembling the old high one it, in those old days, real agents in those antique doings; so far did conveyed,-when the epithet 'divine' or 'sahe fail to be genuine; so far was he a partially cred,' as applied to the uttered Word of man, hollow and false singer; and sang to please only was not a vain metaphor, a vain sound, but a a portion of man's mind, not the whole thereof. real name with meaning. Thus, too, the farther Imagination is, after all, but a poor matter we recede from those early days, when Poetry, when it must part company with Understand-as true Poetry is always, was still sacred or ing, and even front it hostilely in flat contradiction. Our mind is divided in twain: there is contest; wherein that which is weaker must needs come to the worse. Now of all feelings, states, principles, call it what you will, in man's mind, is not Belief the clearest, strongest; against which all others contend in vain? Belief is, indeed, the beginning and first condition of all spiritual Force whatsoever: only | in so far as Imagination, were it but momentarily, is believed, can there be any use or meaning in it, any enjoyment of it. And what is momentary Belief? The enjoyment of a moment. Whereas a perennial Belief were enjoyment perennially, and with the whole united soul.

"It is thus that I judge of the Supernatural in an Epic Poem; and would say, the instant it had ceased to be authentically supernatural, and become what you call 'Machinery;' sweep it out of sight (schaff’es mir vom Halse)! Of a truth, that same Machinery,' about which the critics make such hubbub, was well named Machinery; for it is in very deed mechanical, nowise inspired or poetical. Neither for us is there the smallest æsthetic enjoyment in it; save only in this way: that we believe it to have been believed,-by the Singer or his Hearers; into whose case we now laboriously struggle to transport ourselves; and so, with stinted enough result, catch some reflex of the Reality, which for them was wholly real, and visible face to face. Whenever it has come so

divine, and inspired, (what ours, in great part, only pretends to be,)-the more impossible becomes it to produce any, we say not true Poetry, but tolerable semblance of such; the hollower, in particular, grow all manner of Epics; till at length, as in this generátion, the very name of Epic sets men a-yawning, the announcement of a new Epic is received as a public calamity.

"But what if the impossible being once for all quite discarded, the probable be well adhered to; how stands it with fiction then? Why, then, I would say, the evil is much mended, but nowise completely cured. We have then, in place of the wholly dead modern Epic, the partially living modern Novel; to which latter it is much easier to lend that above-mentioned, so essential 'momentary credence,' than to the former: indeed infinitely easier: for the former being flatly incredible, no mortal can for a moment credit it, for a moment enjoy it. Thus, here and there, a Tom Jones, a Meister, a Crusoe, will yield no little solacement to the minds of men : though still immeasurably less than a Reality would, were the significance thereof as impressively unfolded, were the genius that could so unfold it once given us by the kind Heavens. Neither say thou that proper Realities are wanting for Man's Life, now as of old, is the genuine work of God; wherever there is a Man, a God also is revealed, and all that is Godlike a whole epitome of the Infinite, with its meanings, lies enfolded in the Life of every

Man. Only, alas, that the Seer to discern this | Truth, what we can call a Revelation; which

last does undoubtedly transcend all other poetic efforts, nor can Herr Sauerteig be too loud in its praises. But, on the other hand, whether such effort is still possible for man, Herr Sauerteig and the bulk of the world are probably at issue,—and will probably continue so till that same "Revelation" or new "Invention of Reality," of the sort he desiderates, shall itself make its appearance.

