Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer.No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better.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 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, 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 in strange forms, often inverted and under strange names, often interchanged.Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman.It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of the great Roman Empire.
This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book -the MEDITATIONS of Marcus Aurelius.The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself.No one can read it and not be moved.
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings - those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man.Its address lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.
Wordsworth should perhaps come next.Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how.A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, 'the silence that is in the lonely hills,'
something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is best in us.I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not - Mill did not -agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast.
Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only a new error - the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession.These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate.
