andoned to his revenge him who had put out his
eyes, took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was
sedulous instructions to virtue." Yet this truly comic paper does not
probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that
he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when he wrote a
hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in composing a
treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe know how exquisitely
humorous he was when he wrote, in his Wilhelm Meister, that a beautiful
tear glistened in Theresa's right eye, and then went on to explain that
it glistened in her right eye and not in her left, because she had had a
wart on her left which had been removed--and successfully. Goethe
probably wrote this without a chuckle; he believed what a good many
people who have never read Wilhelm Meister believe still, namely, that it
was a work full of pathos--of fine and tender feeling; yet a less
consummate humorist must have felt that there was scarcely a paragraph in
it from first to last the chief merit of which did not lie in its
absurdity.

But enough has perhaps been said. As the fish in the sea, or the bird in
the air, so unreasoningly and inarticulately safe must a man feel before
he can be said to know. It is only those who are ignorant and
uncultivated who can know anything at all in a proper sense of the words.
Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty even of
his most assured convictions. It is perhaps fortunate for our comfort
that we can none of us be cultivated upon very many subjects, so that
considerable scope for assurance will still remain to us; but however
this may be, we certainly observe it as a fact that those are the
greatest men who are most uncertain in spite of certainty, and at the
same time most certain in spite of uncertainty, and who are thus best
able to feel that there is nothing in such complete harmony with itself
as a flat contradiction in terms. For nature hates that any principle
should breed, so to speak, hermaphroditically, but will give to each an
help meet for it which shall cross it and be the undoing of it; as in the
case of descent with modification, of which the essence is that every
offspring resembles its parents, and yet, at the same time, that no
offspring resembles its parents. But for the slightly irritating
stimulant of this perpetual crossing, we should pass our lives
unconsciously as though in