same Godlike, and with fit utterance unfold it for us, is wanting, and may long be wanting! "Nay, a question arises on us here, wherein the whole German reading-world will eagerly Join: Whether man can any longer be so interested by the spoken Word, as he often was in those primeval days, when, rapt away by its inscrutable power, he pronounced it, in such dialect as he had, to be transcendental, (to transcend all measure,) to be sacred, prophetic, Meanwhile, quitting these airy regions, let and the inspiration of a god? For myself, I, any one bethink him how impressive the (ich meines Ortes,) by faith or by insight, do smallest historical fact may become, as conheartily understand that the answer to such trasted with the grandest fictitious event; what question will be, Yea! For never, that I could an incalculable force lies for us in this consiin searching find out, has Man been, by Time deration: The Thing which I here hold imaged which devours so much, deprivated of any fa- in my mind did actually occur; was, in very culty whatsoever that he in any era was pos- truth, an element in the system of the All, sessed of. To my seeming, the babe born yester- whereof I too form part; had therefore, and day has all the organs of Body, Soul, and Spirit, has, through all time, an authentic being; is and in exactly the same combination and entire- not a dream, but a reality! We ourselves can ness, that the oldest Pelasgic Greek, or Meso- remember reading in Lord Clarendon, with feelpotamian Patriarch, or Father Adam himself ings perhaps somehow accidentally opened to could boast of. Ten fingers, one heart with it,-certainly with a depth of impression venous and arterial blood therein, still belong strange to us then and now,-that insignifito man that is born of woman: when did he cant looking passage, where Charles, after the lose any of his spiritual Endowments either: battle of Worcester, glides down, with Squire above all, his highest spiritual Endowment, that Careless, from the Royal Oak, at night-fall, of revealing Poetic Beauty, and of adequately being hungry: how, "making a shift to get receiving the same? Not the material, not the over hedges and ditches, after walking at least susceptibility is wanting; only the poet, or long eight or nine miles, which were the more series of Poets, to work on these. True, alas grievous to the King by the weight of his too true, the Poet is still utterly wanting, or all boots, (for he could not put them off, when he but utterly: nevertheless have we not centuries cut off his hair, for want of shoes,) before enough before us to produce him in? Him and morning they came to a poor cottage, the owner much else!-I, for the present, will but predict whereof being a Roman Catholic was known to Carethat chiefly by working more and more on less." How this poor drudge, being knocked REALITY, and evolving more and more wisely up from his snoring, "carried them into a litits inexhaustible meanings; and, in brief, speak-tle barn full of hay, which was a better lodging forth in fit utterance whatsoever our whole ing than he had for himself;" and by and by, soul believes, and ceasing to speak forth what not without difficulty, brought his Majesty "a thing soever our whole soul does not believe,- piece of bread and a great pot of butter-milk,' will this high emprise be accomplished, or ap-saying candidly that "he himself lived by his proximated to." daily labour, and that what he had brought him was the fare he and his wife had:" on which nourishing diet his Majesty, "staying upon the haymow," feeds thankfully for two days; and then departs, under new guidance, having first changed clothes down to the very shirt and "old pair of shoes," with his landlord; and so as worthy Bunyan has it, "goes on his way, and sees him no more. Singular enough if we will think of it! This then was a genuine flesh-and-blood Rustic of the year 1651: he did actually swallow bread and butter-milk (not having ale and bacon,) and do field labour; with these hob-nailed "shoes" has sprawled through mud-roads in winter, and, jocund or not, driven his team a-field in summer; he made bargains; had chafferings and higglings, now a sore heart, now a glad one; was born; was a son, was a father;toiled in many ways, being forced to it, till the strength was all worn out of him and thenlay down "to rest his galled back," and sleep there till the long-distant morning!-How comes it, that he alone of all the British rustics who tilled and lived along with him, on whom the blessed sun on that same "fifth

These notable, and not unfounded, though partial and deep-seeing rather than wide-seeing observations on the great import of REALITY, considered even as a poetic material, we have inserted the more willingly, because a transient feeling to the same purpose may often have suggested itself to many readers; and, on the whole, it is good that every reader and every writer understand, with all intensity of conviction, what quite infinite worth lies in Truth; how all-pervading, omnipotent, in man's mind, is the thing we name Belief. For the rest, Herr Sauerteig, though one-sided, on this matter of Reality, seems heartily persuaded, and is not perhaps so ignorant as he looks. It cannot be unknown to him, for example, what noise is made about "Invention ;" what a supreme rank this faculty is reckoned to hold in the poetic endowment. Great truly is Invention; nevertheless, that is but a poor exercise of it with which Belief is not concerned. "An Irishman with whisky in his head," as poor Byron said, will invent you, in this kind, till there is enough and to spare. Nay, perhaps, if we consider well, the highest exercise of Invention has, in very deed, nothing to do with Fiction; but is an invention of new

*History of the Rebellion, iii. 625.

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