INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 AND THE SEARCH FOR 
 
 THE RESTFUL 
 
 GUSTAV POLLAK
 
 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 AND THE SEARCH FOR 
 
 THE RESTFUL 
 
 By 
 GUSTAV POLLAK 
 
 THE NATION PRESS. INC. 
 
 20 VESBY STREET 
 
 NEW YORK
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1919 
 BY GUSTAV POLLAK
 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 The author refers the Reader for a fuller treat- 
 ment of the subjects discussed in this little book 
 to his previously published volumes on 
 
 International Perspective in Criticism: 
 Goethe, Grillparzer, Sainte-Beuve, Lowell. 
 New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1914. 
 
 The Hygiene of the Soul: The Memoir of a 
 Physician and Philosopher. New York: Dodd, 
 Mead & Co. 1910. 
 
 Franz Grillparzer and the Austrian Drama. 
 New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1907. 
 
 The principal points of what he then said are 
 here once more emphasized, and he hopes that 
 their restatement at the present time will be con- 
 sidered not inopportune. 
 
 Keene Valley, N. Y. 
 August, 1919.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Literature and Patriotism . . 5 
 
 II. Goethe's Universal Interests . 13 
 
 III. Grillparzer's Originality . . 34 
 
 IV. Sainte-Beuve's Unique Position . 49 
 V. Lowell : Patriot AND Cosmopolitan 68 
 
 VI. Permanent Literary Standards . 8 1 
 
 VII. Feuchtersleben the Philosopher ioi 
 
 VIII. The Hygiene of the Soul . . 117 
 
 IX. Feuchtersleben's Aphorisms . 162 
 
 X. Feuchtersleben's Influence . 172
 
 INTERNATIONAL MINDS AND 
 
 THE SEARCH FOR 
 
 THE RESTFUL 
 
 Literature and Patriotism 
 
 "I AM convinced," says Lessing, "that no 
 nation on earth has a monopoly of intellect in 
 any of its manifestations. I know very well that 
 people talk of the profoundly serious English- 
 men and the witty Frenchmen, but who has 
 made this distinction? Surely not Nature, who 
 impartially distributes all her gifts. There are 
 just as many witty Englishmen as witty French- 
 men, and just as many profoundly serious 
 Frenchmen as profoundly serious Englishmen." 
 We have in these words an implied declaration 
 of his belief, borne out by all his teachings, that 
 intellect recognizes no distinctions of nation- 
 ality, race, or religion. 
 
 Chauvinistic criticism of foreign achievement 
 
 is merely proof of inability to criticize at all. 
 
 Herder condemns the expression, "the races of 
 
 mankind," as "ignoble words." And if the 
 
 [5]
 
 6 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 philosopher and scientist is thus admonished to 
 divest himself of a prejudice which would segre- 
 gate mankind along narrow and arbitrary lines, 
 with how much greater force comes the warning 
 to the literary critic, who is solely concerned 
 with the beautiful in human thought and expres- 
 sion. 
 
 Among the eminent writers of present-day 
 England Morley and Bryce have shown inter- 
 national sympathies in every sense of the word. 
 Among our own great writers Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes possessed in full measure active sym- 
 pathy with other nations. Writing from Paris 
 to his parents, at the age of twenty-five, he said: 
 "One of the greatest pleasures of living abroad 
 is to meet in such an easy, pleasant sort of a way 
 people from all quarters of the world. Greek 
 and Barbarian, Jew and Gentile, differ much 
 less than one thinks." We recognize in the 
 language of the young American student the 
 spirit of the future cosmopolitan thinker. 
 
 Unfortunately, the day is not yet past when 
 the interests of nations were considered as neces- 
 sarily opposed to each other. A hundred years 
 ago Friedrich Schlcgel wrote:
 
 LITERATURE AND PATRIOTISM 7 
 
 The dwellers in Asia and the people of Europe ought 
 to be treated in popular works as members of one vast 
 family, and their history will never be separated by any 
 student anxious fully to comprehend the bearing of 
 the whole; but the idea of Oriental genius in literature 
 generally entertained in the present day is founded on 
 that of a few Asiatic writers only, the Persians and 
 Arabs in particular, and a few books of the Old Testa- 
 ment, in so far as we may be permitted to view the latter 
 as poetry ; but there are many other Asiatic nations to 
 whom this ordinary opinion is by no means applicable. 
 
 Are East and West nearer to each other to- 
 day? Few indeed are the great writers who 
 have heard the call of the Orient. 
 
 I have ventured to group together in these 
 pages five literary men of acknowledged impor- 
 tance — writers whom the literatures of Ger- 
 many, Austria, France and America cherish 
 among their greatest possessions, who were 
 deeply imbued with the national spirit and yet 
 endowed with international sympathies, who 
 surveyed mankind and its past achievements 
 with a philosophic gaze, who studied and 
 thought as long as they lived, and looked for 
 beauty in literature, finding expression for the 
 perfect things which their search revealed in 
 beautiful words of their own. I have consid-
 
 8 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 ered mainly the critical activity of the first four 
 — Goethe, Grillparzer, Sainte-Beuve, and 
 Lowell. 
 
 Though there have been greater scholars in 
 special fields who followed the critical calling, 
 no other literary critics brought to their task 
 more varied knowledge and a clearer percep- 
 tion of the dignity of literary achievement. All 
 were careful and keen-eyed observers; each 
 taught and practised that, while in veneration 
 for the literary traditions of the past, and in 
 close study of the great models, are rooted the 
 guiding principles of criticism, the literary 
 man, above all, must live in the present and 
 satisfy the demands of the hour. They had a 
 clear eye for the realities of life and inculcated 
 and practised good citizenship. All four rose 
 to high public station, though Lowell alone was 
 consistently active in the political developments 
 of his country. It was their common lot to be 
 accused of lack of patriotism, but all alike an- 
 swered and refuted the criticism of their politi- 
 cal adversaries. Goethe, occupying the highest 
 positions in the duchy of Saxe-Weimar, Grill- 
 parzer as member, in his old age, of the Austrian
 
 LITERATURE AND PATRIOTISM 9 
 
 House of Peers, Sainte-Beuve as French Sena- 
 tor, Lowell as American Minister in Spain and 
 England — all bore their public dignities easily 
 and worthily. 
 
 Each of these men had to contend against 
 physical depressions, which in the case of Grill- 
 parzer and Lowell were accentuated by inheri- 
 tance; but they all conquered their weaknesses 
 by sheer will-power and reliance on intellectual 
 resources. They rose, like all lofty minds, into 
 regions of serenity. Their idealism, as reflected 
 in their critical standards, bears no trace of 
 physical infirmity or mental indecision. Con- 
 tradictions there are in their critical utterances, 
 but we see in these merely varying aspects of the 
 subjects due to changing moods and the flight of 
 time. Personal prejudice but rarely clouds their 
 literary judgment. 
 
 While neither Grillparzer nor Lowell had 
 the encyclopaedic range of knowledge over 
 which Goethe's vision swept, nor the familiarity 
 with the natural sciences which the study of 
 medicine had brought to Sainte-Beuve, they 
 seized as eagerly as Goethe and Sainte-Beuve 
 what served their purpose. We find Lowell
 
 10 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 early in his career devoting many hours each 
 day to the study of German and Spanish, and 
 he mastered the latter language perhaps even 
 more completely than Grillparzer, though he 
 did not draw the same inspiration from its poets. 
 Goethe, Grillparzer, Sainte-Beuve, and 
 Lowell alike sought to the last the companion- 
 ship of wise books, and their critical faculty 
 remained undimmed in old age. Eleven days 
 before his death Goethe writes to his friend 
 Zelter a letter in the liveliest strain; his mind 
 is occupied with "all sorts of examples from 
 ancient history," with an archaeological discov- 
 ery of great personal interest to him, but whose 
 intrinsic importance, he says, one ought to be 
 careful not to overrate: he speaks of remains of 
 fossil animals and plants that are accumulating 
 around him : he finds that it has become the fash- 
 ion for English, French, and Germans "to 
 express themselves in an incomprehensible man- 
 ner," and he longs for "the emphatic language 
 of some Italian." And he praises Zelter for 
 remaining "firm in the midst of what is fleet- 
 ing." "As for myself," he says, "living chiefly 
 in the past, less in the future, and at present
 
 LITERATURE AND PATRIOTISM II 
 
 thinking of what is very remote, bear in mind 
 that I am quite content." 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, for years in the agonies of a 
 cruel and, as he realized, hopeless malady, kept 
 on writing with stoic determination for the press 
 almost to the last hour. Grillparzer's closing 
 eyes rested on a volume of the Greek tragedian 
 who, above all others, had been his solace in life. 
 Lowell abandoned his reading only with life 
 itself. During his last illness, "his books," in 
 the words of his biographer, Horace E. Scud- 
 der, "were close at hand and his constant 
 friends. He re-read Boswell's Johnson for the 
 fourth time, and he read the recently published 
 full diary of Walter Scott. He took up novel 
 reading, rather a new taste, and amused himself 
 with contemporaneous society in England as 
 depicted by Norris. . . . Death found him 
 cheerful." 
 
 Such was the consistent attitude toward life 
 and literature of these eminently representative 
 men of letters. Theirs was — with all the differ- 
 ences in temperament and personal character- 
 istics — a self-contained repose, as free from flip- 
 pant self-sufficiency as it was from the shallow
 
 12 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 optimism which sees in the things of this world 
 the best of all possible things. Though Lowell 
 betrayed the Puritan strain in his blood and pro- 
 fessed a certain allegiance to inherited faith, 
 and though Sainte-Beuve sometimes toyed with 
 Catholicism, they ranged themselves with 
 Goethe and Grillparzer on the side of intellec- 
 tual independence concerning all the religious 
 movements that have left their impress on lit- 
 erature and swayed thinking men. All four, no 
 matter what their subject, spoke from the depth 
 of conviction. We feel at all times the sheer 
 intellectual force of their utterances, and we 
 yield to the charm of their diction. Of each of 
 them, at his best, is true what Emerson said of 
 Montaigne: ''Cut his words, and they bleed."
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 
 
 Sainte-Beuve speaks of Goethe as the great- 
 est of all critics. He certainly stands alone in 
 the comprehensiveness of his intellectual sym- 
 pathies and the vastness of his knowledge, in the 
 manifestations of a powerful, creative genius 
 finding critical utterance. All the phases of 
 Goethe's activity have been amply discussed in 
 that vast Goethe literature to which all nations 
 have contributed, but something, it would seem, 
 is still to be said of his unique importance as an 
 international critic. 
 
