picture was
also sufficiently, perhaps a touch more than sufficiently, admitted in
his own being. He would have been a conventionalist and epicurean,
unless he had been a seer. He would have been a mere man of the world,
had he not been Goethe. But whereas a man of the world reads up from man
to dignity, estate, and social advantage, he reverses the process, and
reads up from these to man. Say that he does it with some stammering,
with some want of the last nicety. What then? It were enough, if he set
forth upon the true road, though his own strength fail before the end is
reached. It is enough, if, falling midway, even though it be by excess
of the earthly weight he bears, he still point forward, and his voice
out of the dust whisper, "There lies your way!" This alone makes him a
benefactor of mankind.

This specific aim of Goethe's work makes it, indeed, a novel.
Conventional society and the actual conditions of life are, with respect
to eternal truth, but the _novelties_ of time. The novelist is to
picture these, and, in picturing, subordinate them to that which is
perpetual and inspiring. Just so far as he opens the ravishing
possibilities of life in commanding reconciliation with the formal
civilization of a particular time, he does his true work.

The function of the poet is different. His business it is simply to
_refresh_ the spirit of man. To its lip he holds the purest ichors of
existence; with ennobling draughts of awe, pity, sympathy, and joy, he
quickens its blood and strengthens its vital assimilations. The
particular circumstances he uses are merely the cup wherein this wine of
life is contained. This he may obtain as most easily he can; the world
is all before him where to choose.

The novelist has no such liberty. His business it is to find the ideal
possibilities of man _here_, in the midst of actual society. He shall
teach us to free the heart, while respecting the bonds of circumstance.
And the more strictly he clings to that which is central in man on the
one hand, and the more broadly and faithfully he embraces the existing
prosaic limitations on the other, the more his work answers to the whole
nature of his function. Goethe has done the latter thoroughly, his
accusers themselves being judges; that he has done the other, and how he
has done it, I have sought to show in a preceding paper. He looks on
actual men and actual society with an eye of piercing observation; he
depicts them with remorse