actual European civilization. What is this but
to say that Goethe faces the facts? What is it but to say that he
accepts the conditions of his problem? He is to show that the high
possibilities of growth can be realized _here_. To run off, get up a
fancy world, and then picture these possibilities as coming to fruition
_there_, would be a mere toying with his readers. Here is modern
civilization, with its fixed forms, its rigid limits, its traditional
mechanisms. Here is this life, where men make, execute, and obey laws,
own and manage property, buy and sell, plant, sail, build, marry and
beget children and maintain households, pay taxes, keep out of debt, if
they are wise, and go to the poorhouse, or beg, or do worse, if they are
unwise or unfortunate. Here such trivialities as starched collars,
blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society
has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and
connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare
exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. One cannot even go into
the street in a wilfully strange costume, without establishing
repulsions and balking relations between him and his neighbors which
destroy their use to each other. Every man is bound to the actual form
of society by his necessities at least, if not by his good-will.

To step violently out of all this puts one in a social vacuum,--a
position in which few respire well, while most either perish or become
in some degree monstrous. It is necessary that one should live and work
with his fellows, if he is to obtain the largest growth. On the other
hand, to be merely in and of this--a wheel, spoke, or screw, in this
vast social mechanism--makes one, not a man, but a thing, and precludes
all growth but such as is obscure and indirect. Thousands, indeed, have
no desire but to obtain some advantageous place in this machinery.
Meanwhile this enormous conventional civilization strives, and must
strive, to make every soul its puppet. Let each fall into the routine,
pursue it in some shining manner, asking no radical questions, and he
shall have his heart's desire. "Blessed is he," it cries, "who
handsomely and with his whole soul reads upwards from man to position
and estate,--from man to millionnaire, judge, lord, bishop! Cursed is he
who questions, who aims to strike down beneath this great mechanism, and
to connect himself with the primal resources of his being! The