f part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary
deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and
becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only
useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand,
not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot
judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will
get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the
influence of Herbert Spencer.[12] No more persuasive rabbi exists. How
much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is
clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his
words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages
a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic
symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a _caput
mortuum_[13] of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with
most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome,
as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be
much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.

_Goethe's Life_, by Lewes,[14] had a great importance for me when it
first fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of
man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than
Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open
the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that
crowning offence of _Werther_, and in his own character a mere
pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior
talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties
of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest
and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained!
Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform
for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the
truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining
virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. History serves us
well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the
popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to
make us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential
identity of man, and even in the originals only to those who can
recognise their own human virtues and defects