There is probably nothing from which the public service of
the country suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
cated class; that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
from the disinterested and competent sources.
the country suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
cated class; that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
from the disinterested and competent sources.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v11 - Fro to Gre
The faculty was singularly
intense, and yet it was spent within a narrow circle. There is
a marked sign of this narrowness, in his disinclination even to
look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he
disliked.
It appears that this dislike, and the ignorance consequent
upon it, applied to the works of Carlyle. Now, we may have
much or little faith in Carlyle as a philosopher or as a historian.
Half-lights and half-truths may be the utmost which, in these
departments, his works will be found to yield. But the total
want of sympathy is the more noteworthy, because the resem-
blances, though partial, are both numerous and substantial be-
tween these two remarkable men and powerful writers, as well
in their strength as in their weakness. Both are honest; and
both, notwithstanding honesty, are partisans.
Each is vastly,
though diversely, powerful in expression; and each is more power-
ful in expression than in thought. Both are, though variously,
poets using the vehicle of prose. Both have the power of por-
traitures, extraordinary for vividness and strength. For compre-
hensive disquisition, for balanced and impartial judgments, the
world will probably resort to neither; and if Carlyle gains on the
comparison in his strong sense of the inward and the ideal, he
loses in the absolute and violent character of his one-sidedness.
Without doubt, Carlyle's licentious though striking peculiarities
of style have been of a nature allowably to repel, so far as they
go, one who was so rigid as Macaulay in his literary orthodoxy,
and who so highly appreciated, and with such expenditure of
labor, all that relates to the exterior or body of a book. Still,
if there be resemblances so strong, the want of appreciation,
which has possibly been reciprocal, seems to be partly of that
nature which Aristotle would have explained by his favorite
proverb, κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ * The discrepancy is like the discrepancy
* Potter [detests] potter.
## p. 6368 (#344) ###########################################
6368
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
of colors that are too near. Carlyle is at least a great fact in
the literature of his time, and has contributed largely,- in some
respects too largely,- toward forming its characteristic habits of
thought. But on these very grounds he should not have been
excluded from the horizon of a mind like Macaulay's, with all its
large and varied and most active interests.
There have been other men of our own generation, though
very few, who if they have not equaled have approached Mac-
aulay in power of memory, and who have certainly exceeded him
in the unfailing accuracy of their recollections; and yet not in
accuracy as to dates or names or quotations, or other matters of
hard fact, when the question was one simply between ay and
no. In these he may have been without a rival. In a list of
kings, or popes, or senior wranglers, or prime ministers, or
battles, or palaces, or as to the houses in Pall Mall or about
Leicester Square, he might be followed with implicit confidence.
But a large and important class of human recollections are not
of this order: recollections for example of characters, of feelings,
of opinions; of the intrinsic nature, details, and bearings of oc-
currences. And here it was that Macaulay's wealth" was unto
him an occasion of falling. " And that in two ways. First, the
possessor of such a vehicle as his memory could not but have
something of an overweening confidence in what it told him; and
quite apart from any tendency to be vain or overbearing, he could
hardly enjoy the benefits of that caution which arises from self-
interest, and the sad experience of frequent falls. But what is
more, the possessor of so powerful a fancy could not but illumi-
nate with the colors it supplied, the matters which he gathered
into his great magazine, wherever the definiteness of their out-
line was not so rigid as to defy or disarm the action of the in-
truding and falsifying faculty. Imagination could not alter the
date of the battle of Marathon, of the Council of Nice, or the
crowning of Pepin; but it might seriously or even fundamentally
disturb the balance of light and dark in his account of the opin-
ions of Milton or of Laud, or his estimate of the effects of the
Protectorate or the Restoration, or of the character and even the
adulteries of William III. He could detect justly this want of
dry light in others; he probably suspected it in himself; but it
was hardly possible for him to be enough upon his guard against
the distracting action of a faculty at once so vigorous, so crafty,
and so pleasurable in its intense activity.
## p. 6369 (#345) ###########################################
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
6369
Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of
partisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has
been and probably much more will be said. He may not have
possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice.
tact of exact justice, which is among the very rarest as well as
the most precious of human virtues. But there never was a
writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This during his life-
time was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by
opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of
the range of controversy. He wrote for truth, but of course for
truth such as he saw it; and his sight was colored from within.
This color, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a
mordant; it was a fast color: he could not distinguish between
what his mind had received and what his mind had imparted.
Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong;
and of those calamities which are due to the intellect only, and
not the heart, there can hardly be a greater.
XI-399
.
However true it may be that Macaulay was a far more con-
summate workman in the manner than in the matter of his
works, we do not doubt that the works contain, in multitudes,
passages of high emotion and ennobling sentiment, just awards of
praise and blame, and solid expositions of principle, social, moral,
and constitutional. They are pervaded by a generous love of
liberty; and their atmosphere is pure and bracing, their general
aim and basis morally sound. Of the qualifications of this eulogy
we have spoken, and have yet to speak. But we can speak of
the style of the works with little qualification. We do not indeed.
venture to assert that his style ought to be imitated. Yet this
is not because it was vicious, but because it was individual and
incommunicable. It was one of those gifts of which, when it
had been conferred, Nature broke the mold. That it is the head
of all literary styles we do not allege; but it is different from
them all, and perhaps more different from them all than they
are usually different from one another. We speak only of natural
styles, of styles where the manner waits upon the matter, and not
where an artificial structure has been reared either to hide or to
make up for poverty of substance.
It is paramount in the union of ease in movement with per-
spicuity of matter, of both with real splendor, and of all with
immense rapidity and striking force. From any other pen, such
## p. 6370 (#346) ###########################################
6370
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
masses of ornament would be tawdry; with him they are only
rich. As a model of art concealing art, the finest cabinet pictures
of Holland are almost his only rivals. Like Pascal, he makes the
heaviest subject light; like Burke, he embellishes the barrenest.
When he walks over arid plains, the springs of milk and honey,
as in a march of Bacchus, seem to rise beneath his tread. The
repast he serves is always sumptuous, but it seems to create an
appetite proportioned to its abundance; for who has ever heard
of the reader that was cloyed with Macaulay? In none, perhaps,
of our prose writers are lessons such as he gives of truth and
beauty, of virtue and of freedom, so vividly associated with
delight. Could some magician but do for the career of life what
he has done for the arm-chair and the study, what a change
would pass on the face (at least) of the world we live in, what
an accession of recruits would there be to the professing follow-
ers of virtue!
"
The truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like
many more of us, to go out hobby-riding, but from the portent-
ous vigor of the animal he mounted was liable more than most
of us to be run away with. His merit is that he could keep his
seat in the wildest steeple-chase; but as the object in view is
arbitrarily chosen, so it is reached by cutting up the fields, spoil-
ing the crops, and spoiling or breaking down the fences needful
to secure for labor its profit, and to man at large the full enjoy-
ment of the fruits of the earth. Such is the overpowering glow
of color, such the fascination of the grouping in the first sketches
which he draws, that when he has grown hot upon his work he
seems to lose all sense of the restraints of fact and the laws of
moderation; he vents the strangest paradoxes, sets up the most
violent caricatures, and handles the false weight and measure as
effectively as if he did it knowingly. A man so able and so
upright is never indeed wholly wrong. He never for a moment
consciously pursues anything but truth. But truth depends,
above all, on proportion and relation. The preterhuman vivid-
ness with which Macaulay sees his object, absolutely casts a
shadow upon what lies around; he loses his perspective; and
imagination, impelled headlong by the strong consciousness of
honesty in purpose, achieves the work of fraud. All things for
him stand in violent contrast to one another. For the shadows,
the gradations, the middle and transition touches, which make up
## p. 6371 (#347) ###########################################
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
6371
the bulk of human life, character, and action, he has neither eye
nor taste. They are not taken account of in his practice, and
they at length die away from the ranges of his vision.
In Macaulay all history is scenic; and philosophy he scarcely
seems to touch, except on the outer side, where it opens into
action. Not only does he habitually present facts in forms of
beauty, but the fashioning of the form predominates over, and is
injurious to, the absolute and balanced presentation of the sub-
ject. Macaulay was a master in execution, rather than in what
painting or music terms expression. He did not fetch from the
depths, nor soar to the heights; but his power upon the surface
was rare and marvelous, and it is upon the surface that an ordi-
nary life is passed and that its imagery is found. He mingled,
then, like Homer, the functions of the poet and the chronicler:
but what Homer did was due to his time; what Macaulay did,
to his temperament.
The History' of Macaulay, whatever else it may be, is the
work not of a journeyman but of a great artist, and a great
artist who lavishly bestowed upon it all his powers. Such a work,
once committed to the press, can hardly die. It is not because
it has been translated into a crowd of languages, nor because it
has been sold in hundreds of thousands, that we believe it will
live; but because, however open it may be to criticism, it has in
it the character of a true and very high work of art.
Whether he will subsist as a standard and supreme authority
is another question. Wherever and whenever read, he will be
read with fascination, with delight, with wonder. And with copi-
ous instruction too; but also with copious reserve, with question-
ing scrutiny, with liberty to reject and with much exercise of
that liberty. The contemporary mind may in rare cases be taken
by storm; but posterity, never. The tribunal of the present is
accessible to influence; that of the future is incorrupt. The com-
ing generations will not give Macaulay up; but they will prob-
ably attach much less value than we have done to his ipse dixit.
They will hardly accept from him his net solutions of literary,
and still less of historic problems. Yet they will obtain, from his
marked and telling points of view, great aid in solving them.
We sometimes fancy that ere long there will be editions of his
works in which his readers may be saved from pitfalls by brief,
respectful, and judicious commentary; and that his great achieve-
ments may be at once commemorated and corrected by men of
-
## p. 6372 (#348) ###########################################
6372
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
slower pace, of drier light, and of more tranquil, broad-set, and
comprehensive judgment. For his works are in many respects
among the prodigies of literature; in some, they have never been
surpassed. As lights that have shone through the whole universe
of letters, they have made their title to a place in the solid firma-
ment of fame. But the tree is greater and better than its fruit;
and greater and better yet than the works themselves are the
lofty aims and conceptions, the large heart, the independent, man-
ful mind, the pure and noble career, which in this Biography
have disclosed to us the true figure of the man who wrote them.
## p. 6373 (#349) ###########################################
6373
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
(1831-)
MONG the men in the United States who through the agency
of the press have molded intelligent public opinion, Edwin
Lawrence Godkin deserves an honorable place. In the
columns of the New York Nation and the New York Evening Post,
he has for a generation given editorial utterance to his views upon
economic, civic, political, and international questions, this work being
supplemented by occasional incisive and scholarly articles in the best
periodicals. His clientèle has been drawn mainly from that powerful
minority which is made up of the educated,
thoughtful men and women of the country.
To this high function Mr. Godkin has con-
tributed exceptional gifts and qualifications;
and that in its exercise he has been a force
for good, is beyond dispute.
Born in Moyne, Ireland, in 1831, he was
educated at Queen's College, Belfast. Then
came the more practical education derived
from a familiarity with men and things, for
in early manhood he began newspaper
work as war correspondent, in Turkey and
the Crimea, of the London Daily News.
As correspondent of this paper he came to
the United States and settled here, being
admitted to the New York bar in 1858. But journalism was to be
his life work; and in 1865 he became the editor of The Nation, a
weekly, succeeding the Round Table, but at once taking a much
more important place as a journal of political and literary discussion,
-and the next year its proprietor. In 1881 he also became one
of the owners and the controlling editor of the New York Evening
Post, a daily, and his contributions since then have appeared in both
papers, which bear to each other the relation of a daily and weekly
edition. Thus he has been in active journalistic service for more
than thirty years.
EDWIN L. GODKIN
From this slight biographical outline it may be seen that Mr.
Godkin brought to the pursuit of his profession and to the study.
of American institutions some valuable qualifications. A college-bred
man of wide experience, an adoptive American able to judge by the
## p. 6374 (#350) ###########################################
6374
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
comparative method, a careful student of the philosophy of govern-
ment, from Aristotle to Sir Henry Maine, his views combine in an
unusual degree the practical and the theoretical. No doubt he has
in his writings what to some will seem the defect of his quality.
There is in him a certain haughtiness of temper, and what seems
like impatient contempt for the opponent in argument, which, con-
joined with a notable power of invective and satire in dealing with
what he deems to be fallacious, are likely to arouse opposition.
Hence the feeling in some quarters that Mr. Godkin is not at heart
an American, but a captious critic, with sympathies ill suited to a
democratic government.
This opinion is not justified by a fair examination of his writings.
He has on the contrary and in the true sense proved himself a true
American. He has spoken wise words upon many of the social and
political problems of our day. He has defended democracy from the
charge of failure, pointing out that here in the United States social
defects, wrongly ascribed by foreign critics to the form of govern-
ment, have been incidental to the settling of a vast new country.
He has stated with clearness and cogency the inadvisability of allow-
ing the government paternal power in finance and tariff legislation.
He has preached the difference between cheap jingoism or political
partisanship, and the enlightened Americanism which puts its finger
upon weak points, criticizing in order to correct and purify. Mr.
Godkin, in this, has been a consistent worker in a cause of which
Lowell was a noble prophet. And in regard of literary excellence,
his editorial writing is often a model of lucid, sinewy English style;
while his more deliberated essays have been admirable for calm dig-
nity, polish, and organic exposition, with an air of good breeding
over it all. The influence of such a man, both as writer and thinker,
especially in a land like the United States, has been most salutary.
THE DUTY OF CRITICISM IN A DEMOCRACY
From Problems of Modern Democracy. Copyright 1896, by Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York
INTELLIGENT man can or ought to ignore the part which
N hope of better things plays in our present social system. It
has largely, among the working classes, taken the place of
religious belief. They have brought their heaven down to earth,
and are literally looking forward to a sort of New Jerusalem, in
which all comforts and many of the luxuries of life will be
within easy reach of all. The great success of Utopian works
D
L
——————
## p. 6375 (#351) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6375
like Bellamy's shows the hold which these ideas have taken of
the popular mind. The world has to have a religion of some
kind, and the hope of better food and clothing, more leisure, and
a greater variety of amusements, has become the religion of the
working classes. Hope makes them peaceful, industrious, and
resigned under present suffering. A Frenchman saw a ragged
pauper spend his last few cents on a lottery ticket, and asked.
him how he could commit such a folly. "In order to have some-
thing to hope for," he said. And from this point of view the
outlay was undoubtedly excusable. It is literally hope which
makes the world go round, and one of the hardest things an
educated man who opens his mouth about public affairs has to
do, is to say one word or anything to dampen or destroy it. Yet
his highest duty is to speak the truth.
Luckily, there is one truth which can always be spoken with-
out offense, and that is that on the whole the race advances
through the increase of intelligence and the improvement of char-
acter, and has not advanced in any other way. The great amel-
ioration in the condition of the working classes in Europe within.
this century, including the increasing power of the trades-unions,
is the result not of any increase of benevolence in the upper
classes, but of the growth of knowledge and self-reliance and
foresight among the working classes themselves. The changes in
legislation which have improved their condition are changes which
they have demanded. When a workingman becomes a capitalist,
and raises himself in any way above his early condition, it is
rarely the result of miracle or accident. It is due to his superior
intelligence and thrift. Nothing, on the whole, can be more
delusive than official and other inquiries into the labor problem
through commissions and legislative committees. They all assume
that there is some secret in the relations of labor and capital
which can be found out by taking testimony. But they never
find anything out. Their reports during the last fifty years would
make a small library, but they never tell us anything new. They
are meant to pacify and amuse the laborer, and they do so; but
to their constant failure to do anything more we owe some of the
Socialist movement. The Socialists believe this failure due to
want of will, and that Karl Marx has discovered the great truth
of the situation, which is, that labor is entitled to the whole
product. The great law which Nature seems to have prescribed
for the government of the world, and the only law of human
## p. 6376 (#352) ###########################################
6374
EDWIN LA
comparative method, a care
ment, from Aristotle to Sir I
unusual degree the practical a
in his writings what to some
There is in him a certain i
like impatient contempt for
joined with a notable power
what he deems to be fall
Hence the feeling in some
an American, but a captious
democratic government.
This opinion is not justi
He has on the contrary at
American. He has spoke.
political problems of our c
charge of failure, pointing
defects, wrongly ascribed
ment, have been incident.
He has stated with clearne
ing the government pater:
He has preached the di
partisanship, and the en
upon weak points, critic
Godkin, in this, has bec"
Lowell was a noble prop
his editorial writing is ot
while his more deliberated
nity, polish, and organic
over it all. The influence
especially in a land like
THE DUTY OF
From Problems of Modern !
INTELLIGENT man
N°
hope of better th
has largely, amor
religious belief. They
and are literally looki
which all comforts an
within easy reach of
{
## p. 6377 (#353) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6377
1
writers or orators. And yet nothing is more
sful government than abundant criticism from
to the suspicion of particular interest. There is
governments so much dislike and resent as
he in past ages taken so much pains to put
, a history of the civil liberty would consist.
account of the resistance to criticism on the part
>
of the first acts of a successful tyranny or des-
ys the silencing of the press or the establishment
).
cction to criticism is however senseless, because
criticism—that is, through discrimination between.
astoms, or courses—that the race has managed to
the woods and lead a civilized life. The first man
to the general nakedness, and advised his fellows to
>, was the first critic. Criticism of a high tariff
a low tariff; criticism of monarchy recommends a
ism of vice recommends virtue. In fact, almost
life, in the practice of a profession or the conduct
, condemns one course and suggests another. The
adging, and judgment is the highest of the human
one which most distinguishes us from the animals.
probably nothing from which the public service of
suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
interested and competent sources. It is a very rare
neducated man to say anything publicly about the
the day. He is absorbed in science, or art, or liter-
practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his
if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is
He is silent because he does not much care, or
ne.
o embarrass the administration or
he does not feel that anything he
h difference. So that on the whole,
ructed opinion of the country is ever
report of the Bar Association on the
You was a remarkable excep-
this direction has been
'e known as the "Mug-
ltivation. They have
known to the masses
## p. 6377 (#354) ###########################################
6376
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
society which we are able to extract from history, is that the
more intelligent and thoughtful of the race shall inherit the earth.
and have the best time, and that all others shall find life on the
whole dull and unprofitable. Socialism is an attempt to contra-
vene this law and insure a good time to everybody, independently
of character and talents; but Nature will see that she is not
frustrated or brought to naught, and I do not think educated
men should ever cease to call attention to this fact; that is, ever
cease to preach hopefulness, not to everybody, but to good people.
This is no bar to benevolence to bad people or any people; but
our first duty is loyalty to the great qualities of our kind, to the
great human virtues which raise the civilized man above the
savage.
