Among these, no more
instructive name occurs than that of Goethe, to represent the power
and duties of the scholar or writer.
I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life
and aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe,
a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying
its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, and taking away, by his
colossal parts, the reproach of weakness, which, but for him, would
lie on the intellectual works of the period. He appears at a time when
a general culture has spread itself, and has smoothed down all sharp
individual traits; when, in the absence of heroic characters, a social
comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no poet, but scores of
poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, with
transit-telescope, barometer, and concentrated soup and pemmican; no
Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number of clever parliamentary and
forensic debaters; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divinity; no
learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms, and
book-clubs, without number.
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