 Wisdom such as Goethe possessed is not 
 learned from books; he looked upon life and 
 men, upon literature, science, and art with equal 
 interest and equal detachment. The world can 
 show no other example of so much creative 
 power joined to so much critical acumen. His 
 poetic productions, as he so often pointed out, 
 were born of the impulse of the moment, his 
 critical wisdom was the result of life-long self- 
 restraint. His attitude was always judicial, 
 though at times there was in his judgments a 
 certain lack of finality, as if he felt the need of 
 
 [13]
 
 14 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 Still wider information. His intellectual curi- 
 osity was endless, though kept within bounds by 
 his natural reposefulness. He allowed nothing 
 to claim his attention exclusively. It was his 
 aim to rise above the merely transitory and fas- 
 ten upon the permanent. His sympathies were 
 too general to be expended upon any one phase 
 of individual effort. Nor does this imply, as 
 has sometimes been charged, a certain aristo- 
 cratic aloofness in Goethe's character. "It was 
 natural for me," he says in his autobiography, 
 "to enter into the conditions of other men, to 
 sympathise with every phase of man's existence 
 and to find pleasure in sharing it." We feel 
 this universal sympathy in Goethe's critical 
 attitude toward notable literary efforts of what- 
 ever kind. He approaches the most diverse sub- 
 jects with equal interest and equal desire to learn 
 the truth. He discusses, as a young man, the 
 poems of an obscure Polish Jew quite as philo- 
 sophically as a scientific treatise on the clouds, 
 or Shakespeare's Cynibeline. No other critic 
 has given to the world such ripe and varied 
 results of self-culture. His literary susceptibili- 
 ties sprang from the ever deepening conviction
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 1 5 
 
 that all mankind is related to the truly educated 
 man. He adopted and expanded the saying of 
 Epictetus: "Never, in reply to the question to 
 what country you belong, say that you are an 
 Athenian or a Corinthian, but say that you are 
 a citizen of the world." 
 
 In this noble cosmopolitanism lay Goethe's 
 supreme importance as literary critic. The love 
 of one's country is natural to everybody and need 
 not be inculcated, but our interest in other na- 
 tions can be strengthened and kept alive only by 
 active sympathy and deliberate effort. "The 
 poet," said Goethe to Eckermann, "loves his 
 native land as a man and citizen, but the father- 
 land of his poetic powers and his poetic activity 
 is the good and noble and beautiful, and that is 
 not limited to any particular province or any 
 particular country.* He seizes it and makes use 
 of it wherever he finds it. He may be likened 
 to the eagle who soars over the land with wide 
 gaze, and is indifferent as to whether the hare 
 
 *LowelI expresses the same thought in the lines : 
 "Where is the true man's fatherland? 
 Is it where he by chance is born? 
 Doth not the yearning spirit scorn 
 In such scant borders to be spanned?"
 
 1 6 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 upon which he suddenly descends is running on 
 Prussian or Saxon soil. What, in reality, does 
 it mean to love one's own country and be patri- 
 otic? If a poet has all his life endeavored to 
 overcome harmful prejudices and narrow views, 
 to enlighten his countrymen, improve their 
 tastes, and ennoble their feelings and thoughts, 
 could he have been better employed, and have 
 rendered a more patriotic service?" 
 
 Amid the endless variety of subjects to which 
 Goethe's critical sagacity was applied through- 
 out life, his vision ever remained clear. He 
 discerned every object that came within his ken, 
 and analyzed carefully whatever appealed to 
 him. No other critic of modern times inspires 
 us with the same confidence in his competence 
 to speak of matters outside of the chosen field in 
 which he is the recognized master; no one had 
 the same background of ripe experience, the 
 same fund of wisdom on which he could end- 
 lessly draw. No other critic has so constantly 
 pointed out, by his own example, the interde- 
 pendence of literature, art and science. Just as, 
 in conversation with his friends, he passed 
 rapidly from topic to topic, culling from the
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 1 7 
 
 many fields over which his mind continually 
 ranged, so in his contact with the affairs of life 
 he turned from occupation to occupation, "with- 
 out haste, without rest." Nothing can be more 
 instructive in this respect than to show how 
 many activities Goethe could crowd into a sin- 
 gle year, although, as applied to him, the word 
 "crowded" seems ill-chosen, to such a degree 
 was constant and varied activity a necessity of 
 his nature. Let us take, at random, his notes 
 for the year 181 7, in the Annalen. 
 
 "For more than one reason," he writes, "I 
 had during this year to make a prolonged stay 
 in Jena, and foreseeing this, I sent there some of 
 my manuscripts, drawings, apparatus and col- 
 lections. But first of all, I inspected the various 
 institutions, and finding much that seemed 
 important in its bearing on the formation and 
 transformation of plants, I established a sepa- 
 rate botanical museum." 
 
 He also rearranged, during this year, the uni- 
 versity library, which was in a state of neglect 
 and confusion, as well as the veterinary school. 
 Among the other subjects to which he devoted 
 attention at the same period were the following:
 
 1 8 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 The anatomy of caterpillars and butterflies, the 
 influence of Kant on his own philosophical 
 studies, geology, mineralogy and kindred sci- 
 ences, the precious stones of Brazil, the polari- 
 zation of light and chromatics. Everything 
 assumed additional importance in his hands 
 through his tendency to connect the remote with 
 the present. Thus he says, in the entry referred 
 to: 
 
 "I ow^ed much enlightenment in geology and 
 geography to Sorriot's map of the mountains of 
 Europe; through it, for example, the land and 
 the soil of Spain, so troublesome to a command- 
 ing general and so favorable to guerilla war- 
 fare, became at once clear to me. I drew the 
 principal water-sheds on my own map of Spain, 
 and every campaign, every route, all the regular 
 and irregular army movements became plain 
 and intelligible." Plastic art, as usual, claimed 
 much of his attention. His desire to see the 
 Elgin marbles at that time was so great that 
 "one fine, sunny morning, starting to drive from 
 my house without any particular purpose, I sud- 
 denly turned, overcome by my desire, towards 
 Rudolstadt, where I refreshed myself by gazing
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 1 9 
 
 long on the truly wonderful heads of Monte 
 Cavallo." He studied minutely Bossi's work 
 on Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" as well 
 as pen drawings, engravings and lithographs, 
 statuary and archaeological remains, observed 
 the scattering of the seed of the barberry flower, 
 ''casually made it my business to purge an old 
 edition of Thomas Campanella's De sensu rerum 
 from printer's errors"; turned with pleasure 
 ''after dwelling long on clouds and their forms" 
 to a translation of the Hindu Megha-Duta, grew 
 "into the habit of reading Byron," found in John 
 Hunter's Life "a most important monument of 
 a splendid mind which, without school learning, 
 developed nobly and powerfully," and con- 
 trasted with it the Life of Franklin, which, 
 "while of the same general character," was "as 
 wide apart from it as the heavens." From 
 Elphinstone's Cabul and Raffle's History of 
 Java he "profited immensely." Among other 
 books that influenced him during the year were 
 Hermann's De Mythologia Graecorum anti- 
 quissima and Raynouard's Recherches siir Van- 
 ciennete de la langue rotnane. 
 
 Such many-sidedness implied necessarily the
 
 20 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 ability to keep at a distance subjects that had 
 ceased to interest him. Thus he rarely recurred 
 to Rousseau after he reached maturity, although 
 he had been greatly influenced by him in his 
 youth. But what had entered deeply into his 
 intellectual life became his permanent posses- 
 sion. He never ceased to draw inspiration from 
 the ancients, never abated his admiration for 
 Shakespeare, or Moliere, or Spinoza. 
 
 Much has been said of Goethe's interest in 
 world-literature. In its essence, his effort to 
 foster an international appreciation of the mas- 
 ter works of all time was a protest against 
 national one-sidedness. But such an apprecia- 
 tion was conditioned on critical capacity to dis- 
 tinguish between the commonplace good and the 
 commanding best. There is narrowness in too 
 wide a tolerance of mediocrity. Such narrow- 
 ness was impossible to Goethe. "In our esti- 
 mate of foreign writers," he says, "we must not 
 fasten upon national characteristics and imagine 
 that they are to serve as our model. We must 
 not single out the Chinese, or the Serbs, or Cal- 
 deron, or the Nibelungenlied; but if we look for 
 a model of what is really excellent we must
 
 Goethe's universal interests 21 
 
 return again and again to the ancient Greeks, 
 in whose works man in all his beauty appears 
 to us. All the rest is only of a historic interest, 
 and we may use what good there is in it as far 
 as it serves our purpose." Goethe disliked pro- 
 vincialism in literature, just as he deprecated 
 sectarianism in religion and chauvinism in poli- 
 tics. International hatred was utterly incon- 
 ceivable to him. There were certain patriots 
 who reproached him with not having taken up 
 arms during the War of Liberation, or at least 
 with not having encouraged it openly in his 
 writings. 
 
 "Let us not speak of this," said Goethe on this 
 subject to Eckermann; "we live in a foolish 
 world, which does not know what it wants; we 
 must allow it to have its say. How could I take 
 up arms without being impelled thereto by 
 hatred? And how could I hate at my age? 
 Had those events happened when I was t^venty 
 years of age, I should surely not have been the 
 last to take up arms, but they took place when 
 I was past sixty. Besides, we cannot all serve 
 our country in the same way. Each of us must 
 do the best God has enabled him to do. I have
 
 22 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 toiled hard enough for half a century. I may 
 say that in those matters which nature has fitted 
 me to do as my daily task, I have allowed myself 
 no rest or relaxation by day or night; I have 
 always toiled, studied, and aimed at progress as 
 far and as well as I could. If each of us can 
 say the same thing of himself, it will be well 
 with all of us. . . . 
 
 "To write military songs, sitting in my room 
 — that would indeed have suited my nature! 
 Camping in the open air, by night, with the 
 horses of the enemy's outposts neighing near 
 me, that would have been more to my liking. 
 But this was not my affair, nor the object of my 
 life. That was the business of Theodor 
 Korner; his martial songs suited his nature per- 
 fectly. But war is foreign to me, and I am 
 without military ambition; martial songs would 
 therefore have been merely a mask, which would 
 have ill fitted me. 
 
 "I have never affected anything in my poetry. 
 I have never thought and expressed anything 
 that did not live within me and inspire me irre- 
 sistibly. I have never written love songs except 
 when I loved; how then could I have written
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 23 
 
 songs of hatred without hating? And between 
 ourselves, I never hated the French, although 
 I thanked God when we were rid of them. 
 How could I, to whom the question of culture 
 and barbarism alone is all-important, hate a 
 nation which is among the most cultured of the 
 world, and to which I owe so great a part of my 
 own culture? National hatred is indeed a 
 peculiar thing. It is always found most pro- 
 nounced and violent where civilization is low- 
 est; but there is a stage of culture where it 
 vanishes altogether, where one stands, so to say, 
 above all nations, and feels the happiness and 
 the sorrows of a neighboring people as much as 
 if they were a part of one's own. This degree 
 of culture was in accord with my nature, and I 
 had become confirmed in these views before I 
 reached my sixtieth year." 
 