There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable
as that of the United States. The chief advantage of democratic
government is, in a country like this, the enormous force it can
command on an emergency. By "emergency" I mean the sup-
pression of an insurrection or the conduct of a foreign war. But
it is not equally strong in the ordinary work of administration.
A good many governments, by far inferior to it in strength, fill
the offices, collect the taxes, administer justice, and do the work
of legislation with much greater efficiency. One cause of this
inefficiency is that the popular standard in such matters is low,
and that it resents dissatisfaction as an assumption of superiority.
When a man says these and those things ought not to be, his
neighbors, who find no fault with them, naturally accuse him of
giving himself airs. It seems as if he thought he knew more
than they did, and was trying to impose his plans on them. The
consequence is that in a land of pure equality, as this is, critics.
are always an unpopular class, and criticism is in some sense an
odious work. The only condemnation passed on the governmental
acts or systems is apt to come from the opposite party in the
form of what is called "arraignment," which generally consists in
wholesale abuse of the party in power, treating all their acts,
small or great, as due to folly or depravity, and all their public
men as either fools or knaves. Of course this makes but small
impression on the public mind. It is taken to indicate not so
much a desire to improve the public service as to get hold of the
offices, and has as a general rule but little effect. Parties lose
their hold on power through some conspicuously obnoxious acts or
failures; never, or very rarely, through the judgments passed on
## p. 6377 (#355) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6377
them by hostile writers or orators. And yet nothing is more
necessary to successful government than abundant criticism from
sources not open to the suspicion of particular interest. There is
nothing which bad governments so much dislike and resent as
criticism, and have in past ages taken so much pains to put
down. In fact, a history of the civil liberty would consist
largely of an account of the resistance to criticism on the part
of rulers. One of the first acts of a successful tyranny or des-
potism is always the silencing of the press or the establishment
of a censorship.
Popular objection to criticism is however senseless, because
it is through criticism—that is, through discrimination between
two things, customs, or courses that the race has managed to
come out of the woods and lead a civilized life. The first man
who objected to the general nakedness, and advised his fellows to
put on clothes, was the first critic. Criticism of a high tariff
recommends a low tariff; criticism of monarchy recommends a
republic; criticism of vice recommends virtue. In fact, almost
every act of life, in the practice of a profession or the conduct
of a business, condemns one course and suggests another. The
word means judging, and judgment is the highest of the human
faculties, the one which most distinguishes us from the animals.
There is probably nothing from which the public service of
the country suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
cated class; that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
from the disinterested and competent sources. It is a very rare
thing for an educated man to say anything publicly about the
questions of the day. He is absorbed in science, or art, or liter-
ature, in the practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his
business; and if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is
a languid one. He is silent because he does not much care, or
because he does not wish to embarrass the administration or
"hurt the party," or because he does not feel that anything he
could say would make much difference. So that on the whole,
it is very rarely that the instructed opinion of the country is ever
heard on any subject. The report of the Bar Association on the
nomination of Maynard in New York was a remarkable excep-
tion to this rule. Some improvement in this direction has been
made by the appearance of the set of people known as the "Mug-
wumps," who are, in the main, men of cultivation. They have
been defined in various ways. They are known to the masses
―
## p. 6378 (#356) ###########################################
6378
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
mainly as "kickers"; that is, dissatisfied, querulous people, who
complain of everybody and cannot submit to party discipline. But
they are the only critics who do not criticize in the interest of
party, but simply in that of good government. They are a kind
of personage whom the bulk of the voters know nothing about
and find it difficult to understand, and consequently load with
ridicule and abuse. But their movement, though its visible rec-
ognizable effects on elections may be small, has done inestimable
service in slackening the bonds of party discipline, in making
the expression of open dissent from party programmes respect-
able and common, and in increasing the unreliable vote in large
States like New York. It is of the last importance that this un-
reliable vote-that is, the vote which party leaders cannot count
on with certainty-should be large in such States. The mere
fear of it prevents a great many excesses.
But in criticism one always has hard work in steering a
straight course between optimism and pessimism. These are the
Scylla and Charybdis of the critic's career. Almost every man
who thinks or speaks about public affairs is either an optimist or
a pessimist; which he is, depends a good deal on temperament,
but often on character. The political jobber or corruptionist is
almost always an optimist. So is the prosperous business man.
So is nearly every politician, because the optimist is nearly al-
ways the more popular of the two. As a general rule, people
like cheerful men and the promise of good times. The kill-joy
and bearer of bad news has always been an odious character.
But for the cultivated man there is no virtue in either optimism
or pessimism. Some people think it a duty to be optimistic, and
for some people it may be a duty; but one of the great uses of
education is to teach us to be neither one nor the other. In the
management of our personal affairs, we try to be neither one
nor the other. In business, a persistent and uproarious optimist
would certainly have poor credit. And why? Because in busi-
ness the trustworthy man, as everybody knows, is the man who
sees things as they are: and to see things as they are, without
glamor or illusion, is the first condition of worldly success. It
is absolutely essential in war, in finance, in law, in every field.
of human activity in which the future has to be thought of and
provided for. It is just as essential in politics. The only reason
why it is not thought as essential in politics is, the punishment
for failure or neglect comes in politics more slowly.
## p. 6379 (#357) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6379
The pessimist has generally a bad name, but there is a good
Ideal to be said for him. To take a recent illustration, the man
who took pessimistic views of the silver movement was for nearly
twenty years under a cloud. This gloomy anticipation of 1873
was not realized until 1893. For a thousand years after Marcus
Aurelius, the pessimist, if I may use the expression, was "cock
of the walk. " He certainly has no reason to be ashamed of his
rôle in the Eastern world for a thousand years after the Moham-
medan Hegira. In Italy and Spain he has not needed to hang
his head since the Renaissance. In fact, if we take various na-
tions and long reaches of time, we shall find that the gloomy
man has been nearly as often justified by the course of events as
the cheerful one. Neither of them has any special claim to a
hearing on public affairs. A persistent optimist, although he may
be a most agreeable man in family life, is likely, in business or
politics, to be just as foolish and unbearable as a persistent pes-
simist. He is as much out of harmony with the order of nature.
The universe is not governed on optimistic any more than on
pessimistic principles. The best and wisest of men make their
mistakes and have their share of sorrow and sickness and losses.
So also the most happily situated nations must suffer from inter-
nal discord, the blunders of statesmen, and the madness of the
people. What Cato said in the Senate of the conditions of suc-
cess, "vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo, prosperê omnia cedunt,"
is as true to-day as it was two thousand years ago. We must
remember that though the optimist may be the pleasantest man to
have about us, he is the least likely to take precautions; that is,
the least likely to watch and work for success. We owe a great
deal of our slovenly legislation to his presence in large numbers
in Congress and the legislatures. The great suffering through
which we are now passing, in consequence of the persistence.
in our silver purchases, is the direct result of unreasoning opti-
mism. Its promoters disregarded the warnings of economists and
financiers because they believed that somehow, they did not
know how, the thing would come out right in the end. The
silver collapse, together with the Civil War over slavery, are
striking illustrations to occur in one century, of the fact that
if things come out right in the end, it is often after periods of
great suffering and disaster. Could people have foreseen how the
slavery controversy would end, what frantic efforts would have
been made for peaceful abolition! Could people have foreseen
## p. 6380 (#358) ###########################################
6380
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
the panic of last year, with its wide-spread disaster, what haste
would have been made to stop the silver purchases! And yet
the experience of mankind afforded abundant reason for antici-
pating both results.
This leads me to say that the reason why educated men should
try and keep a fair mental balance between both pessimism and
optimism, is that there has come over the world in the last
twenty-five or thirty years a very great change of opinion touch-
ing the relations of the government to the community. When
Europe settled down to peaceful work after the great wars of the
French Revolution, it was possessed with the idea that the free-
dom of the individual was all that was needed for public pros-
perity and private happiness. The old government interference.
with people's movements and doings was supposed to be the
reason why nations had not been happy in the past. This became
the creed, in this country, of the Democratic party, which came
into existence after the foundation of the federal government.
At the same time there grew up here the popular idea of the
American character, in which individualism was the most marked
trait. If you are not familiar with it in your own time, you may
remember it in the literature of the earlier half of the century.
The typical American was always the architect of his own for-
tunes. He sailed the seas and penetrated the forest, and built
cities and lynched the horse thieves, and fought the Indians and
dug the mines, without anybody's help or support. He had even
an ill-concealed contempt for regular troops, as men under con-
trol and discipline. He scorned government for any other pur-
poses than security and the administration of justice. This was
the kind of American that Tocqueville found here in 1833. He
says:
"The European often sees in the public functionaries simply force;
the American sees nothing but law. One may then say that in
America a man never obeys a man, or anything but justice and law.
Consequently he has formed of himself an opinion which is often
exaggerated, but is always salutary. He trusts without fear to his
own strength, which appears to him equal to anything. A private
individual conceives some sort of enterprise. Even if this enterprise
have some sort of connection with the public welfare, it never occurs
to him to address himself to the government in order to obtain its
aid. He makes his plan known, offers to carry it out, calls other
individuals to his aid, and struggles with all his might against any
25. 501
***
Ind
74
3.
