He who
cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily
papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at
least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under
the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi
exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will
bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass,
it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are
always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit
of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic
symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a
CAPUT MORTUUM of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness,
but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make
him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a
bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my
gratitude to Herbert Spencer.
GOETHE'S LIFE, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when
it first fell into my hands - a strange instance of the
partiality of man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom
I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the
sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life, and
wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of
WERTHER, and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink
Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior
talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the rights
and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to
his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for
Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so
false to its office, does here for once perform for us some
of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly
mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and
shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character.
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