 The creation of a world-literature was, in 
 Goethe's eyes, the natural result of an intelli- 
 gent and humane interest in other nations than 
 one's own. "It is very gratifying," he said, 
 "that the close relations existing between 
 French, English and Germans make it possible 
 for these nations to correct each other. We,
 
 24 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 perhaps, can appreciate Shakespeare and Byron 
 better than the English." 
 
 Numerous passages scattered throughout 
 Goethe's writings testify to his appreciation of 
 the peculiar importance of English literature. 
 He often laid stress on the value of becoming 
 familiar with the English language and thus 
 with the character of the British nation. He 
 wrote to Countess O'Donnell, July 24, 1813: "I 
 congratulate you sincerely on your interest in the 
 English language. Its literature offers the vast- 
 est treasures, and it is scarcely possible to appre- 
 ciate all its wealth on first approaching it." 
 
 In one of his minor scientific papers, entitled 
 Materials for a History of the Color Theory, he 
 remarks, with reference to Newton's person- 
 ality: "What chiefly characterizes the English, 
 and cannot be too highly praised, is that they 
 make it possible for so many sound and straight- 
 forward individuals to develop themselves, each 
 in his own way, while at the same time serving 
 the public and the commonwealth. This is an 
 advantage which perhaps no other nation pos- 
 sesses, at least not to the same extent." Else- 
 where, in these notes on scientific subjects, he
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 25 
 
 says: "The English possess, perhaps above most 
 nations, the ability to impress themselves upon 
 foreigners. Their personal repose, precision, 
 industry, firmness of opinion and complacency, 
 form an almost unapproachable model of what 
 everybody would wish to attain." 
 
 Goethe's critical activity, strictly speaking, 
 extended over sixty years. He began to write 
 for the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen in 1772, 
 when twenty-three years of age, and his earliest 
 contributions showed that seriousness and matu- 
 rity which characterized all his critical work. 
 He wrote on Sulzer's Theory of the Fine Arts, 
 on Homer and Shakespeare, on the Truths of 
 Revelation, on Paradise and Eternity, on Lava- 
 ter's Sermons, on a work about Turkish Laws, 
 on a treatise concerning the Characteristics of 
 the Principal European Nations, on a scientific 
 System of Nature, etc. Of greater importance 
 were his subsequent contributions, on a vast 
 range of literary, scientific, linguistic, and 
 aesthetic subjects, which appeared in Wieland's 
 Merkur, in the Propylden, in Kunst und Alter- 
 tlium, and the Jenaische AUgcmeine Literatiir- 
 zeitutifj. Painting, sculpture, architecture, and
 
 26 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 the drama at all times claimed his critical atten- 
 tion. In a larger sense his entire life was 
 devoted to the exposition of his views on these 
 subjects, and his critical activity was only 
 varied, but not interrupted, by his creative 
 work. His Autobiography (Dichtung und 
 PVahrheit) and Wilhelm Meister contain liter- 
 ary and philosophical criticism of the highest 
 value, and we must go not only to Faust, but also 
 to the Elective Affinities, and even to Tasso and 
 Iphigenia, if we would have full insight into 
 Goethe's philosophical and critical methods. 
 His Annalen, and his correspondence with 
 Schiller, with the Humboldts, with Zelter, and 
 with other friends, are inexhaustible critical 
 repositories, but even these are surpassed in 
 value by his talks with Eckermann. In Ecker- 
 mann's Conversations with Goethe the great 
 thinker stands before us in all the benignant 
 wisdom of his last decade. Nowhere else does 
 he so fully impress us with the comprehensive- 
 ness of his knowledge and judgment. 
 
 It is characteristic of Goethe's attitude 
 toward life and literature that even in his earl- 
 iest book notices philosophical reflection pre-
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 27 
 
 dominates over critical analysis. He was never 
 a professional critic in the usual sense of the 
 word. Books of doubtful value he scarcely ever 
 read or alluded to, either in writing or in con- 
 versation; but he recurred again and again to 
 the excellent, expatiating upon previously 
 uttered thoughts that seemed to him to require 
 amplification, and comparing the great writers 
 and artists of one nation with those of another. 
 The French are contrasted with the ancients, 
 Beranger suggests Horace or Hafiz; from Vol- 
 taire and priestcraft we pass to the fossiliferous 
 formation of some German mountain. Every- 
 where we see the hand of wisdom pointing to 
 some new outlook upon the world. 
 
 Of great intrinsic importance are Goethe's 
 reflections called forth by the activity of the 
 French periodical, Le Globe, to which, in the 
 last years of his life, before it became an organ 
 of Saint-Simonism, he paid much attention. 
 The writers in the Globe, among whom was 
 Sainte-Beuve, appeared to him to have grasped 
 clearly the meaning of his world-literature, and 
 the admiration bestowed by able commentators 
 in that periodical on his own dramatic works
 
 28 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 filled him with genuine pleasure. In addition 
 to the Globe he read with interest several of the 
 most important British reviews, whose contribu- 
 tions likewise testified to the spread of inter- 
 national relations in literature. He anticipated, 
 however, the objections to an indiscriminate and 
 artificial identification of literary interests 
 among the nations of the world, and laid the 
 greatest stress on the need of serious individual 
 effort and the cultivation of one's native talent. 
 "Vast as the world is," he wrote, "it is but 
 an enlarged fatherland, and, if we look at the 
 matter closely, it cannot give us more than our 
 native soil can furnish. What pleases the mul- 
 titude is sure to gain unbounded popularity and, 
 as we see, spreads to the furthest countries and 
 to every clime; but what is serious and impor- 
 tant is less certain of such a result. Neverthe- 
 less, those who devote themselves to higher 
 ideals and to what is productive in the best sense 
 will henceforth come into more rapid and closer 
 contact. There are in every part of the world 
 men interested in what has been long established 
 and must serve as a base for the true progress 
 of humanity. But their ways are not the ways
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 29 
 
 of the average man, nor can their pace 
 be followed; those who live for the enjoy- 
 ment of life demand a more rapid rate 
 of progress, and hence refuse to be led 
 and to aid in the cause which they ought to 
 serve. The serious-minded, therefore, must 
 form a quiet and self-contained community; it 
 were useless to oppose the broad current of the 
 hour, but it is well to maintain courageously 
 one's firm attitude until the flood has passed. 
 The principal consolation and encouragement 
 that such men will find is that what is true is 
 also useful. . . . Every nation has peculiarities 
 which distinguish it from other nations, and it 
 is these characteristics which mutually attract 
 and repel. An inner peculiarity is in its out- 
 ward manifestation often very obnoxious to 
 another nation, or if not so, appears at least 
 ridiculous. For these reasons we always appre- 
 ciate every nation less fully than it deserves. 
 The inner traits are neither known nor recog- 
 nized, not only by strangers, but by the very 
 nation itself. The real nature, with nations as 
 with individuals, is beneath the surface, and we 
 are astonished at its sudden manifestation."
 
 30 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 Goethe often spoke in a similar strain about 
 the importance of looking at life and literature 
 from a wider point of view than the purely 
 national one; thus he said, in a review of Serb 
 folk-songs: "The purely human repeats itself 
 among all nations, but it inspires no real inter- 
 est when it appears in a foreign garb or under 
 a foreign sky; what is particularly characteris- 
 tic of every nation produces only a strange and 
 often a disagreeable impression, like everything 
 peculiar the proper significance of which we 
 have not grasped, and which we have therefore 
 not yet learned to understand." 
 
 Goethe often held up the directness of the 
 English style as a model to his countrymen. He 
 said to Eckermann: 
 
 "On the whole, philosophical speculations are 
 injurious to the Germans, as they infuse into 
 their literary style something vague, intangible 
 and obscure. The stronger their adherence to 
 certain philosophic schools, the worse they 
 write. Those Germans, however, who, as busi- 
 ness-men and men of the world, look only to the 
 practical side of things, write best. Schiller's 
 style is most brilliant and impressive when he
 
 GOETHE S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 3 I 
 
 ceases to philosophize, as I see in his letters, 
 which I am just now looking over, and which 
 are of the highest importance. There are also 
 gifted German women who write admirably, 
 and, indeed, they are in this respect superior to 
 some of our famous male authors. 
 
 "The English, as a rule, write uniformly well, 
 being born orators and men of practical sense, 
 busy with realities. The French, in their style, 
 are true to their general character. Their nature 
 is social, and they never forget what is due to 
 the public whom they address. They endeavor 
 to be clear, so as to convince the reader, and 
 agreeable, so as to please him. 
 
 "All in all, the style of an author is the true 
 image of his mind. He who would write 
 clearly, ought first to think clearly, and who- 
 ever would have a grand style must first have a 
 grand character." 
 
 Genius, in Goethe's conception of the term, 
 implied character. He thus expresses himself 
 to Eckermann as to the harm done by writers 
 who lacked, in their very nature, the elements 
 of real greatness: "Want of character, in indi- 
 vidual investigators and writers is the source
 
 32 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 of all the evils in our recent literature. In criti- 
 cism especially, this defect produces great 
 harm." He sighed for another Lessing, for 
 one of his character and firmness. The greatest 
 ability, if not employed in the pursuit of high 
 aims, merely repelled him. Two months before 
 his death, in speaking to Eckermann about Vic- 
 tor Hugo's great productivity, he remarked: 
 ''Can a writer help deteriorating and ruining 
 even a very great talent, if he has the hardihood 
 to write in a single year two tragedies and a 
 novel, and if, moreover, he seems to write only 
 in order to amass a great deal of money? I by 
 no means blame him for trying to become rich, 
 nor for seeking the fame of the day, but if he 
 wishes to be remembered by posterity he must 
 begin to write less and to work more." 
 
 In his teachings as in his practice, Goethe 
 enforced the need of keeping at a distance the 
 vulgar which threatens to enthrall us all. "Men 
 are so prone," says Wilhelm Meister, ''to give 
 themselves up to the commonplace and vulgar, 
 the mind and the feelings so easily become cal- 
 lous to the beautiful and the perfect, that one 
 ought to try in every way possible to retain a
 
 GOETHE'S UNIVERSAL INTERESTS 33 
 
 taste for higher things. Such enjoyments no one 
 can wholly do without. Our lack of familiarity 
 with what is really excellent is the explanation 
 why so many take pleasure in what is silly and 
 insipid, merely because it is new. We ought to 
 form the habit of listening every day to some 
 pretty song, reading a fine poem, looking at a 
 beautiful picture and, if possible, saying a few 
 sensible things."
 
