very conditions of our being. For the
moment, it is charming to have a story end happily, but after one has
lived a certain number of years, and read a certain number of novels, it
is not the prosperous or adverse fortune of the characters that affects
one, but the good or bad faith of the novelist in dealing with them.
Will he play us false or will he be true in the operation of this or that
principle involved? I cannot hold him to less account than this: he must
be true to what life has taught me is the truth, and after that he may
let any fate betide his people; the novel ends well that ends faithfully.
The greater his power, the greater his responsibility before the human
conscience, which is God in us. But men come and go, and what they do in
their limited physical lives is of comparatively little moment; it is
what they say that really survives to bless or to ban; and it is the evil
which Wordsworth felt in Goethe, that must long sur vive him. There is a
kind of thing--a kind of metaphysical lie against righteousness and
common-sense which is called the Unmoral; and is supposed to be different
from the Immoral; and it is this which is supposed to cover many of the
faults of Goethe. His 'Wilhelm Meister,' for example, is so far removed
within the region of the "ideal" that its unprincipled, its evil
principled, tenor in regard to women is pronounced "unmorality," and is
therefore inferably harmless. But no study of Goethe is complete without
some recognition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to hurl the
book across the room with an indignant perception of its sensuality.
For the sins of his life Goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in his
life by his final marriage with Christiane; for the sins of his
literature many others must suffer. I do not despair, however, of the
day when the poor honest herd of man kind shall give universal utterance
to the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, in
art, in religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its crazy pride
nor its amusing vanity shall be flattered by the puissance of the
"geniuses" who have forgotten their duty to the common weakness, and have
abused it to their own glory. In that day we shall shudder at many
monsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of heartlessness, whom we still
more or less openly adore for their "genius," and shall account no man
worshipful whom we do not feel and know to be good. The spectacle of
strenuous