2. 4
1. A PS
# 7 8 1 23 1
57
## p. 6381 (#359) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6381
obstacles there may be in his way. Often, without doubt, he suc-
ceeds less well than the State would in his place; but in the long
run the general result of individual enterprises far surpasses anything
the government could do. "
Now there is no doubt that if this type of character has not
passed away, it has been greatly modified; and it has been mod-
ified by two agencies- the "labor problem," as it is called, and
legislative protection to native industry. I am not going to make
an argument about the value of this protection in promoting
native industry, or about its value from the industrial point of
view. We may or we may not owe to it the individual progress
and prosperity of the United States. About that I do not pro-
pose to say anything. What I want to say is that the doctrine.
that it is a function of government, not simply to foster indus-
try in general, but to consider the case of every particular in-
dustry and give it the protection that it needs, could not be
preached and practiced for thirty years in a community like this,
without modifying the old American conception of the relation
of the government to the individual. It makes the government,
in a certain sense, a partner in every industrial enterprise, and
makes every Presidential election an affair of the pocket to every
miner and manufacturer and to his men; for the men have for
fully thirty years been told that the amount of their wages would
depend, to a certain extent at least, on the way the election
went. The notion that the government owes assistance to indi-
viduals in carrying on business and making a livelihood has
in fact, largely through the tariff discussions, permeated a very
large class of the community, and has materially changed what I
may call the American outlook. It has greatly reinforced among
the foreign-born population the socialistic ideas which many
bring here with them, of the powers and duties of the State
toward labor; for it is preached vehemently by the employing
class.
What makes this look the more serious is, that our political
and social manners are not adapted to it. In Europe, the State
is possessed of an administrative machine which has a finish,
efficacy, and permanence unknown here. Tocqueville comments
on its absence among us; and it is, as all the advocates of civil-
service reform know, very difficult to supply. All the agencies
of the government suffer from the imposition on them of what
I may call non-American duties. For instance, a custom-house
## p. 6382 (#360) ###########################################
6382
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
organized as a political machine was never intended to collect the
enormous sum of duties which must pass through its hands under
our tariff. A post-office whose master has to be changed every
four years to "placate" Tammany, or the anti-Snappers, or any
other body of politicians, was never intended to handle the huge
mass which American mails have now become. One of the
greatest objections to the income tax is the prying into people's
affairs which it involves. No man likes to tell what his income
is to every stranger, much less to a politician, which our col-
lectors are sure to be. Secrecy on the part of the collector is in
fact essential to reconcile people to it in England or Germany,
where it is firmly established; but our collectors sell their lists to
the newspapers in order to make the contributors pay up.
In all these things, we are trying to meet the burdens and
responsibilities of much older societies with the machinery of a
much earlier and simpler state of things. It is high time to halt
in this progress until our administrative system has been brought
up to the level even of our present requirements. It is quite
true that, with our system of State and federal constitutions
laying prohibitions on the Legislature and Congress, any great
extension of the sphere of government in our time seems very
unlikely. Yet the assumption by Congress, with the support of
the Supreme Court, of the power to issue paper money in time
of peace, the power to make prolonged purchases of a commod-
ity like silver, the power to impose an income tax, to execute
great public works, and to protect native industry, are powers.
large enough to effect a great change in the constitution of so-
ciety and in the distribution of wealth, such as, it is safe to say,
in the present state of human culture, no government ought to
have and exercise.
One hears every day from educated people some addition to
the number of things which "governments" ought to do, but for
which any government we have at present is totally unfit. One
listens to them with amazement, when looking at the material
of which our government is composed,- for the matter of that,
of which all governments are composed; for I suppose there is no
question that all legislative bodies in the world have in twenty
years run down in quality. The parliamentary system is appar-
ently failing to meet the demands of modern democratic society,
and is falling into some disrepute; but it would seem as if there
was at present just as little chance of a substitute of any kind as
## p. 6383 (#361) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6383
of the dethronement of universal suffrage. It will probably last
indefinitely, and be as good or as bad as its constituents make
it. But this probable extension of the powers and functions of
government makes more necessary than ever a free expression
of opinion, and especially of educated opinion. We may rail at
"mere talk" as much as we please, but the probability is that
the affairs of nations and of men will be more and more reg-
ulated by talk. The amount of talk which is now expended on
all subjects of human interest -and in "talk" I include contri-
butions to periodical literature-is something of which no previ-
ous age has had the smallest conception. Of course it varies
infinitely in quality. A very large proportion of it does no good
beyond relieving the feelings of the talker. Political philosophers
maintain, and with good reason, that one of its greatest uses is
keeping down discontent under popular government. It is un-
doubtedly true that it is an immense relief to a man with a
grievance to express his feelings about it in words, even if he
knows that his words will have no immediate effect. Self-love is
apt to prevent most men from thinking that anything they say
with passion or earnestness will utterly and finally fail. But still
it is safe to suppose that one half of the talk of the world on
subjects of general interest is waste. But the other half certainly
tells. We know this from the change in ideas from genera-
tion to generation. We see that opinions which at one time
everybody held became absurd in the course of half a century —
opinions about religion and morals and manners and government.
Nearly every man of my age can recall old opinions of his own
on subjects of general interest, which he once thought highly
respectable, and which he is now almost ashamed of having ever
held. He does not remember when he changed them, or why,
but somehow they have passed away from him.
In communities these changes are often very striking. The
transformation, for instance, of the England of Cromwell into the
England of Queen Anne, or of the New England of Cotton
Mather into the New England of Theodore Parker and Emerson,
was very extraordinary, but it would be very difficult to say in
detail what brought it about or when it began. Lecky has some
curious observations in his "History of Rationalism" on these
silent changes in new beliefs, apropos of the disappearance of the
belief in witchcraft. Nobody could say what had swept it away;
but it appeared that in a certain year people were ready to burn
-
## p. 6384 (#362) ###########################################
6384
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
old women as witches, and a few years later were ready to laugh
at or pity any one who thought old women could be witches.
"At one period," says he, "we find every one disposed to believe
in witches; at a later period we find this predisposition has
silently passed away. " The belief in witchcraft may perhaps be
considered a somewhat violent illustration, like the change in
public opinion about slavery in this country. But there can be
no doubt that it is talk somebody's, anybody's, everybody's talk
-by which these changes are wrought, by which each generation
comes to feel and think differently from its predecessor.
-
No one ever talks freely about anything without contributing
something, let it be ever so little, to the unseen forces which carry
the race on to its final destiny. Even if he does not make a posi-
tive impression, he counteracts or modifies some other impression,
or sets in motion some train of ideas in some one else, which
helps to change the face of the world. So I shall, in disregard
of the great laudation of silence which filled the earth in the
days of Carlyle, say that one of the functions of an educated man
is to talk; and of course he should try to talk wisely.
## p. 6384 (#363) ###########################################
## p. 6384 (#364) ###########################################
THE GOETHE HOUSE
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## p. 6384 (#365) ###########################################
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## p. 6385 (#367) ###########################################
6385
GOETHE
(1749-1832)
BY EDWARD DOWDEN
OHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main
on August 28th, 1749, and died at Weimar on March 22d,
1832. His great life, extending over upwards of fourscore
years, makes him a man of the eighteenth century and also of the nine-
teenth. He belongs not only to German but to European literature.
And in the history of European literature his position is that of suc-
cessor to Voltaire and Rousseau. Humanity, as Voltaire said, had lost
its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth century was to recover
them. Under all Voltaire's zeal for destruction in matters of religious
belief lay a positive faith and a creative sentiment,- a faith in human
intellect and the sentiment of social justice. What indefatigable toil!
what indefatigable play! Surely it was not all to establish a nega-
tion. Voltaire poured a gay yet bitter élan into the intellectual move-
ment of his time. Yet amid his various efforts for humanity he
wanted love; he wanted reverence. And although a positive tend-
ency underlies his achievements, we are warranted in repeating the
common sentence, that upon the whole he destroyed more than he
built up.
Voltaire fought to enfranchise the understanding. Rousseau
dreamed, brooded, suffered, to emancipate the heart. A wave of pas-
sion, or at least of sentiment, swept over Europe with the Nouvelle
Héloise,' the 'Émile,' the 'Confessions. It was Rousseau, exclaims
Byron, who "threw enchantment over passion," who "knew how to
make madness beautiful. " Such an emancipation of the heart was felt,
in the eighteenth century, to be a blessed deliverance from the
material interests and the eager yet too arid speculation of the age.
But Byron in that same passage of Childe Harold' names Rousseau
"the self-torturing sophist. " And a sophist Rousseau was. His intel-
lect fed upon fictions, and dangerous fictions,-fictions respecting
nature, respecting the individual man, respecting human society.
Therefore his intellect failed to illuminate, clarify, tranquilize his
heart. His emotions were turbid, restless, and lacking in sanity.
Here then were Goethe's two great predecessors: one a most viva-
cious intelligence, the other a brooding sensibility; one aiming at an
emancipation of the understanding, but deficient in reverence and in
XI-400
## p. 6386 (#368) ###########################################
6386
GOETHE
love; the other aiming at an emancipation of the affections, but defi-
cient in sanity of thought. In what relation stood Goethe to these
great forces of the eighteenth century?
In his old age Goethe, speaking of Voltaire, uses the words a
universal source of light. " But as a young man he was repelled by
"the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and his perversion of so many
worthy subjects. " "He would never have done," says Goethe, "with
degrading religion and the sacred books, for the sake of injuring
priestcraft, as they called it. " Goethe, indeed, did not deny a use to
the spirit of negation. Mephistopheles lives and works. Yet he lives
and works as the unwilling servant of the Lord, and the service he
renders is to provoke men from indolence to activity.
Into the influence of Rousseau, on the contrary, and into the gen-
eral movement of feeling to which Rousseau belonged, Goethe in his
youth was caught, almost inevitably; and he abandoned himself to it
for a time, it might seem without restraint.
Yet Goethe differed from Rousseau as profoundly as he differed
from Voltaire.
intense, and yet it was spent within a narrow circle. There is
a marked sign of this narrowness, in his disinclination even to
look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he
disliked.
It appears that this dislike, and the ignorance consequent
upon it, applied to the works of Carlyle. Now, we may have
much or little faith in Carlyle as a philosopher or as a historian.
Half-lights and half-truths may be the utmost which, in these
departments, his works will be found to yield. But the total
want of sympathy is the more noteworthy, because the resem-
blances, though partial, are both numerous and substantial be-
tween these two remarkable men and powerful writers, as well
in their strength as in their weakness. Both are honest; and
both, notwithstanding honesty, are partisans.
Each is vastly,
though diversely, powerful in expression; and each is more power-
ful in expression than in thought. Both are, though variously,
poets using the vehicle of prose. Both have the power of por-
traitures, extraordinary for vividness and strength. For compre-
hensive disquisition, for balanced and impartial judgments, the
world will probably resort to neither; and if Carlyle gains on the
comparison in his strong sense of the inward and the ideal, he
loses in the absolute and violent character of his one-sidedness.
Without doubt, Carlyle's licentious though striking peculiarities
of style have been of a nature allowably to repel, so far as they
go, one who was so rigid as Macaulay in his literary orthodoxy,
and who so highly appreciated, and with such expenditure of
labor, all that relates to the exterior or body of a book. Still,
if there be resemblances so strong, the want of appreciation,
which has possibly been reciprocal, seems to be partly of that
nature which Aristotle would have explained by his favorite
proverb, κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ * The discrepancy is like the discrepancy
* Potter [detests] potter.
## p. 6368 (#344) ###########################################
6368
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
of colors that are too near. Carlyle is at least a great fact in
the literature of his time, and has contributed largely,- in some
respects too largely,- toward forming its characteristic habits of
thought. But on these very grounds he should not have been
excluded from the horizon of a mind like Macaulay's, with all its
large and varied and most active interests.
There have been other men of our own generation, though
very few, who if they have not equaled have approached Mac-
aulay in power of memory, and who have certainly exceeded him
in the unfailing accuracy of their recollections; and yet not in
accuracy as to dates or names or quotations, or other matters of
hard fact, when the question was one simply between ay and
no. In these he may have been without a rival. In a list of
kings, or popes, or senior wranglers, or prime ministers, or
battles, or palaces, or as to the houses in Pall Mall or about
Leicester Square, he might be followed with implicit confidence.
But a large and important class of human recollections are not
of this order: recollections for example of characters, of feelings,
of opinions; of the intrinsic nature, details, and bearings of oc-
currences. And here it was that Macaulay's wealth" was unto
him an occasion of falling. " And that in two ways. First, the
possessor of such a vehicle as his memory could not but have
something of an overweening confidence in what it told him; and
quite apart from any tendency to be vain or overbearing, he could
hardly enjoy the benefits of that caution which arises from self-
interest, and the sad experience of frequent falls. But what is
more, the possessor of so powerful a fancy could not but illumi-
nate with the colors it supplied, the matters which he gathered
into his great magazine, wherever the definiteness of their out-
line was not so rigid as to defy or disarm the action of the in-
truding and falsifying faculty. Imagination could not alter the
date of the battle of Marathon, of the Council of Nice, or the
crowning of Pepin; but it might seriously or even fundamentally
disturb the balance of light and dark in his account of the opin-
ions of Milton or of Laud, or his estimate of the effects of the
Protectorate or the Restoration, or of the character and even the
adulteries of William III. He could detect justly this want of
dry light in others; he probably suspected it in himself; but it
was hardly possible for him to be enough upon his guard against
the distracting action of a faculty at once so vigorous, so crafty,
and so pleasurable in its intense activity.
## p. 6369 (#345) ###########################################
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
6369
Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of
partisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has
been and probably much more will be said. He may not have
possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice.
tact of exact justice, which is among the very rarest as well as
the most precious of human virtues. But there never was a
writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This during his life-
time was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by
opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of
the range of controversy. He wrote for truth, but of course for
truth such as he saw it; and his sight was colored from within.
This color, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a
mordant; it was a fast color: he could not distinguish between
what his mind had received and what his mind had imparted.
Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong;
and of those calamities which are due to the intellect only, and
not the heart, there can hardly be a greater.
XI-399
.
However true it may be that Macaulay was a far more con-
summate workman in the manner than in the matter of his
works, we do not doubt that the works contain, in multitudes,
passages of high emotion and ennobling sentiment, just awards of
praise and blame, and solid expositions of principle, social, moral,
and constitutional. They are pervaded by a generous love of
liberty; and their atmosphere is pure and bracing, their general
aim and basis morally sound. Of the qualifications of this eulogy
we have spoken, and have yet to speak. But we can speak of
the style of the works with little qualification. We do not indeed.
venture to assert that his style ought to be imitated. Yet this
is not because it was vicious, but because it was individual and
incommunicable. It was one of those gifts of which, when it
had been conferred, Nature broke the mold. That it is the head
of all literary styles we do not allege; but it is different from
them all, and perhaps more different from them all than they
are usually different from one another. We speak only of natural
styles, of styles where the manner waits upon the matter, and not
where an artificial structure has been reared either to hide or to
make up for poverty of substance.
It is paramount in the union of ease in movement with per-
spicuity of matter, of both with real splendor, and of all with
immense rapidity and striking force. From any other pen, such
## p. 6370 (#346) ###########################################
6370
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
masses of ornament would be tawdry; with him they are only
rich. As a model of art concealing art, the finest cabinet pictures
of Holland are almost his only rivals. Like Pascal, he makes the
heaviest subject light; like Burke, he embellishes the barrenest.
When he walks over arid plains, the springs of milk and honey,
as in a march of Bacchus, seem to rise beneath his tread. The
repast he serves is always sumptuous, but it seems to create an
appetite proportioned to its abundance; for who has ever heard
of the reader that was cloyed with Macaulay? In none, perhaps,
of our prose writers are lessons such as he gives of truth and
beauty, of virtue and of freedom, so vividly associated with
delight. Could some magician but do for the career of life what
he has done for the arm-chair and the study, what a change
would pass on the face (at least) of the world we live in, what
an accession of recruits would there be to the professing follow-
ers of virtue!
"
The truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like
many more of us, to go out hobby-riding, but from the portent-
ous vigor of the animal he mounted was liable more than most
of us to be run away with. His merit is that he could keep his
seat in the wildest steeple-chase; but as the object in view is
arbitrarily chosen, so it is reached by cutting up the fields, spoil-
ing the crops, and spoiling or breaking down the fences needful
to secure for labor its profit, and to man at large the full enjoy-
ment of the fruits of the earth. Such is the overpowering glow
of color, such the fascination of the grouping in the first sketches
which he draws, that when he has grown hot upon his work he
seems to lose all sense of the restraints of fact and the laws of
moderation; he vents the strangest paradoxes, sets up the most
violent caricatures, and handles the false weight and measure as
effectively as if he did it knowingly. A man so able and so
upright is never indeed wholly wrong. He never for a moment
consciously pursues anything but truth. But truth depends,
above all, on proportion and relation. The preterhuman vivid-
ness with which Macaulay sees his object, absolutely casts a
shadow upon what lies around; he loses his perspective; and
imagination, impelled headlong by the strong consciousness of
honesty in purpose, achieves the work of fraud. All things for
him stand in violent contrast to one another. For the shadows,
the gradations, the middle and transition touches, which make up
## p. 6371 (#347) ###########################################
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
6371
the bulk of human life, character, and action, he has neither eye
nor taste. They are not taken account of in his practice, and
they at length die away from the ranges of his vision.
In Macaulay all history is scenic; and philosophy he scarcely
seems to touch, except on the outer side, where it opens into
action. Not only does he habitually present facts in forms of
beauty, but the fashioning of the form predominates over, and is
injurious to, the absolute and balanced presentation of the sub-
ject. Macaulay was a master in execution, rather than in what
painting or music terms expression. He did not fetch from the
depths, nor soar to the heights; but his power upon the surface
was rare and marvelous, and it is upon the surface that an ordi-
nary life is passed and that its imagery is found. He mingled,
then, like Homer, the functions of the poet and the chronicler:
but what Homer did was due to his time; what Macaulay did,
to his temperament.
The History' of Macaulay, whatever else it may be, is the
work not of a journeyman but of a great artist, and a great
artist who lavishly bestowed upon it all his powers. Such a work,
once committed to the press, can hardly die. It is not because
it has been translated into a crowd of languages, nor because it
has been sold in hundreds of thousands, that we believe it will
live; but because, however open it may be to criticism, it has in
it the character of a true and very high work of art.
Whether he will subsist as a standard and supreme authority
is another question. Wherever and whenever read, he will be
read with fascination, with delight, with wonder. And with copi-
ous instruction too; but also with copious reserve, with question-
ing scrutiny, with liberty to reject and with much exercise of
that liberty. The contemporary mind may in rare cases be taken
by storm; but posterity, never. The tribunal of the present is
accessible to influence; that of the future is incorrupt. The com-
ing generations will not give Macaulay up; but they will prob-
ably attach much less value than we have done to his ipse dixit.
They will hardly accept from him his net solutions of literary,
and still less of historic problems. Yet they will obtain, from his
marked and telling points of view, great aid in solving them.