 GRILLPARZER'S ORIGINALITY 
 
 Grillparzer's critical writings are virtually 
 unknown to English readers. Even in Ger- 
 many his fame as a dramatist has completely 
 overshadowed every other phase of his intellec- 
 tual activity. George Saintsbury and Edward 
 Dowden were the first English literary authori- 
 ties who grasped the significance of Grillpar- 
 zer's critical utterances. Saintsbury remarks, in 
 his History of Criticism: "I am told by persons 
 who know more about the matter than I do, that 
 Grillparzer was a remarkable playwright; I am 
 sure that he is a remarkable critic." 
 
 Grillparzer was all his life a lover of good 
 books of many nations. He studied Greek and 
 Spanish dramatic literature, in particular, more 
 constantly than did Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, or 
 Lowell. For the portrayal of his characters and 
 the development of his plots, he went to no 
 source but his imagination : for his literary back- 
 ground he turned to volume after volume of 
 recondite lore. And with all his ease in com- 
 position — after the slow brooding time was over 
 — only the constant exercise of severe self-criti- 
 
 [34]
 
 GRILLPARZER'S ORIGINALITY 35 
 
 cism gave him that unerring felicity of phrase, 
 that intimate adaptation of word to mood and 
 action which marks the great literary artist. 
 
 As I have said elsewhere*: "Jotted down 
 mostly on the spur of the moment, with no 
 thought of publication, and covering, as they 
 do, practically the entire period of his intellec- 
 tual activity, his critical remarks are all the 
 more interesting from their momentary point of 
 view and not infrequent contradictions — the 
 result of riper judgment and an invariable 
 desire to be just. His lifelong study of the 
 Greek dramatists is evidenced by a weighty 
 paper on the significance of the chorus in the 
 ancient tragedy, and particularly by numerous 
 passages on Euripides, his favorite author among 
 the ancients. An entire volume of the Cotta 
 edition of Grillparzer's works is given up to his 
 contributions to the study of the Spanish theatre, 
 covering hundreds of plays. Of the master- 
 pieces of the Spanish dramatists Grillparzer 
 might often have said, in his moments of de- 
 spondency, what Lowell wrote after the death 
 of his second wife: 'I have at last found some- 
 
 *Fraiis Grillparzer and the Austrian Drama.
 
 36 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 thing I can read — Calderon.' Grillparzer stud- 
 ied Calderon, and even more Lope de Vega, 
 with loving minuteness. To no other writer did 
 he turn more frequently for inspiration than to 
 the latter." 
 
 While it may be said that Grillparzer was a 
 critic primarily for his own creative purposes, 
 his subjective attitude merely heightens the 
 clearness and precision of his utterances, which 
 serve all the purposes of the most exacting objec- 
 tive criticism. Neither Goethe, nor Sainte- 
 Beuve, nor Lowell, possessed the gift of self- 
 criticism to the same degree as Grillparzer. It 
 may be doubted whether the verbal blemishes 
 — his Austriacisms and apparent occasional 
 lapses in grammatical construction — are not the 
 result of direct intention, rather than of acci- 
 dental carelessness; what is certain is that the 
 consistency and individuality of his characters 
 bear the imprint of that critical habit which he 
 turned against himself as remorselessly as he did 
 against others. It is a curious and most instruc- 
 tive fact that every one of Grillparzer's great 
 dramas has been pronounced his masterpiece by 
 some competent critic— a singular phenomenon
 
 grillparzer's originality 37 
 
 in literary criticism which, if it does not demon- 
 strate the caprice of critics, proves that every- 
 one of these plays possesses merits of the very 
 highest order. It may be doubted whether as 
 much can be said of the total output of any other 
 great dramatist of modern times. Grillparzer 
 analyzed his own works sometimes morbidly, 
 but, as a rule, dispassionately and in a spirit of 
 philosophical and modest resignation. What he 
 says, in his fragmentary autobiography, con- 
 cerning the right of the general public to pro- 
 nounce judgment on the dramatic worth of a 
 play is as sane criticism as has ever been uttered 
 on the subject. Referring to his Medea trilogy, 
 he remarked : 
 
 "I have always attached great value to the 
 judgment of the public. As regards the concep- 
 tion of his play the dramatic poet must consult 
 his own judgment, but as to whether in its exe- 
 cution he has depicted human nature as we find 
 it in life, the public alone, as representing human 
 nature, can tell him. The public is no judge, but 
 a jury; it issues its verdict in the shape of ap- 
 proval or disapproval. Its right to judge is' 
 based not on knowledge of the law, but on spon-
 
 38 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 taneous and natural feeling. Of this natural- 
 ness, which in northern Germany has been 
 pushed into the background by pseudo-culture 
 and blind imitation, there still exists in Austria 
 a considerable remnant, combined with a sus- 
 ceptibility which, by proper guidance on the 
 part of the poet, can be heightened to an incredi- 
 ble degree. The pleasure of such a public may 
 not prove much, for it wishes, above all, to be 
 amused, but its disapproval is in the highest 
 degree instructive. In this case all it pro- 
 nounced was a succes d'estime/' 
 
 His autobiography closed with this reference 
 to his superb drama, Des Meeres iind der Liebe 
 We II en : 
 
 "I had found a new dramatic subject, or 
 rather an old one, which I took up again: Hero 
 and Leander. A beautiful woman tempted me 
 to represent her outward form, even if not her 
 real being, as she passes through the vicissi- 
 tudes of fortune. The somewhat affected title, 
 Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves 
 of the Sea and of Love) , was to point at the out- 
 set to the romantic, or rather purely human, 
 treatment of the ancient legend. My interest
 
 GRILLPARZER'S ORIGINALITY 39 
 
 centered in the principal character, and there- 
 fore I crowded the other persons — nay, toward 
 the end, the development of the story itself — 
 further into the background than was really 
 just. And yet it was these last acts that I wrote 
 with the deepest sentiment, the outcome of my 
 interest in the heroine. That the fourth act 
 bored the spectators to some extent lay partly 
 in my intention, . . . but there are also other 
 things in the play that ought to have been dif- 
 ferent." Two weeks after the first performance 
 of Des Meeres und der Liebe TVellen he penned 
 the following criticism of the play: 
 
 "On the fifth of this month (April, 1831) 
 Hero und Leander was performed. No suc- 
 cess. The first three acts were vociferously 
 applauded, but the last two were passed over in 
 inattentive silence. It is sad indeed that the 
 voice of the public coincides so fully with my 
 own doubts. The fifth act is unfortunately only 
 too effective, too theatrical (for which reason 
 I always wanted to change it) ; it evidently suf- 
 fered from the ineffectiveness of the fourth act, 
 for it is impossible to produce an effect upon a 
 public that has lost its interest. Curious indeed!
 
 40 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 I wrote just this fourth act with the deepest 
 feeling; nowhere did I enter so closely into the 
 situation, and I originally considered it par- 
 ticularly good; but when I rewrote the play, a 
 year later, I could not any more find the key to 
 it. There is evidently too little development in 
 the whole of the play; it is fragmentary and the 
 result rather of general enthusiasm than of par- 
 ticular interest in the subject itself — in other 
 words, it is more of a sketch than of a picture. 
 I had set myself a tremendous task. Had I suc- 
 ceeded, the result would have been a great gain 
 for poetry. But I did not succeed, and yet, and 
 yet! If I can succeed in keeping myself, by a 
 few successful plays, within the ranks of the 
 poets who are to last, there may come a time 
 when the world will recognize the value of this 
 fourth act, even though I only half attained 
 what I aimed at." 
 
 While conceding to the public the role of a 
 jury, as far as the theatrical effectiveness of a 
 play is concerned, he was, as we have seen, far 
 from granting it the rights of a judge in purely 
 literary matters. Moreover, much as he appre- 
 ciated in theory, and illustrated in practice,
 
 grillparzer's originality 41 
 
 spontaneity of sentiment and naturalness of ex- 
 pression ("Die Natiirlichkeit der Empfin- 
 dung") he did not believe in "natural poets," 
 and distrusted the ability of the people, as such, 
 to product a literary work of genius. He depre- 
 cated the glorification of folk-lore by literary 
 historians and sought in every genuine poetic 
 work, whether epic or lyric, for the individual 
 author. The anonymous multitude never cre- 
 ated anything great, he said, and added: 
 
 "Since Hegel threw doubt on the validity of 
 individual talent and every wooden pedant 
 found it convenient to deny the prerogative of 
 intellectual endowment, the theory of poetry 
 without poets was established. Epics were sup- 
 posed to have been the outcome of simple folk- 
 songs, which some one from the rabble had 
 made and some Middle-High German pedant 
 had put together at haphazard. In this way the 
 entire nation was elevated to the rank of poets, 
 and according to this theory of folk-poesy, there 
 is no reason why every writer of poetic doggerel 
 of our own day should not consider himself as 
 laying the foundations for future Iliads and 
 Odysseys."
 
 42 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 Grillparzer recognized in the Nibelungen- 
 lied a mysterious work of great power and won- 
 derful poetic charm, but to believe, he said, 
 ''that such a poem could have come out of the 
 mouth of the common people is to assume the 
 impossible." 
 
 Contrary to Goethe, who admired artistic 
 perfection in literature regardless of the genre, 
 and ranked Beranger as highly as he did Byron 
 or Moliere, Grillparzer assumed a certain gra- 
 dation of values in literary form and expression. 
 To epigrams and satires he assigned the lowest 
 rank, to the drama the highest. The distinction 
 is significant. Grillparzer disclaimed for him- 
 self a place by the side of the greatest dramatic 
 poets, and he set little store by the multitude of 
 epigrammatic flings (admirable satires of their 
 kind) in which, throughout his life, he attacked 
 bureaucratic stupidity or retaliated against 
 political and literary persecution. Like his 
 critical utterances, these epigrams slumbered in 
 the recesses of his writing-desk. 
 
 Like Goethe, Grillparzer could appreciate 
 the critical standards of many nations, as 
 embodied in works of great literary excellence,
 
 GRILLPARZER'S ORIGINALITY 43 
 
 and Puritanism in literary matters was as foreign 
 to him as to Goethe. But he had a sovereign 
 contempt, exemplified in his own literary prac- 
 tices, for offences against established aesthetic 
 standards. He wrote of Swift: 
 
 "Have the publishers of Swift's works done 
 well in including therein those obscene riddles 
 the composing of which gave the Dean of St. 
 Patrick, then nearly sixty years of age, so much 
 pleasure? I believe they have. For in spite of 
 the inexpressible pain these riddles have given 
 me, they embody a great lesson. That is to say, 
 they show to what even the highest intellectual 
 gifts finally lead if unaccompanied by genuine 
 warmth of heart. But my disappointment was 
 none the less real, for I was on the point of learn- 
 ing to admire Swift, in spite of all his faults." 
 
