habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement
or rusticity, his extravagance or economy, his follies or his
cleverness. You have listened to his conversation and noted the
inflexions of his voice, the attitudes he has assumed, so as to judge
of his spirit, self-abandonment or gayety, his energy or his rigidity.
You consider his writings, works of art, financial and political
schemes, with a view to measure the reach and limits of his
intelligence, his creative power and self-command, to ascertain the
usual order, kind, and force of his conceptions, in what way he
thinks and how he resolves. All these externals are so many avenues
converging to one center, and you follow these only to reach that
center; here is the real man, namely, that group of faculties and of
sentiments which produces the rest. Behold a new world, an infinite
world; for each visible action involves an infinite train of
reasonings and emotions, new or old sensations which have combined to
bring this into light and which, like long ledges of rock sunk deep
in the earth, have cropped out above the surface and attained their
level. It is this subterranean world which forms the second aim, the
special object of the historian. If his critical education suffices,
he is able to discriminate under every ornament in architecture, under
every stroke of the brush in a picture, under each phrase of literary
composition, the particular sentiment out of which the ornament, the
stroke, and the phrase have sprung; he is a spectator of the inward
drama which has developed itself in the breast of the artist or
writer; the choice of words, the length or shortness of the period,
the species of metaphor, the accent of a verse, the chain of
reasoning--all are to him an indication; while his eyes are reading
the text his mind and soul are following the steady flow and
ever-changing series of emotions and conceptions from which this text
has issued; he is working out its _psychology_. Should you desire to
study this operation, regard the promoter and model of all the high
culture of the epoch, Goethe, who, before composing his "Iphigenia"
spent days in making drawings of the most perfect statues and who, at
last, his eyes filled with the noble forms of antique scenery and his
mind penetrated by the harmonious beauty of antique life, succeeded in
reproducing internally, with such exactness, the habits and yearnings
of Greek imagination as to provide us with an almost twin si