We sometimes fancy that ere long there will be editions of his
works in which his readers may be saved from pitfalls by brief,
respectful, and judicious commentary; and that his great achieve-
ments may be at once commemorated and corrected by men of
-
## p. 6372 (#348) ###########################################
6372
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
slower pace, of drier light, and of more tranquil, broad-set, and
comprehensive judgment. For his works are in many respects
among the prodigies of literature; in some, they have never been
surpassed. As lights that have shone through the whole universe
of letters, they have made their title to a place in the solid firma-
ment of fame. But the tree is greater and better than its fruit;
and greater and better yet than the works themselves are the
lofty aims and conceptions, the large heart, the independent, man-
ful mind, the pure and noble career, which in this Biography
have disclosed to us the true figure of the man who wrote them.
## p. 6373 (#349) ###########################################
6373
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
(1831-)
MONG the men in the United States who through the agency
of the press have molded intelligent public opinion, Edwin
Lawrence Godkin deserves an honorable place. In the
columns of the New York Nation and the New York Evening Post,
he has for a generation given editorial utterance to his views upon
economic, civic, political, and international questions, this work being
supplemented by occasional incisive and scholarly articles in the best
periodicals. His clientèle has been drawn mainly from that powerful
minority which is made up of the educated,
thoughtful men and women of the country.
To this high function Mr. Godkin has con-
tributed exceptional gifts and qualifications;
and that in its exercise he has been a force
for good, is beyond dispute.
Born in Moyne, Ireland, in 1831, he was
educated at Queen's College, Belfast. Then
came the more practical education derived
from a familiarity with men and things, for
in early manhood he began newspaper
work as war correspondent, in Turkey and
the Crimea, of the London Daily News.
As correspondent of this paper he came to
the United States and settled here, being
admitted to the New York bar in 1858. But journalism was to be
his life work; and in 1865 he became the editor of The Nation, a
weekly, succeeding the Round Table, but at once taking a much
more important place as a journal of political and literary discussion,
-and the next year its proprietor. In 1881 he also became one
of the owners and the controlling editor of the New York Evening
Post, a daily, and his contributions since then have appeared in both
papers, which bear to each other the relation of a daily and weekly
edition. Thus he has been in active journalistic service for more
than thirty years.
EDWIN L. GODKIN
From this slight biographical outline it may be seen that Mr.
Godkin brought to the pursuit of his profession and to the study.
of American institutions some valuable qualifications. A college-bred
man of wide experience, an adoptive American able to judge by the
## p. 6374 (#350) ###########################################
6374
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
comparative method, a careful student of the philosophy of govern-
ment, from Aristotle to Sir Henry Maine, his views combine in an
unusual degree the practical and the theoretical. No doubt he has
in his writings what to some will seem the defect of his quality.
There is in him a certain haughtiness of temper, and what seems
like impatient contempt for the opponent in argument, which, con-
joined with a notable power of invective and satire in dealing with
what he deems to be fallacious, are likely to arouse opposition.
Hence the feeling in some quarters that Mr. Godkin is not at heart
an American, but a captious critic, with sympathies ill suited to a
democratic government.
This opinion is not justified by a fair examination of his writings.
He has on the contrary and in the true sense proved himself a true
American. He has spoken wise words upon many of the social and
political problems of our day. He has defended democracy from the
charge of failure, pointing out that here in the United States social
defects, wrongly ascribed by foreign critics to the form of govern-
ment, have been incidental to the settling of a vast new country.
He has stated with clearness and cogency the inadvisability of allow-
ing the government paternal power in finance and tariff legislation.
He has preached the difference between cheap jingoism or political
partisanship, and the enlightened Americanism which puts its finger
upon weak points, criticizing in order to correct and purify. Mr.
Godkin, in this, has been a consistent worker in a cause of which
Lowell was a noble prophet. And in regard of literary excellence,
his editorial writing is often a model of lucid, sinewy English style;
while his more deliberated essays have been admirable for calm dig-
nity, polish, and organic exposition, with an air of good breeding
over it all. The influence of such a man, both as writer and thinker,
especially in a land like the United States, has been most salutary.
THE DUTY OF CRITICISM IN A DEMOCRACY
From Problems of Modern Democracy. Copyright 1896, by Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York
INTELLIGENT man can or ought to ignore the part which
N hope of better things plays in our present social system. It
has largely, among the working classes, taken the place of
religious belief. They have brought their heaven down to earth,
and are literally looking forward to a sort of New Jerusalem, in
which all comforts and many of the luxuries of life will be
within easy reach of all. The great success of Utopian works
D
L
——————
## p. 6375 (#351) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6375
like Bellamy's shows the hold which these ideas have taken of
the popular mind. The world has to have a religion of some
kind, and the hope of better food and clothing, more leisure, and
a greater variety of amusements, has become the religion of the
working classes. Hope makes them peaceful, industrious, and
resigned under present suffering. A Frenchman saw a ragged
pauper spend his last few cents on a lottery ticket, and asked.
him how he could commit such a folly. "In order to have some-
thing to hope for," he said. And from this point of view the
outlay was undoubtedly excusable. It is literally hope which
makes the world go round, and one of the hardest things an
educated man who opens his mouth about public affairs has to
do, is to say one word or anything to dampen or destroy it. Yet
his highest duty is to speak the truth.
Luckily, there is one truth which can always be spoken with-
out offense, and that is that on the whole the race advances
through the increase of intelligence and the improvement of char-
acter, and has not advanced in any other way. The great amel-
ioration in the condition of the working classes in Europe within.
this century, including the increasing power of the trades-unions,
is the result not of any increase of benevolence in the upper
classes, but of the growth of knowledge and self-reliance and
foresight among the working classes themselves. The changes in
legislation which have improved their condition are changes which
they have demanded. When a workingman becomes a capitalist,
and raises himself in any way above his early condition, it is
rarely the result of miracle or accident. It is due to his superior
intelligence and thrift. Nothing, on the whole, can be more
delusive than official and other inquiries into the labor problem
through commissions and legislative committees. They all assume
that there is some secret in the relations of labor and capital
which can be found out by taking testimony. But they never
find anything out. Their reports during the last fifty years would
make a small library, but they never tell us anything new. They
are meant to pacify and amuse the laborer, and they do so; but
to their constant failure to do anything more we owe some of the
Socialist movement. The Socialists believe this failure due to
want of will, and that Karl Marx has discovered the great truth
of the situation, which is, that labor is entitled to the whole
product. The great law which Nature seems to have prescribed
for the government of the world, and the only law of human
## p. 6376 (#352) ###########################################
6374
EDWIN LA
comparative method, a care
ment, from Aristotle to Sir I
unusual degree the practical a
in his writings what to some
There is in him a certain i
like impatient contempt for
joined with a notable power
what he deems to be fall
Hence the feeling in some
an American, but a captious
democratic government.
This opinion is not justi
He has on the contrary at
American. He has spoke.
political problems of our c
charge of failure, pointing
defects, wrongly ascribed
ment, have been incident.
He has stated with clearne
ing the government pater:
He has preached the di
partisanship, and the en
upon weak points, critic
Godkin, in this, has bec"
Lowell was a noble prop
his editorial writing is ot
while his more deliberated
nity, polish, and organic
over it all. The influence
especially in a land like
THE DUTY OF
From Problems of Modern !
INTELLIGENT man
N°
hope of better th
has largely, amor
religious belief. They
and are literally looki
which all comforts an
within easy reach of
{
## p. 6377 (#353) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6377
1
writers or orators. And yet nothing is more
sful government than abundant criticism from
to the suspicion of particular interest. There is
governments so much dislike and resent as
he in past ages taken so much pains to put
, a history of the civil liberty would consist.
account of the resistance to criticism on the part
>
of the first acts of a successful tyranny or des-
ys the silencing of the press or the establishment
).
cction to criticism is however senseless, because
criticism—that is, through discrimination between.
astoms, or courses—that the race has managed to
the woods and lead a civilized life. The first man
to the general nakedness, and advised his fellows to
>, was the first critic. Criticism of a high tariff
a low tariff; criticism of monarchy recommends a
ism of vice recommends virtue. In fact, almost
life, in the practice of a profession or the conduct
, condemns one course and suggests another. The
adging, and judgment is the highest of the human
one which most distinguishes us from the animals.
probably nothing from which the public service of
suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
interested and competent sources. It is a very rare
neducated man to say anything publicly about the
the day. He is absorbed in science, or art, or liter-
practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his
if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is
He is silent because he does not much care, or
ne.
o embarrass the administration or
he does not feel that anything he
h difference. So that on the whole,
ructed opinion of the country is ever
report of the Bar Association on the
You was a remarkable excep-
this direction has been
'e known as the "Mug-
ltivation. They have
known to the masses
## p. 6377 (#354) ###########################################
6376
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
society which we are able to extract from history, is that the
more intelligent and thoughtful of the race shall inherit the earth.
and have the best time, and that all others shall find life on the
whole dull and unprofitable. Socialism is an attempt to contra-
vene this law and insure a good time to everybody, independently
of character and talents; but Nature will see that she is not
frustrated or brought to naught, and I do not think educated
men should ever cease to call attention to this fact; that is, ever
cease to preach hopefulness, not to everybody, but to good people.
This is no bar to benevolence to bad people or any people; but
our first duty is loyalty to the great qualities of our kind, to the
great human virtues which raise the civilized man above the
savage.
There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable
as that of the United States. The chief advantage of democratic
government is, in a country like this, the enormous force it can
command on an emergency. By "emergency" I mean the sup-
pression of an insurrection or the conduct of a foreign war. But
it is not equally strong in the ordinary work of administration.