 Much as he loved the ancients, Grillparzer 
 was far from being their imitator. Like Goethe, 
 he believed that the poet must in his works 
 reflect his inner life. When reproached with 
 having made his Sappho express un-Greek sen- 
 timents, he merely remarked that he had writ- 
 ten his play for Germans and not for Athenians. 
 He made the difference between the life of the
 
 44 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 Athenians and our own clear in another critical 
 utterance. Even in his Greek plays he had 
 chiefly his Austrian audience in mind. 
 
 One quality, above all others, Grillparzer 
 demanded of every poet, no matter how great 
 and individual his gifts — concentration of all his 
 powers. Just as Goethe admonished the poets 
 to "command poesy," so Grillparzer showed by 
 his own example that only he can be successful 
 in literature who is master of himself and of his 
 surroundings as well as of his moods. He had 
 no patience with those critical theories which see 
 in the works of a genius the results of his time 
 and the conditions of his milieu. "The progress 
 of art," he said, "depends upon talent and not 
 upon historical events. Goethe would have 
 been the same great poet if there never had been 
 a Frederick the Great, and the French Revolu- 
 tion, which surely was powerful enough in its 
 workings, has not produced a single poet." 
 
 Professor Auguste Ehrhard, the author of an 
 admirable French work on Grillparzer, crowned 
 by the French Academy, remarks that in a 
 period of great literary unrest in Germany Grill- 
 parzer's aesthetic convictions never wavered.
 
 GRILLPARZER'S ORIGINALITY 45 
 
 "He was guided," says Ehrhard, ''by the artistic 
 sense inherent in the Austrians, as well as by his 
 own poetic instinct." His aesthetic education 
 was of the broadest, and comprised a knowledge 
 of music such as Sainte-Beuve and Lowell 
 lacked, and Goethe never fully acquired. 
 Goethe, indeed, was in his youth a performer 
 of some skill on several musical instruments and 
 sought in his old age, through his association 
 with Zelter, to acquaint himself with certain 
 musical theories, and Lowell recognized (in his 
 essay on Pope) the value of music to a poet. 
 "Milton, Collins and Gray," he remarks, "our 
 three great masters of harmony, were all musi- 
 cians." With Grillparzer, music was part of 
 his very nature, and his familiarity with this art 
 entered into all his esthetic theories. 
 
 The following extract will, to some extent, 
 give an idea of the comprehensiveness and 
 originality of a writer whom his French biog- 
 rapher considers the greatest critic that Ger- 
 many has produced since the days of Lessing. 
 As a characteristic specimen of Grillparzer's 
 breadth of view it will suffice to point to his 
 appreciation of Ghiberti, penned after reading a
 
 46 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 German translation of his Chronicle of Flor- 
 ence: 
 
 '^I must confess that few books have made so 
 deep an impression upon me. While Benve- 
 nuto Cellini's Life shows us the heaven-storming 
 Titan, who, intent upon his work in his inex- 
 haustible power, regards all those beside and 
 around him as so many disturbing and antagon- 
 izing opponents, Ghiberti's gentle, perhaps 
 somewhat feminine, nature clings with a glori- 
 fying love to his contemporaries, and affords us 
 a picture of days which had no equal in any 
 other epoch in art. The Michael-Angelo-like 
 Brunelleschi, the joyous Donatello, Masaccio, 
 Filippo Lippi — monk and painter — the won- 
 derful Leonardo da Vinci, in his early begin- 
 nings, and the peaceful painter of Fiesole — 
 briefly mentioned yet throwing over us, as it 
 were, a shimmer of his angelic halo — added to 
 all these a world of artists of the second and 
 third rank, whom we see not only in sharply 
 defined outline, but in all their relations of life, 
 and in situations such as to-day are found only 
 in novels, but which those days produced in 
 abundance — what an age! There are entire
 
 GRILLPARZER'S ORIGINALITY 47 
 
 countries whose history from the creation of the 
 world to the year of our Lord 1833 offers not 
 half as much of real interest as little Florence 
 under the Medici. Truly, he who espies at a 
 distance an Italian in the street ought to uncover 
 his head, and say to himself: 'Here is one of 
 those who are the fathers of modern civiliza- 
 tion.' I do not doubt that many will ridicule 
 such an idea. Let those not read Ghiberti's 
 book; all others will enjoy it." 
 
 Grillparzer, like Goethe, capable of the 
 highest imaginative flights, guarded with equal 
 jealousy his critical independence. With all his 
 admiration for Euripides, Lope, Shakespeare, 
 and Goethe himself, he was, as it were, con- 
 stantly on the guard against their overmaster- 
 ing power. When starting on a journey on one 
 occasion, he asked himself: "What books am I 
 to take with me for my poetic flight? Little, 
 and yet much! Herodotus and Plutarch, besides 
 the two Spanish dramatists. And not Shake- 
 speare? No, not Shakespeare, although he is 
 perhaps the greatest product of the modern age. 
 Not Shakespeare! He tyrannizes over my intel- 
 lect, and I want to remain free. I thank God
 
 48 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 that he exists, and that I have the good fortune 
 to read him and re-read him, and absorb him. 
 But now I shall try to forget him. The ancients 
 invigorate me, the Spaniards incite me to pro- 
 ductiveness; but the former are too remote, the 
 latter too purely human — with their blemishes 
 amid their greatest beauties, and their often 
 exaggerated mannerisms — to influence deeply 
 my nature, my individual way of looking at 
 things. But the giant Shakespeare usurps the 
 powers of Nature, whose most magnificent 
 mouth-piece he was, and whosoever surrenders 
 himself to him will forever have to go to him 
 for an answer to any question which he may 
 wish to ask Nature herself."
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE'S UNIQUE POSITION 
 
 Within the whole range of literature no 
 country has produced a critic like Sainte-Beuve. 
 He is unique in vastness of achievement, in the 
 erudition and industry he brought to his task, 
 as well as in the unfailing grace, apparently so 
 spontaneous and yet the result of unremitting 
 effort, which illumines his pages. French lit- 
 erature in its entirety lay open before him; he 
 was at home with philosophers and journalists, 
 with historians and scientists, with society and 
 life in all their shades and, often enough, their 
 shadows; with great and little men and women, 
 with all prominent figures in the annals of 
 French history; he analyzed character as pro- 
 foundly as he did books; and while he gave to 
 France all the resources of an eminently French 
 intellect, he spoke of her literature as one whose 
 background was all literature, and who had 
 assimilated the culture of the other great civi- 
 lized nations. 
 
 Criticism was with Sainte-Beuve, as he him- 
 self said, "an instinct and a passion," but he laid 
 down no critical canons, as other critics have 
 
 [49]
 
 50 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 done. Boileau and men of lesser eminence have 
 attempted to teach what may be called the 
 science of the profession, and Lessing has writ- 
 ten an immortal text-book on one aspect of the 
 subject; Sainte-Beuve embodied his critical 
 views in countless articles, from which those who 
 would learn his secret may deduce his theory as 
 best they can. Yet he was lavish enough of 
 direct advice, which no one who aspires to lit- 
 erary taste, let alone to literary judgment, can 
 afford to ignore. We may open his pages any- 
 where, and we shall learn and admire. In one 
 of his Monday Causeries, that on "Public Even- 
 ing Readings," we seem to be initiated into a 
 course of lectures not only on French literature 
 and aesthetics, but on the proper study of litera- 
 ture in general, and on the art of reading wisely 
 books of whatever kind. He speaks as the lover 
 of French literature, who would open its treas- 
 ures to his countrymen, and as the man of inter- 
 national culture who admires all that is of uni- 
 versal appeal. "I should wish," he warningly 
 says, "the lecturer dwelling on the beauties and 
 the grandeur of our literature and national his- 
 tory to guard against repeating what is so con-
 
 sainte-beuve's unique position 51 
 
 stantly said, in colleges and even in Academies 
 on solemn occasions : that the French are the 
 greatest and most sensible of all nations, and our 
 literature the greatest of all literatures. I 
 should wish him to content himself with saying 
 that it is one of the finest, and that the world did 
 not begin and does not end with us." 
 
 Much as has been written about Sainte-Beuve, 
 his cosmopolitan aspect has not yet been suffi- 
 ciently emphasized, although an attentive read- 
 ing of his critical articles, whatever the subject, 
 cannot fail to disclose his international sym- 
 pathies. What he admires, for instance, above 
 all in Montaigne is that he, "like Socrates, did 
 not consider himself citizen of a single town, but 
 of the whole world, that his imagination 
 grasped, in its wide sweep, the universal charac- 
 ter of all ages and all countries." If he ranks 
 Montaigne with the wisest of Frenchmen, it is 
 precisely because he finds in him a wisdom that 
 is not distinctively French. "Such as he is," 
 says Sainte-Beuve, "Montaigne is our Horace; 
 he is like him in his very nature and often in 
 form and expression, although in point of style 
 he also resembles Seneca. His book is a treas-
 
 52 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 ure-house of moral observations and experi- 
 ences; open his pages where we may, and we 
 shall be sure to find, no matter what his momen- 
 tary mood, some wise thought expressed in a 
 telling and impressive manner, something stand- 
 ing out in its beautiful and deep meaning, 
 graven permanently into one striking word, or a 
 single, strong, intimate, or grand line." The 
 comparison with Horace is carried further: we 
 lose sight of Montaigne the Frenchman, and 
 have before us once more the polished wit of 
 antiquity, who bids us dismiss our private anxie- 
 ties and public concerns, and refrain from bor- 
 rowing trouble. Sainte-Beuve gives us a true 
 measure of his critical capacity in such allusions. 
 Again and again this note of insistence on 
 comparisons with other writers than those of 
 one's own language is struck in Sainte-Beuve's 
 writings. He would have the French profit by 
 such critics as the Swiss De Muralt, who, in his 
 Lettres sur les Anglais et les Francais, tells 
 Sainte-Beuve's countrymen certain wholesome 
 truths. Apropos of De Muralt's criticism of 
 Boileau's Satires, Sainte-Beuve remarks that 
 such judgments are of particular value to those
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE'S UNIQUE POSITION ^3 
 
 "who look at French literature at some distance, 
 and take their standard of comparison from the 
 great poets of all times and of all countries, and 
 from human nature itself." With what con- 
 vincing earnestness does Sainte-Beuve plead the 
 cause of minor writers, like Gresset and Parny, 
 who have been stripped by narrow critics of 
 their peculiar charm and thus robbed of the 
 appreciation due them. How ought one to 
 approach writers like these? he asks. Are the 
 learned but one-sided commentators to have it 
 all their own dull way? What ought to be the 
 proper equipment of the critic? "Is it neces- 
 sary to adopt the method of Gervinus in order 
 to understand and admire La Fontaine? In 
 order to give to Gresset his proper place, to 
 assign to an elegy of Parny the rank it deserves, 
 is it indispensable for us to have gone the rounds 
 of all literature, to have read the Nibelungen 
 and to know by heart the mystic stanzas of 
 Calderon?" Possibly, he says. "In any case, 
 this is the longest route, and when we return 
 home into our own quarters we run the risk of 
 being so fatigued that we fall asleep. Never- 
 theless, I admit that if a small amount of knowl-
 
 54 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 edge takes us away from the love of beauty and 
 simple charms, much knowledge brings us back 
 to it." 
 
