himself, and victoriously fought on all the fields of his
being the battle against self-deception, he now comes armed with new and
strange powers of vision to encounter life and the world,--ready either
to soar of dive,--above no fact, beneath none, by none appalled, by none
dazzled,--a falcon, whose prey is truth, and whose wing and eye are well
mated. And _he_ it is who sets that ineffable price on the being of a
real man.

This is manifested in many ways, all of them silent, rather than
obstreperous and obtrusive. It is shown by a certain gracious, ineffable
expectation with which for the first time he approaches any human soul,
as if unknown and incalculable possibilities were opening here; by a
noble ceremonial which he ever observes toward his higher characters,
standing uncovered in their presence; by the space in his eye, not
altogether measurable, which a man of worth is perceived to fill. Each
of his principal characters has an atmosphere about him, like the earth
itself; each has a vast perspective, and rounds off into mystery and
depths of including sky.

The common novelist holds his characters in the palm of his hand, as he
would his watch; winds them up, regulates, pockets them, is exceedingly
handy with them. He may continue some little, pitiful puzzle about them
for his readers; but _he_ can see over, under, around them, and can make
them stop or go, tick or be silent, altogether at pleasure. To Goethe
his characters are as intelligible and as mysterious as Nature herself.
He sees them, studies them, and with an eye how penetrating, how subtile
and sure! But over, under, and around them he would hold it for no less
than a profanity to pretend that he sees. They come upon the scene to
prove what they are; he and the reader study them together; and when
best known, their possibilities are obviously unexhausted, the unknown
remains in them still. They go forward into their future, with a real
future before them, with an unexplained life to live: not goblets whose
contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the
traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man
of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly
distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole
delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book
closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of
very definite limitations, and yet also of