A good many governments, by far inferior to it in strength, fill
the offices, collect the taxes, administer justice, and do the work
of legislation with much greater efficiency. One cause of this
inefficiency is that the popular standard in such matters is low,
and that it resents dissatisfaction as an assumption of superiority.
When a man says these and those things ought not to be, his
neighbors, who find no fault with them, naturally accuse him of
giving himself airs. It seems as if he thought he knew more
than they did, and was trying to impose his plans on them. The
consequence is that in a land of pure equality, as this is, critics.
are always an unpopular class, and criticism is in some sense an
odious work. The only condemnation passed on the governmental
acts or systems is apt to come from the opposite party in the
form of what is called "arraignment," which generally consists in
wholesale abuse of the party in power, treating all their acts,
small or great, as due to folly or depravity, and all their public
men as either fools or knaves. Of course this makes but small
impression on the public mind. It is taken to indicate not so
much a desire to improve the public service as to get hold of the
offices, and has as a general rule but little effect. Parties lose
their hold on power through some conspicuously obnoxious acts or
failures; never, or very rarely, through the judgments passed on
## p. 6377 (#355) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6377
them by hostile writers or orators. And yet nothing is more
necessary to successful government than abundant criticism from
sources not open to the suspicion of particular interest. There is
nothing which bad governments so much dislike and resent as
criticism, and have in past ages taken so much pains to put
down. In fact, a history of the civil liberty would consist
largely of an account of the resistance to criticism on the part
of rulers. One of the first acts of a successful tyranny or des-
potism is always the silencing of the press or the establishment
of a censorship.
Popular objection to criticism is however senseless, because
it is through criticism—that is, through discrimination between
two things, customs, or courses that the race has managed to
come out of the woods and lead a civilized life. The first man
who objected to the general nakedness, and advised his fellows to
put on clothes, was the first critic. Criticism of a high tariff
recommends a low tariff; criticism of monarchy recommends a
republic; criticism of vice recommends virtue. In fact, almost
every act of life, in the practice of a profession or the conduct
of a business, condemns one course and suggests another. The
word means judging, and judgment is the highest of the human
faculties, the one which most distinguishes us from the animals.
There is probably nothing from which the public service of
the country suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
cated class; that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
from the disinterested and competent sources. It is a very rare
thing for an educated man to say anything publicly about the
questions of the day. He is absorbed in science, or art, or liter-
ature, in the practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his
business; and if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is
a languid one. He is silent because he does not much care, or
because he does not wish to embarrass the administration or
"hurt the party," or because he does not feel that anything he
could say would make much difference. So that on the whole,
it is very rarely that the instructed opinion of the country is ever
heard on any subject. The report of the Bar Association on the
nomination of Maynard in New York was a remarkable excep-
tion to this rule. Some improvement in this direction has been
made by the appearance of the set of people known as the "Mug-
wumps," who are, in the main, men of cultivation. They have
been defined in various ways. They are known to the masses
―
## p. 6378 (#356) ###########################################
6378
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
mainly as "kickers"; that is, dissatisfied, querulous people, who
complain of everybody and cannot submit to party discipline. But
they are the only critics who do not criticize in the interest of
party, but simply in that of good government. They are a kind
of personage whom the bulk of the voters know nothing about
and find it difficult to understand, and consequently load with
ridicule and abuse. But their movement, though its visible rec-
ognizable effects on elections may be small, has done inestimable
service in slackening the bonds of party discipline, in making
the expression of open dissent from party programmes respect-
able and common, and in increasing the unreliable vote in large
States like New York. It is of the last importance that this un-
reliable vote-that is, the vote which party leaders cannot count
on with certainty-should be large in such States. The mere
fear of it prevents a great many excesses.
But in criticism one always has hard work in steering a
straight course between optimism and pessimism. These are the
Scylla and Charybdis of the critic's career. Almost every man
who thinks or speaks about public affairs is either an optimist or
a pessimist; which he is, depends a good deal on temperament,
but often on character. The political jobber or corruptionist is
almost always an optimist. So is the prosperous business man.
So is nearly every politician, because the optimist is nearly al-
ways the more popular of the two. As a general rule, people
like cheerful men and the promise of good times. The kill-joy
and bearer of bad news has always been an odious character.
But for the cultivated man there is no virtue in either optimism
or pessimism. Some people think it a duty to be optimistic, and
for some people it may be a duty; but one of the great uses of
education is to teach us to be neither one nor the other. In the
management of our personal affairs, we try to be neither one
nor the other. In business, a persistent and uproarious optimist
would certainly have poor credit. And why? Because in busi-
ness the trustworthy man, as everybody knows, is the man who
sees things as they are: and to see things as they are, without
glamor or illusion, is the first condition of worldly success. It
is absolutely essential in war, in finance, in law, in every field.
of human activity in which the future has to be thought of and
provided for. It is just as essential in politics. The only reason
why it is not thought as essential in politics is, the punishment
for failure or neglect comes in politics more slowly.
## p. 6379 (#357) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6379
The pessimist has generally a bad name, but there is a good
Ideal to be said for him. To take a recent illustration, the man
who took pessimistic views of the silver movement was for nearly
twenty years under a cloud. This gloomy anticipation of 1873
was not realized until 1893. For a thousand years after Marcus
Aurelius, the pessimist, if I may use the expression, was "cock
of the walk. " He certainly has no reason to be ashamed of his
rôle in the Eastern world for a thousand years after the Moham-
medan Hegira. In Italy and Spain he has not needed to hang
his head since the Renaissance. In fact, if we take various na-
tions and long reaches of time, we shall find that the gloomy
man has been nearly as often justified by the course of events as
the cheerful one. Neither of them has any special claim to a
hearing on public affairs. A persistent optimist, although he may
be a most agreeable man in family life, is likely, in business or
politics, to be just as foolish and unbearable as a persistent pes-
simist. He is as much out of harmony with the order of nature.
The universe is not governed on optimistic any more than on
pessimistic principles. The best and wisest of men make their
mistakes and have their share of sorrow and sickness and losses.
So also the most happily situated nations must suffer from inter-
nal discord, the blunders of statesmen, and the madness of the
people. What Cato said in the Senate of the conditions of suc-
cess, "vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo, prosperê omnia cedunt,"
is as true to-day as it was two thousand years ago. We must
remember that though the optimist may be the pleasantest man to
have about us, he is the least likely to take precautions; that is,
the least likely to watch and work for success. We owe a great
deal of our slovenly legislation to his presence in large numbers
in Congress and the legislatures. The great suffering through
which we are now passing, in consequence of the persistence.
in our silver purchases, is the direct result of unreasoning opti-
mism. Its promoters disregarded the warnings of economists and
financiers because they believed that somehow, they did not
know how, the thing would come out right in the end. The
silver collapse, together with the Civil War over slavery, are
striking illustrations to occur in one century, of the fact that
if things come out right in the end, it is often after periods of
great suffering and disaster. Could people have foreseen how the
slavery controversy would end, what frantic efforts would have
been made for peaceful abolition! Could people have foreseen
## p. 6380 (#358) ###########################################
6380
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
the panic of last year, with its wide-spread disaster, what haste
would have been made to stop the silver purchases! And yet
the experience of mankind afforded abundant reason for antici-
pating both results.
This leads me to say that the reason why educated men should
try and keep a fair mental balance between both pessimism and
optimism, is that there has come over the world in the last
twenty-five or thirty years a very great change of opinion touch-
ing the relations of the government to the community. When
Europe settled down to peaceful work after the great wars of the
French Revolution, it was possessed with the idea that the free-
dom of the individual was all that was needed for public pros-
perity and private happiness. The old government interference.
with people's movements and doings was supposed to be the
reason why nations had not been happy in the past. This became
the creed, in this country, of the Democratic party, which came
into existence after the foundation of the federal government.
At the same time there grew up here the popular idea of the
American character, in which individualism was the most marked
trait. If you are not familiar with it in your own time, you may
remember it in the literature of the earlier half of the century.
The typical American was always the architect of his own for-
tunes. He sailed the seas and penetrated the forest, and built
cities and lynched the horse thieves, and fought the Indians and
dug the mines, without anybody's help or support. He had even
an ill-concealed contempt for regular troops, as men under con-
trol and discipline. He scorned government for any other pur-
poses than security and the administration of justice. This was
the kind of American that Tocqueville found here in 1833. He
says:
"The European often sees in the public functionaries simply force;
the American sees nothing but law. One may then say that in
America a man never obeys a man, or anything but justice and law.
Consequently he has formed of himself an opinion which is often
exaggerated, but is always salutary. He trusts without fear to his
own strength, which appears to him equal to anything. A private
individual conceives some sort of enterprise. Even if this enterprise
have some sort of connection with the public welfare, it never occurs
to him to address himself to the government in order to obtain its
aid. He makes his plan known, offers to carry it out, calls other
individuals to his aid, and struggles with all his might against any
25. 501
***
Ind
74
3.