 Sainte-Beuve looked upon spontaneous love 
 of nature, truth, and beauty, as lying at the very 
 foundation of the great works of literature, as 
 of the great deeds of men. Against these senti- 
 ments the efforts of reformers beat in vain. If 
 literature and all human institutions are to 
 endure, it is because of their response to a uni- 
 versal need. The appeals of reformers to the 
 intellect alone fail in literature, as they do in 
 life. There is a significant passage on this sub- 
 ject in Sainte-Beuve's article on Sieyes. "His 
 mistake, like the mistakes of all who seek soli- 
 tude, lay in believing that a radical reform in 
 human nature is possible, and that man, even if 
 we take the chosen few, can be made once for 
 all to obey reason." 
 
 Sainte-Beuve had as little of the zealous 
 reformer and innovator in him as Goethe. They 
 were alike in their distrust of apostles of any 
 new creed, in their endeavor to preserve rather 
 than to demolish and build anew. Sainte- 
 Beuve's entire activity as a critic breathes repose
 
 sainte-beuve's unique position 55 
 
 and moderation, and the past was ever present 
 with him. Genius without repose was to him 
 incomplete and incapable of perfection. He 
 said of La Harpe that he was wanting in some 
 of the qualities essential in the formation of 
 character, that he had neither moderation nor 
 balance, and did not know what it means to stop 
 at the right time or to return wisely to one's 
 moorings; that he had no memory for the past. 
 "The last eleven or twelve years of his life," he 
 remarked, "showed that impossibility of his ever 
 reaching maturity which is the defect of cer- 
 tain emotional natures." 
 
 What he liked, above all, in a writer was the 
 ability to pause and seek refuge from the petty 
 concerns of the moment in the permanent things 
 of the past. "Let there be," he said, in an article 
 on Jules Janin, "beyond the region of all the 
 political systems and the borders of warring 
 doctrines a territory more or less neutral — a kind 
 of sylvan retreat where one is welcome to stray 
 for a little while and dream of those things old 
 as the world and yet eternally young, of spring 
 and summer and love and youth; wiiere one may 
 even walk about (if youth be past) with a book
 
 56 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 in one's hand, and live with an author of another 
 age, free to enjoy him for the whole day, and, 
 on returning to the city, to ask every passer-by, 
 *Have you, too, read the book?' Monsieur Janin 
 claims this right, and I claim it with him, 
 although with less reason, for I have long since 
 ceased to dream of youth and spring; but I do 
 want the rambler and dreamer to have the right 
 to read an old book, a book as far removed as 
 possible from the quarrels of the day, and 
 become completely absorbed in it." 
 
 This art of dreaming, book in hand, Sainte- 
 Beuve understood better than any critic before 
 or after him. He finds himself in the company 
 of another dreamer, Fontenelle, in his fanciful 
 Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes (talks on 
 astronomy with a beautiful marquise in a beau- 
 tiful park) and whither does Sainte-Beuve's 
 fancy, spurred on by his vast knowledge, not lead 
 him! While admitting the insinuating charm 
 of these poetico-scientific discourses, he refuses 
 to surrender to a method which "wheedles one 
 into truth." How differently, he muses, does 
 Pascal view Heaven and Nature! "Pascal felt 
 in awe and trembling the majesty and immensity
 
 sainte-I'euve's unique position 57 
 
 of Nature, while Fontenelle seems merely able 
 to detect her cleverness. He never possessed 
 that ideal, celestial geometry which a Pascal, a 
 Dante, a Milton, or even a Buffon conceived of 
 as established from the very beginning; he has 
 it not and has no idea that he lacks it; he belit- 
 tles the heavens in trying to explain them." 
 
 Sainte-Beuve was well read in the natural sci- 
 ences; his study of medicine and anatomy in par- 
 ticular stood him in good stead, yet even in 
 discussing men of science he was chiefly inter- 
 ested in the literary and personal aspects of his 
 subject. He inquired into the range and depth 
 of the author's mind, into his relations with the 
 thinkers of other countries; he analyzed his lan- 
 guage, and asked whether his genius was imagi- 
 native and went hand in hand with grace and 
 culture. Buffon, for this reason, interested him 
 deeply; he found in him that sacred celestial 
 flame which the great naturalist ignored in his 
 dictum that genius is nothing but a matter of 
 industry and patience. "The genius of Buffon," 
 Sainte-Beuve said, "partakes equally of the poet 
 and the philosopher; the two characters fuse and 
 unite in him as was the case in primitive times."
 
 ^8 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 It has been said that Bufifon oscillated between 
 Newton and Descartes; Sainte-Beuve maintains 
 that Buffon has an equal share, rather, in New- 
 ton and Milton, and that precisely where he is 
 most systematic he is most poetic. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve let it be clearly understood that 
 he wished to be ranged among the critics who, 
 without promulgating a system of their own, 
 prove by the manner in which they pronounce 
 judgment their right to speak with authority. 
 "The characteristic of critics in general," he said 
 (in his article on Villemain and Cousin), "is, 
 as the name indicates, to judge, and, wherever 
 necessary, to render a clear-cut decision. Take 
 all the important men to whom the title of critic 
 has been applied, Malherbe, Boileau (for both 
 were critics in the form of poets) ; Dr. Johnson 
 in England, our own La Harpe, even De Fon- 
 tanes — all these men, who were authoritative in 
 their day, judged in matters of taste with vi- 
 vacity, perhaps with too much dogmatism, but 
 at all events clearly and with irresistible definite- 
 ness." 
 
 Constituted as he was, Sainte-Beuve demanded 
 of the great writers, even in details, accurate
 
 sainte-beuve's unique position 59 
 
 knowledge. Vagueness was in his eyes an evi- 
 dence, if not a confession, of weakness. He takes 
 Balzac severely to task for his psychological 
 vagaries, for his leanings towards the Sweden- 
 borgs, Mesmers, Saint-Germains and Caglio- 
 stros, and he makes effective use of his own 
 physiological knowledge by twitting Balzac 
 with having discovered, in his studies of the 
 human anatomy, imaginary veins and lymphatic 
 vessels'. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve was not wholly just to Balzac, 
 though he recognized in him "perhaps the most 
 original and penetrating painter of the morals of 
 his time." The immensity of his canvases, the 
 audaciousness of his attempts, offended his deli- 
 cate sense of proportion, and he felt uneasy in 
 the morbid atmosphere of Balzac's characters. 
 Sir Walter Scott, too, as Sainte-Beuve recog- 
 nized, painted on a large scale, but he fills us 
 with delight, while Balzac, though he had come 
 under his spell, could only envy, but never emu- 
 late, the charm of the Scotch wizard. "Had 
 not Scott," asked Sainte-Beuve, "breathed that 
 universal charm, that purity and healthfulness, 
 that wholesome air which circulates even amid
 
 6o INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 the conflict of human passions?" One feels the 
 need of going to him for refreshment, says 
 Sainte-Beuve, of plunging into some sane and 
 clear book after finishing the Parents Pauvres, 
 or of immersing one's self in a song of Milton, 
 "in lucid streams," in those pure currents of 
 which the poet sings. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve speaks of English writers, not as 
 a Frenchman, but as Goethe speaks of Scott and 
 Goldsmith — with cosmopolitan understanding. 
 "If you knew English," he writes to a friend 
 who had sent him some verses of his own, "you 
 would have a treasure, upon which you could 
 draw. England has a poetic literature greatly 
 superior to ours — one which, above all, is more 
 healthful, just as it is richer. Wordsworth has 
 not been translated, one cannot translate such 
 things, one goes and drinks them at the source." 
 
 There are many allusions to Wordsworth in 
 Sainte-Beuve's pages, and he has himself felici- 
 tously translated — "imitated" the French call it, 
 with a just recognition of the limits of transla- 
 tion — several of Wordsworth's sonnets. Keats 
 also engaged Sainte-Beuve's muse at the time 
 when he still attempted poetic flights. He was,
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE'S UNIQUE POSITION 6 1 
 
 however, more at home with the English prose 
 writers. He wrote penetrating essays on Gib- 
 bon, Lord Chesterfield and Cowper, as he did 
 on Benjamin Franklin. They had in common a 
 grace of style not unlike his own, and in the case 
 of Gibbon the difficulty of defining a genius 
 partly French and yet characteristically British 
 challenged Sainte-Beuve's ingenuity. He was, 
 however, in all his criticisms impelled by a far 
 higher motive than zest in analyzing style and 
 character. He possessed from the very begin- 
 ning, says Paul Elmer More, "that inquisitive 
 passion for the truth without which all other 
 critical gifts are as brass and tinkling cymbals." 
 With such impassioned love of truth fondness 
 for generalization is incompatible. Sainte- 
 Beuve had an innate distrust of a certain class of 
 historical writers whose mission, almost as a mat- 
 ter of course, inclines them to establish theories 
 in order to explain facts. Memoirs, the living 
 testimony of eye-witnesses, he read with an 
 enthusiasm which the sober pages of the his- 
 torian seldom evoked. His admiration for 
 Saint-Simon's pictures of the court of Louis 
 XIV was unbounded, but he was sceptical as to
 
 62 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 the absolute value of Guizot's Histoire de la 
 Civilisation en Europe. "Generalizations," he 
 said, "which appear to us so profound when 
 applied to distant ages, seem superficial enough 
 if we apply them to our own time. Let me make 
 my meaning clear: I admire that power of a 
 broad and ingenious mind which remolds and 
 restores of the past all that can be restored, 
 which gives to it, if not the true meaning, at least 
 a plausible and probable meaning, which puts 
 order into history, and gives direction and use- 
 ful support to our study of it. But what I object 
 to as dangerous is the tendency to draw conclu- 
 sions from a past thus remade and reconstructed, 
 from a past artificially simplified — conclusions 
 bearing on a changeable and changing present. 
 As for myself, after reading some of these high- 
 sounding lessons on the History of Civilization, 
 given with so much precision and definiteness, I 
 quickly open a volume of the Memoirs of Retz, 
 in order to see the real play of human intrigue 
 and masquerade." 
 
 There is a passage in Sainte-Beuve's article 
 on Joubert (Causeries du Lundi, Vol. I) which 
 gives us a glimpse of his method, if method it
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE'S UNIQUE POSITION 63 
 
 can be called, of preserving intact his literary 
 detachment while nourishing his taste at the 
 varied sources of admirable writing. 
 
