ce. Noble pain is worth more than ignoble
pleasure; and there is a health in the _dying_ Schiller which beggars in
comparison that of the fat cattle on a thousand hills. All the world
might be well fed, well clothed, well sheltered, and very properly
behaved, and be a pitiful world nevertheless, were this all.

Let us get out of this business of merely improving _conditions_. There
are two things which make life worth living. First, the absolute worth
and significance of man's spirit in its harmonious completeness; and
hence the absolute value of culture and growth in the deepest sense of
the words. Secondly, the relevancy of actual experience and the actual
world to these ends. Goethe attends to both these, and to both in a
spirit of great sanity. He fixes his eye with imperturbable steadiness
on the central fact, then with serene, intrepid modesty suggests the
relevancy to this of the world as it is around us, and _then trusts the
healthy attraction of the higher to modify and better the lower_. Give
man, he says, something to work _for_, namely, the high uses of his
spirit; give him next something to work _with_, namely, actual
civilization, the powers, limits, and conditions which actually exist in
and around him; and if these instruments be poor, be sure he will begin
to improve upon them, the moment he has found somewhat inspiring and
sufficing to do with them. Actual conditions will improve precisely in
proportion as _all_ conditions are utilized, are placed in relations of
service to a result which contents the soul of men. And to establish in
this relation all the existing conditions of life, natural and
artificial, is the task which Goethe has undertaken.

I invite the reader to dwell upon this fact, that, the moment life has
an inspiring significance, and the moment also the men, industries, and
conditions around us become instrumental toward resolving that, in this
moment one must begin, so far as he may, bettering these conditions. If
I hire a man to work in my garden, how much is it worth to me, if he
bring not merely his hands and gardening skill, but also an appreciable
soul, with him! So soon as that fact is apparent, fruitful relations are
established between us, and sympathies begin to fly like bees, bearing
pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be
degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I _can_
make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow