Flathead Indians were to suppose _him_, the Thoreau of our
love and pride, unborn still. The civilization he slighted was an air
that he breathed; it was implied, as impulse and audience, in those
books of his, wherein he enshrined his spirit, and whereby he kept its
health.

A fixed social order is indirectly necessary even to him who, by rare
gifts of Nature, can stand nobly and unfalteringly aside from it. And it
is directly, instantly necessary to him who, either by less power of
self-support or by a more flowing human sympathy, _must_ live with men,
and _must_ comply with the conditions by which social connection is
preserved.

The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the
primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous,
engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few
elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The
reconciling word,--is there a reconciling word?

Here, now, comes one who answers, Yes. And he answers thus, not by a
bald assertion, but by a picture wherein these opposites lose their
antagonism,--by a picture which is true to both, yet embraces both, and
shapes them into a unity. That is Goethe. This attempt represents the
grand _nisus_ of his life. It is most fully made in "Wilhelm Meister."

Above the world he places the growing spirit of man, the vessel of all
uses, with his resource in eternal Nature. Then he seizes with a
sovereign hand upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it
all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization,
he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true
end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in
all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with
growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the
harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that
jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand
rolling organ-harmonies of life.

That he succeeds to perfection I do not say. I could find fault enough
with his book, if there were either time or need. There is no need: its
faults are obvious. In binding himself by such unsparing oaths to
recognize and admit all the outward truth of society, he has, indeed,
grappled with the whole problem, but also made its solution a little
cumbrous and incomplete. Nay, this which he so admits in his