 "I have sometimes asked myself," he says, 
 "what a handbook of French rhetoric ought to 
 be, a book sensible, fair, and natural, and it has 
 even happened to me, once in my life, that I had 
 to talk on the subject before young people. What 
 was I to do to avoid falling into beaten tracks 
 and being caught by the fancies of the day? I 
 began simply with Pascal, with his thoughts on 
 literature, in which the great writer laid down 
 some of his observations on his art. I read them 
 aloud and commented upon them. Then I took 
 La Bruyere's chapter on Ouvrages de I'espr'it. 
 I then passed on to Fenelon's Dialogues stir 
 I'Eloquence and his Lettre a VAcademie Fran- 
 caise; I went over the ground carefully, choos- 
 ing my points and always commenting by exam- 
 ples if need be from living writers. Vauvenar- 
 gues's Thoughts and Literary Characters came 
 next. I borrowed from Voltaire the articles on 
 Taste and Style, in the Dictiofinaire Philo- 
 sophique, his Temple of Taste, and some pas- 
 sages from the letters in which he passes judg-
 
 64 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 ment on Boileau, Racine and Corneille. I 
 added, in order to widen my horizon at this 
 particular moment, some reflections on the intel- 
 lect of Goethe and on English taste, as exempli- 
 fied in Coleridge. Marmontel, in his Elements 
 de Litterature, furnished me with an article on 
 Style, an admirable piece of writing. I took good 
 care not to omit Buffon on the same subject, 
 whose words crowned the whole. Finally, with 
 the classic circle complete, I gave my young 
 hearers Joubert as a sort of dessert and choice 
 tidbit. Here was a meal fit for Pythagoras!" 
 
 Who does not recognize, in the delicate play 
 of Sainte-Beuve's fancy, the almost Spartan 
 demands on himself which his conception of the 
 duty of a critic imposed upon his time? Such a 
 universal interest in literature, such conscien- 
 tious preparation for the task before him, presup- 
 posed complete abstraction from society during 
 the days of work. No one plodded more indus- 
 triously than Sainte-Beuve, burying himself, as 
 he did, among his books from morning till night, 
 and only emerging on the one day intervening 
 between the completion of one Lundi and the 
 beginning of another. "A critic," he said,
 
 sainte-beuve's unique position 65 
 
 "ought not to have too many friends and social 
 relations — those obligations dictated by conven- 
 tion. . . . Without being exactly freebooters, 
 as we have been called, we must be able to roam 
 about at will ; we must have elbow-room. Mon- 
 sieur Janin wittily said one day to a lady who at 
 an evening entertainment introduced him to a 
 number of guests: 'You are procuring me so 
 many friends that you rob me of all my spirit.' " 
 In a more serious vein, Sainte-Beuve insisted 
 that the critic must scrupulously weigh his 
 words. He must be sparing of superlatives and 
 know the value of perspective. In discussing 
 M. de Saint-Victor's critical manner, he said: 
 "The author's preferences are expressed in an 
 unmistakable way. He observes proper grada- 
 tion, and groups literature and art as Raphael 
 groups his School of Athens and Ingres his ceil- 
 ings. Each genius, each talent, is placed accord- 
 ing to its merits and on its own plane : Gil Bias 
 is not on a level with Do?i Quixote/^ Sainte- 
 Beuve had no patience with the easy-going, com- 
 plaisant critic who carries his optimism into 
 literature, identifies himself with no settled con- 
 viction, opposes no new movement, and, as critic,
 
 66 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 is all things to all men. He acknowledged the 
 exquisite good taste, in classic matters, of that 
 once famous critic Huet, but he was repelled by 
 the spineless amiability of Huet's judgment con- 
 cerning French literature. *'No doubt," he said, 
 "he was incomparably more at home among the 
 ancients than Boileau, who indeed seemed almost 
 an ignoramus beside him; but of that keen lit- 
 erary feeling, that brisk movement, that impetu- 
 ous judgment that seem to spring from a glowing 
 heart, Huet had not a particle." Sainte-Beuve 
 discriminated very sharply between writers who 
 merely adorn literature and the "thundering 
 minds" that arouse a century. "It is after all," 
 he says, "the ignorant, like Pascal, Descartes 
 and Rousseau, men who have read little, but who 
 think and dare, that, for good or evil, stir the 
 world and make it move." Few of those men 
 that have aroused a century appealed to Sainte- 
 Beuve as much as Franklin, of whom, while 
 dwelling on his lack of certain literary refine- 
 ments, he said: 
 
 "Franklin is by nature above the anxieties of 
 the Childe Harolds or the susceptibilities of the 
 Chateaubriands. We, of the outspoken French
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE'S UNIQUE POSITION 67 
 
 race, might have wished that there had been 
 something of all this in him. . . . Let us, how- 
 ever, look at Franklin such as he is, in his proper 
 stature and in all his moral beauty. That judi- 
 cious man, firm, astute, skilful, honest, remains 
 unshaken when injustice approaches him or his 
 compatriots. For many years he tries to 
 enlighten public opinion in the mother country, 
 and to avert extreme measures; until the last 
 moment he does his utmost to bring about a 
 reconciliation based on fairness; and when on 
 the very eve of the final rupture, one of the 
 influential men of England [Lord Howe] leaves 
 him still some hope of reconciliation, tears of 
 joy roll down his cheeks. But when, finally, 
 hardened injustice and obstinate pride close 
 all avenues to his countrymen, he is carried 
 away by the loftiest and most invincible pas- 
 sion, and he who thinks that every peace is good 
 and that every u-ar is bad, is henceforth for war, 
 for the holy war of patriotic and legitimate 
 defence."
 
 LOWELL: PATRIOT AND 
 COSMOPOLITAN 
 
 Lowell's fame as a critic has been over- 
 shadowed by his eminence in other fields, where 
 public recognition is more easily obtained, or 
 at least more spontaneously rendered. The 
 range of his accomplishments was very wide. 
 A poet whose Commemoration Ode stirred the 
 heart of the nation to its depths, a brilliant sati- 
 rist in prose and verse, a political writer of 
 singular power, an admirable teacher and lec- 
 turer, a fascinating orator, conversationalist, and 
 letter-writer, a skilful and dignified diplomat, 
 and, above all, a pure and sagacious patriot — • 
 who would look, first and foremost, for the 
 critic in so many-sided and picturesque a per- 
 sonality? Yet, the attentive reader of Lowell's 
 works cannot fail to recognize that in all his 
 activities — not seldom even in his poetry — the 
 critical faculty was paramount. His ancestry 
 amply accounts for his observant and reflective 
 temperament, as it does for his love of Nature, 
 especially in her rugged mood, his sympathy 
 
 [68]
 
 LOWELL : PATRIOT AND COSMOPOLITAN 69 
 
 with the sturdy untutored man, racy of the soil, 
 his hard-headed Yankee sense of humor. 
 
 In a famous distich Grillparzer, referring to 
 the beautiful hill that commands the finest view 
 of Vienna, says: ''If you look at the country 
 around you from the heights of the Kahlenberg 
 you will understand what I have written and 
 what I am." Similarly, if we would know what 
 Lowell was, and why he wrote as he did, we 
 have to know New England and particularly 
 Cambridge, where he was born and where he 
 died. He was a man of the world, easilv at 
 home in the great capitals of Europe, but his 
 musings ever took him back to the town on the 
 Charles River. Puritan as he was in his sense 
 of duty toward man and the State, his outlook 
 on life and literature was that of the serene phi- 
 losopher and the cosmopolitan critic. He dis- 
 claimed the title of scholar, but the extent of his 
 reading was extraordinary, and his knowledge 
 of both essentials and minutiae in literary mat- 
 ters was deep and sound beyond that of most 
 specialists. He drew inspiration from English, 
 French, Italian, Spanish and German sources, 
 as well as from the ancients. No critic of simi-
 
 JO INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 lar importance in literary history has spoken of 
 the glories of the past with more contagious 
 enthusiasm and with a freer fancy. He con- 
 ducts us through the highways and byways of 
 many literatures at a leisurely gait, and though 
 his wilful digressions, his bewildering allusive- 
 ness, at times threaten to obstruct our path, we 
 surrender ourselves w^ith delight to so fascinat- 
 ing and instructive a guide. 
 
 The most important critical w^ork of James 
 Russell Lowell is not to be found in the book 
 reviews which, as editor of the Atlantic 
 Monthly, he contributed to its pages, though all 
 his articles were scholarly criticism of a high 
 order, sometimes seasoned with his characteris- 
 tic wit. It is the essayist Lowell that gives us 
 the measure of the critic. 
 
 Perhaps the ripest fruit of Lowell's learning 
 and critical activity was his treatise on Dante— 
 the outgrowth of that life-long familiarity with 
 the poet of which Harvard students were to reap 
 so rich a harvest; but it may be doubted whether 
 this essay is to-day read with the same relish as 
 his papers on lesser writers. He was most effec- 
 tive when least academic. Perhaps no other
 
 LOWELL : PATRIOT AND COSMOPOLITAN 7 1 
 
 international critic is so quotable. His pages 
 bristle with the unexpected — with sallies of wit 
 and humor, puns of varying quality, curious 
 metaphors and quaint conceits, with deep senti- 
 ment and shrewd wisdom. And the whole, if 
 not always the last word in literary criticism, is 
 itself delectable literature. 
 
 Posterity alone can decide whether the critic 
 was also the prophet. In the case of Lowell, 
 the best international judgment has already con- 
 firmed his own in conspicuous instances. Thus 
 his estimate of Carlyle has gradually super- 
 seded that extravagant eulogium which hailed 
 in him the inspired prophet of a new gospel in 
 history and morals. 
 
 Almost every page that Lowell wrote bears 
 proof of his love of letters, his gusto in borrow- 
 ing from a half-forgotten author, no matter in 
 what language. Unsystematic, on the whole, his 
 reading undeniably was. One of his most dis- 
 criminating critics, Mr. Ferris Greenslet, well 
 says of him: "Lowell, it is needless to say at this 
 hour, was never quite a scholar in the German 
 sense of the word, nor even in the modern Amer- 
 ican academic sense: but he was a scholar in
 
 72 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 what we may perhaps think a more admirable 
 sense — that in which the bookmen of the Renais- 
 sance were so." Yet there were at least two for- 
 eign fields, besides Dante literature, in which 
 Lowell was thoroughly at home: French lan- 
 guage and literature of the ante-classic period, 
 and the dramas of Calderon. Though he 
 entered upon his post of American Minister to 
 Spain with a comprehensive knowledge of Span- 
 ish literature, and a mastery of the language 
 which soon procured him admission to the Span- 
 ish Academy, it was only to Calderon, and next 
 to him to Cervantes, that he gave his heart. He 
 revelled in Calderon as Grillparzer did in Lope. 
 Allusions to Calderon give point to not a few 
 of Lowell's critical remarks; and they may come 
 upon us, with his startling suddenness, in the 
 most unexpected places. While on the ocean, 
 he says: ''When we were up with the Azores, 
 we began to meet flying-fish and Portuguese 
 men-of-war beautiful as the galley of Cleopatra, 
 tiny craft that dared these seas before Columbus. 
 I have seen one of the former rise from the crest 
 of a wave, and, glancing from another some two 
 hundred feet beyond, take a fresh flight of per-
 
 LOWELL : PATRIOT AND COSMOPOLITAN 73 
 
 haps as far. How Calderon would have simi- 
 lized this pretty creature had he ever seen it! 
 How would he have run him up and down the 
 gamut of simile! If a fish, then a fish with 
 wings; if a bird, then a bird, with fins; and so 
 on, keeping up the light shuttle-cock of a con- 
 ceit as is his wont." 
 
