Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Page 5

as they
might seem, was in an equally expectant condition. Everywhere, as in
Germany, there was polish and languor, external glitter and internal
vacuity; it was not fire, but a picture of fire, at which no soul could be
warmed. Literature had sunk from its former vocation: it no longer held
the mirror up to Nature; no longer reflected, in many-coloured
expressive symbols, the actual passions, the hopes, sorrows, joys of
living men; but dwelt in a remote conventional world in /Castles of
Otranto/, in /Epigoniads/ and /Leonidases/, among clear, metallic
heroes, and white, high, stainless beauties, in whom the drapery and
elocution were nowise the least important qualities. Men thought it
right that the heart should swell into magnanimity with Caractacus and
Cato, and melt into sorrow with many an Eliza and Adelaide; but the
heart was in no haste either to swell or to melt. Some pulses of heroical
sentiment, a few /un/natural tears might, with conscientious readers, be
actually squeezed forth on such occasions: but they came only from the
surface of the mind; nay, had the conscientious man considered the
matter, he would have found that they ought not to have come at all.
Our only English poet of the period was Goldsmith; a pure, clear,
genuine spirit, had he been of depth or strength sufficient; his /Vicar of
Wakefield/ remains the best of all modern Idyls; but it is and was
nothing more. And consider our leading writers; consider the poetry of
Gray, and the prose of Johnson. The first a laborious mosaic, through
the hard stiff lineaments of which little life or true grace could be
expected to look: real feeling, and all freedom of expressing it, are

sacrificed to pomp, to cold splendour; for vigour we have a certain
mouthing vehemence, too elegant indeed to be tumid, yet essentially
foreign to the heart, and seen to extend no deeper than the mere voice
and gestures. Were it not for his /Letters/, which are full of warm
exuberant power, we might almost doubt whether Gray was a man of
genius; nay, was a living man at all, and not rather some
thousand-times more cunningly devised poetical turning-loom, than
that of Swift's Philosophers in Laputa. Johnson's prose is true, indeed,
and sound, and full of practical sense: few men have seen more clearly
into the motives, the interests, the whole walk and conversation of the
living busy world as it lay before him; but farther than this busy, and to
most of us, rather prosaic world, he seldom looked: his instruction is
for men of business, and in regard to matters of business alone.
Prudence is the highest Virtue he can inculcate; and for that finer
portion of our nature, that portion of it which belongs essentially to
Literature strictly so called, where our highest feelings, our best joys
and keenest sorrows, our Doubt, our Love, our Religion reside, he has
no word to utter; no remedy, no counsel to give us in our straits; or at
most, if, like poor Boswell, the patient is importunate, will answer:
"My dear Sir, endeavour to clear your mind of Cant."
The turn which Philosophical speculation had taken in the preceding
age corresponded with this tendency, and enhanced its narcotic
influences; or was, indeed, properly speaking, the loot they had sprung
from. Locke, himself a clear, humble-minded, patient, reverent, nay
religious man, had paved the way for banishing religion from the world.
Mind, by being modelled in men's imaginations into a Shape, a
Visibility; and reasoned of as if it had been some composite, divisible
and reunitable substance, some finer chemical salt, or curious piece of
logical joinery,--began to lose its immaterial, mysterious, divine though
invisible character: it was tacitly figured as something that might, were
our organs fine enough, be /seen/. Yet who had ever seen it? Who could
ever see it? Thus by degrees it passed into a Doubt, a Relation, some
faint Possibility; and at last into a highly-probable Nonentity.
Following Locke's footsteps, the French had discovered that 'as the
stomach secretes Chyle, so does the brain secrete Thought.' And what
then was Religion, what was Poetry, what was all high and heroic

feeling? Chiefly a delusion; often a false and pernicious one. Poetry,
indeed, was still to be preserved; because Poetry was a useful thing:
men needed amusement, and loved to amuse themselves with Poetry:
the playhouse was a pretty lounge of an evening; then there were so
many precepts, satirical, didactic, so much more impressive for the
rhyme; to say nothing of your occasional verses, birthday odes,
epithalamiums, epicediums, by which 'the dream of existence may be
so highly sweetened and embellished.' Nay, does not Poetry, acting on
the imaginations of men, excite them to daring purposes; sometimes, as
in the case of Tyrtaeus, to