unfolding the Godlike to
men: Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age,
teaching all men that a God is still present in their life; that all
'Appearance,' whatsoever we see in the world, is but as a vesture for
the 'Divine Idea of the World,' for 'that which lies at the bottom of
Appearance.' In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged
or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the
world's Priest:--guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark
pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp
zeal the _true_ Literary Man, what we here call the _Hero_ as Man of
Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly
in this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles not, as for
the one good, to live wholly in it,--he is, let him live where else he
like, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is,
says Fichte, a 'Bungler, _Stuemper_.' Or at best, if he belong to the
prosaic provinces, he may be a 'Hodman;' Fichte even calls him
elsewhere a 'Nonentity,' and has in short no mercy for him, no wish
that _he_ should continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of
the Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we here
mean.

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by
far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe.
To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a
life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine
mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once
more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all,
not in fierce impure fire-splendour as of Mahomet, but in mild
celestial radiance;--really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic
times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one of the quietest,
among all the great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosen
specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. And it were
a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for I
consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, and
perhaps still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me a
noble spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping
silence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred,
high-cultivated Man of Letters! We have had no such spectacle; no man
capable of affording s