2. 4
1. A PS
# 7 8 1 23 1
57
## p. 6381 (#359) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6381
obstacles there may be in his way. Often, without doubt, he suc-
ceeds less well than the State would in his place; but in the long
run the general result of individual enterprises far surpasses anything
the government could do. "
Now there is no doubt that if this type of character has not
passed away, it has been greatly modified; and it has been mod-
ified by two agencies- the "labor problem," as it is called, and
legislative protection to native industry. I am not going to make
an argument about the value of this protection in promoting
native industry, or about its value from the industrial point of
view. We may or we may not owe to it the individual progress
and prosperity of the United States. About that I do not pro-
pose to say anything. What I want to say is that the doctrine.
that it is a function of government, not simply to foster indus-
try in general, but to consider the case of every particular in-
dustry and give it the protection that it needs, could not be
preached and practiced for thirty years in a community like this,
without modifying the old American conception of the relation
of the government to the individual. It makes the government,
in a certain sense, a partner in every industrial enterprise, and
makes every Presidential election an affair of the pocket to every
miner and manufacturer and to his men; for the men have for
fully thirty years been told that the amount of their wages would
depend, to a certain extent at least, on the way the election
went. The notion that the government owes assistance to indi-
viduals in carrying on business and making a livelihood has
in fact, largely through the tariff discussions, permeated a very
large class of the community, and has materially changed what I
may call the American outlook. It has greatly reinforced among
the foreign-born population the socialistic ideas which many
bring here with them, of the powers and duties of the State
toward labor; for it is preached vehemently by the employing
class.
What makes this look the more serious is, that our political
and social manners are not adapted to it. In Europe, the State
is possessed of an administrative machine which has a finish,
efficacy, and permanence unknown here. Tocqueville comments
on its absence among us; and it is, as all the advocates of civil-
service reform know, very difficult to supply. All the agencies
of the government suffer from the imposition on them of what
I may call non-American duties. For instance, a custom-house
## p. 6382 (#360) ###########################################
6382
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
organized as a political machine was never intended to collect the
enormous sum of duties which must pass through its hands under
our tariff. A post-office whose master has to be changed every
four years to "placate" Tammany, or the anti-Snappers, or any
other body of politicians, was never intended to handle the huge
mass which American mails have now become. One of the
greatest objections to the income tax is the prying into people's
affairs which it involves. No man likes to tell what his income
is to every stranger, much less to a politician, which our col-
lectors are sure to be. Secrecy on the part of the collector is in
fact essential to reconcile people to it in England or Germany,
where it is firmly established; but our collectors sell their lists to
the newspapers in order to make the contributors pay up.
In all these things, we are trying to meet the burdens and
responsibilities of much older societies with the machinery of a
much earlier and simpler state of things. It is high time to halt
in this progress until our administrative system has been brought
up to the level even of our present requirements. It is quite
true that, with our system of State and federal constitutions
laying prohibitions on the Legislature and Congress, any great
extension of the sphere of government in our time seems very
unlikely. Yet the assumption by Congress, with the support of
the Supreme Court, of the power to issue paper money in time
of peace, the power to make prolonged purchases of a commod-
ity like silver, the power to impose an income tax, to execute
great public works, and to protect native industry, are powers.
large enough to effect a great change in the constitution of so-
ciety and in the distribution of wealth, such as, it is safe to say,
in the present state of human culture, no government ought to
have and exercise.
One hears every day from educated people some addition to
the number of things which "governments" ought to do, but for
which any government we have at present is totally unfit. One
listens to them with amazement, when looking at the material
of which our government is composed,- for the matter of that,
of which all governments are composed; for I suppose there is no
question that all legislative bodies in the world have in twenty
years run down in quality. The parliamentary system is appar-
ently failing to meet the demands of modern democratic society,
and is falling into some disrepute; but it would seem as if there
was at present just as little chance of a substitute of any kind as
## p. 6383 (#361) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6383
of the dethronement of universal suffrage. It will probably last
indefinitely, and be as good or as bad as its constituents make
it. But this probable extension of the powers and functions of
government makes more necessary than ever a free expression
of opinion, and especially of educated opinion. We may rail at
"mere talk" as much as we please, but the probability is that
the affairs of nations and of men will be more and more reg-
ulated by talk. The amount of talk which is now expended on
all subjects of human interest -and in "talk" I include contri-
butions to periodical literature-is something of which no previ-
ous age has had the smallest conception. Of course it varies
infinitely in quality. A very large proportion of it does no good
beyond relieving the feelings of the talker. Political philosophers
maintain, and with good reason, that one of its greatest uses is
keeping down discontent under popular government. It is un-
doubtedly true that it is an immense relief to a man with a
grievance to express his feelings about it in words, even if he
knows that his words will have no immediate effect. Self-love is
apt to prevent most men from thinking that anything they say
with passion or earnestness will utterly and finally fail. But still
it is safe to suppose that one half of the talk of the world on
subjects of general interest is waste. But the other half certainly
tells. We know this from the change in ideas from genera-
tion to generation. We see that opinions which at one time
everybody held became absurd in the course of half a century —
opinions about religion and morals and manners and government.
Nearly every man of my age can recall old opinions of his own
on subjects of general interest, which he once thought highly
respectable, and which he is now almost ashamed of having ever
held. He does not remember when he changed them, or why,
but somehow they have passed away from him.
In communities these changes are often very striking. The
transformation, for instance, of the England of Cromwell into the
England of Queen Anne, or of the New England of Cotton
Mather into the New England of Theodore Parker and Emerson,
was very extraordinary, but it would be very difficult to say in
detail what brought it about or when it began. Lecky has some
curious observations in his "History of Rationalism" on these
silent changes in new beliefs, apropos of the disappearance of the
belief in witchcraft. Nobody could say what had swept it away;
but it appeared that in a certain year people were ready to burn
-
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6384
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
old women as witches, and a few years later were ready to laugh
at or pity any one who thought old women could be witches.
"At one period," says he, "we find every one disposed to believe
in witches; at a later period we find this predisposition has
silently passed away. " The belief in witchcraft may perhaps be
considered a somewhat violent illustration, like the change in
public opinion about slavery in this country. But there can be
no doubt that it is talk somebody's, anybody's, everybody's talk
-by which these changes are wrought, by which each generation
comes to feel and think differently from its predecessor.
-
No one ever talks freely about anything without contributing
something, let it be ever so little, to the unseen forces which carry
the race on to its final destiny. Even if he does not make a posi-
tive impression, he counteracts or modifies some other impression,
or sets in motion some train of ideas in some one else, which
helps to change the face of the world. So I shall, in disregard
of the great laudation of silence which filled the earth in the
days of Carlyle, say that one of the functions of an educated man
is to talk; and of course he should try to talk wisely.
## p. 6384 (#363) ###########################################
## p. 6384 (#364) ###########################################
THE GOETHE HOUSE
FRANKFORT-ON-THE-MAIN
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## p. 6384 (#365) ###########################################
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## p. 6385 (#367) ###########################################
6385
GOETHE
(1749-1832)
BY EDWARD DOWDEN
OHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main
on August 28th, 1749, and died at Weimar on March 22d,
1832. His great life, extending over upwards of fourscore
years, makes him a man of the eighteenth century and also of the nine-
teenth. He belongs not only to German but to European literature.
And in the history of European literature his position is that of suc-
cessor to Voltaire and Rousseau. Humanity, as Voltaire said, had lost
its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth century was to recover
them. Under all Voltaire's zeal for destruction in matters of religious
belief lay a positive faith and a creative sentiment,- a faith in human
intellect and the sentiment of social justice. What indefatigable toil!
what indefatigable play! Surely it was not all to establish a nega-
tion. Voltaire poured a gay yet bitter élan into the intellectual move-
ment of his time. Yet amid his various efforts for humanity he
wanted love; he wanted reverence. And although a positive tend-
ency underlies his achievements, we are warranted in repeating the
common sentence, that upon the whole he destroyed more than he
built up.
Voltaire fought to enfranchise the understanding. Rousseau
dreamed, brooded, suffered, to emancipate the heart. A wave of pas-
sion, or at least of sentiment, swept over Europe with the Nouvelle
Héloise,' the 'Émile,' the 'Confessions. It was Rousseau, exclaims
Byron, who "threw enchantment over passion," who "knew how to
make madness beautiful. " Such an emancipation of the heart was felt,
in the eighteenth century, to be a blessed deliverance from the
material interests and the eager yet too arid speculation of the age.
But Byron in that same passage of Childe Harold' names Rousseau
"the self-torturing sophist. " And a sophist Rousseau was. His intel-
lect fed upon fictions, and dangerous fictions,-fictions respecting
nature, respecting the individual man, respecting human society.
Therefore his intellect failed to illuminate, clarify, tranquilize his
heart. His emotions were turbid, restless, and lacking in sanity.
Here then were Goethe's two great predecessors: one a most viva-
cious intelligence, the other a brooding sensibility; one aiming at an
emancipation of the understanding, but deficient in reverence and in
XI-400
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6386
GOETHE
love; the other aiming at an emancipation of the affections, but defi-
cient in sanity of thought. In what relation stood Goethe to these
great forces of the eighteenth century?
In his old age Goethe, speaking of Voltaire, uses the words a
universal source of light. " But as a young man he was repelled by
"the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and his perversion of so many
worthy subjects. " "He would never have done," says Goethe, "with
degrading religion and the sacred books, for the sake of injuring
priestcraft, as they called it. " Goethe, indeed, did not deny a use to
the spirit of negation. Mephistopheles lives and works. Yet he lives
and works as the unwilling servant of the Lord, and the service he
renders is to provoke men from indolence to activity.
Into the influence of Rousseau, on the contrary, and into the gen-
eral movement of feeling to which Rousseau belonged, Goethe in his
youth was caught, almost inevitably; and he abandoned himself to it
for a time, it might seem without restraint.
Yet Goethe differed from Rousseau as profoundly as he differed
from Voltaire.