 Unconsciously, Low^ell, in dwelling on Cal- 
 deron's hunt for similes, has described the bent 
 of his own mind. The Spanish dramatist is to 
 him one of the great writers of all time. "For 
 fascination of style and profound suggestion, it 
 would be hard to name another author superior 
 to Calderon, if indeed equal to him. His charm 
 was equally felt by two minds as unlike each 
 other as those of Goethe and Shelley. These in 
 themselves are sufficient achievements, and the 
 intellectual life of a nation could maintain itself 
 on the unearned increment of these without fur- 
 ther addition to its resources." 
 
 One of the most distinctive characteristics of 
 Lowell's critical genius is the possession of a 
 robust common sense — "horse sense" the col- 
 loquial phrase has termed it— which accompan- 
 ied his cosmopolitan standards and in no way
 
 74 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 jars with his lofty idealism. No one has writ- 
 ten with greater admiration of Emerson than he. 
 Transcendentalism, as personified in Emer- 
 son and illumined in his pages, was to him one 
 thing; transcendentalism as lived by Thoreau 
 and expounded by the lesser lights of New Eng- 
 land, was quite another. There was need, in 
 Lowell's day, for such a critical clearing of the 
 atmosphere as his article on Thoreau. 
 
 Lowell, though fond of the great classic writ- 
 ers and never long separated from his Homer 
 and Euripides, has been charged with indif- 
 ference to Hellenism. There is certainly no 
 evidence that he arrogated to himself the right 
 to speak authoritatively on matters of classic 
 art; but we cannot fail to recognize that he was 
 as deeply imbued with the classic spirit as 
 Goethe, Grillparzer, and Sainte-Beuve. He 
 distinguished acutely between the conflicting 
 claims of classicists and modernists, pleading for 
 the moderns, but not as against the ancients. 
 
 Like every other great critic, Lowell had his 
 own method; his discursiveness, his playful seri- 
 ousness, the interfusion of the classic and the 
 modern, the Gallic and the Puritan spirit, are
 
 LOWELL : PATRIOT AND COSMOPOLITAN 71; 
 
 all part of his charm. But he could stick to his 
 text as closely as any parson (indeed he often 
 moralized as well as any), and it is precisely 
 when he speaks on Greek art and the Greek 
 drama that his argument is most closely-knit 
 and serious. 
 
 In discussing Swinburne's Tragedies Lowell 
 refers to the old dispute as to the comparative 
 merits of the ancients and the moderns which 
 far antedates Fontenelle's days, when it reached 
 fever-heat. Like Sainte-Beuve, who, with all 
 his admiration for the classics, ridicules those 
 who cannot think without their permission, 
 Low^ell did his own thinking, after enjoying the 
 best thought that ancients and moderns could 
 offer him. That we neither honor the ancients 
 nor profit ourselves by lifeless imitation of clas- 
 sic literature, Lowell shows in his own striking 
 way. 
 
 As in the case of Sainte-Beuve, we have to 
 know all that Lowell said of Goethe in order to 
 concede that the occasional strictures of a for- 
 eign critic concerning the great German do not 
 necessarily involve the crime of sacrilege. 
 Lowell was even more outspoken in what he said
 
 76 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 of Lessing. Stahr's Life of Lessing served him 
 as a text — one might say a pretext — for a homily 
 on the heaviness of German style, and there is 
 too much merciless dissection of the luckless 
 biographer to enable Lowell to do full justice 
 to his hero; but if the looseness of structure dis- 
 turbs the symmetry of the essay, the witty digres- 
 sions certainly illumine and adorn it. Lowell 
 was not lacking in due appreciation of Lessing; 
 he admired, perhaps, no other character in lit- 
 erature more fully, but he did not find in him 
 an unfailing source of inspiration, as he did in 
 Dante, Cervantes or, most of all possibly, in the 
 old English dramatists and poets. Chaucer, 
 Dryden, Marlowe, Chapman, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, Massinger and Ford — how lovingly 
 he dwelt on them, what life and color they all 
 assumed in his hands, what rich mines of criti- 
 cal suggestions and comparisons he opens up to 
 us in his glowing pages! They had nourished 
 his youth, and he returned to them in old age, 
 his unforgetable early New England impres- 
 sions enriched by all that old England had been 
 to him during his honored residence there. Nor 
 had any American Minister ever given to Eng-
 
 LOWELL : PATRIOT AND COSMOPOLITAN 
 
 77. 
 
 land what James Russell Lowell could give 
 while representing his country at the Court of St. 
 James. The quiet Harvard scholar at once took 
 rank not only with famous old-world scholars 
 and litterateurs, with ripe diplomats and states- 
 men, but with the most accomplished orators 
 and conversationalists, all the impressive per- 
 sonalities that graced the best of London 
 society. 
 
 It is not too much to say that his addresses at 
 the numerous public functions to which he will- 
 ingly lent the never-failing charm of his pres- 
 ence, marked an era in the intercourse between 
 the two countries. English philosophers and 
 workingmen alike listened spellbound to the 
 message of the American Minister, who, on 
 assuming the presidency of the Birmingham and 
 Midland Institute, expounded to the old world 
 the meaning of "Democracy" in the new; the 
 literary societies of London asked themselves 
 who of their number could speak of Fielding 
 or Coleridge v/ith a deeper appreciation of the 
 treasures of English literature, and temper criti- 
 cism with such matchless grace. How deftly he 
 mingles, in his address at the unveiling of the
 
 78 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 bust of Fielding, praise of the great novelist 
 with denunciation of that British Philistinism 
 which hesitates, on moral grounds, to recognize 
 his excellence. 
 
 With all the freedom of the accredited Minis- 
 ter of the great modern Republic and of the 
 ancient Republic of Letters, Lowell lashed those 
 critics who would read a Fielding out of polite 
 literature because of his offences against polite 
 society. Himself endowed with that penetrat- 
 ing mother wit which goes to the root of things, 
 Lowell possessed in equal degree the gift of 
 imagination, without which all the other quali- 
 fications of the critic go for naught. In his 
 address on Coleridge he embodied what may be 
 considered his ideal of the critic's equipment. 
 
 There is a curious antagonism between 
 Lowell's aversion to pedantic display of learn- 
 ing and the profusion of antiquarian lore in his 
 own pages. *T am by temperament impatient 
 of detail in communicating what I have 
 acquired," he says in the Prefatory Note to his 
 Essays, "and too often put into a parenthesis 
 or a note conclusions arrived at by long study 
 and reflection." He was indeed as lavish of
 
 LOWELL : PATRIOT AND COSMOPOLITAN 79 
 
 such condensed wisdom as Sainte-Beuve, and he 
 appreciated brevity and directness in others per- 
 haps even more than the French critic. He 
 realized that ''simplicity, where it is not a care- 
 less gift of the Muses, is the last and most pain- 
 ful achievement of conscientious self-denial." 
 He had a loving partiality for the leisurely pace 
 of an Izaak Walton, but biographical ampli- 
 tude in the case of lesser lights found no favor 
 in his eyes. ''Biography," he amusingly said, 
 "has found out a process by which what is 
 human may be so thrust upon us as to become 
 /w-human." Here again, as so often in criticis- 
 ing the moderns, he holds up the ancients as a 
 model. "Plutarch, a man of the most many- 
 sided moral and intellectual interests, has a 
 truer sense of proportion, and tempers his 
 amiable discursiveness with an eye to his neigh- 
 bor's dial. And in his case the very names of his 
 heroes are mostly so trumpet-like as both to 
 waken attention and to warrant it, ushering in 
 the bearers of them like that flourish on the 
 Elizabethan stage which told that a king was 
 coming." 
 
 The kings in literature alone occupied
 
 8o INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 Lowell's mind permanently, as they did the 
 minds of the other great critics of whom we have 
 spoken. Like them, when weary of the petty 
 concerns of the day, he returns to the ancients 
 and their golden age, which his fancy so often 
 contrasts with the baser metal of our modern 
 epoch. "I have my own suspicion sometimes," 
 he muses, ''that the true age of flint is before and 
 not behind us. . . . The siege of Troy will be 
 remembered when those of Vicksburg and Paris 
 are forgotten."
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY 
 STANDARDS 
 
 The value of the lessons taught us by the 
 eminent writers we are considering would be 
 largely lost if we failed to see their bearing on 
 the literary questions of the day. The critical 
 faculty is commonly supposed to be antagonis- 
 tic to creative ability; but in Goethe, Grill- 
 parzer, and Lowell we find the productive as 
 well as the critical faculty equally manifest. In 
 the case of Sainte-Beuve the prodigious mass of 
 his critical work outweighs in importance even 
 his uniquely valuable History of Port-Royal. 
 It is rare indeed to find the analytic gift joined 
 to such fruitful activity as characterized the 
 lives of Goethe, Grillparzer, Sainte-Beuve, and 
 Lowell. It was their incessant and passionate 
 endeavor to hold up to their countrymen the 
 great models of foreign literatures, in order to 
 bring home to them the excellence of their own 
 great writers. Their chosen field was the uni- 
 versal realm of thought and beauty. Imbued 
 with reverence for classic ideals, they are 
 equally inspired by the wisdom of the East; they 
 
 [81]
 
 82 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 seek what is admirable in German, French, 
 Spanish and Italian literature, and turn aside 
 to gather flowers from the literary bypaths of 
 other nations. Their sympathetic ken embraced 
 all great works that have stood the test of time; 
 and they passed by the mediocre and ignoble, 
 regardless of the insistence of contemporary 
 clamor. They never wrote or spoke to please 
 the crowd, but always to satisfy their literary 
 conscience; they appealed only to the cultivated 
 taste of the mature and receptive. Grill- 
 parzer's solitary critical jottings during so many 
 years bear the same note of sincerity and fulness 
 of knowledge as Goethe's discursive talks with 
 his scholarly intimates, Lowell's elaborate re- 
 views, or Sainte-Beuve's Monday Causeries, 
 which, with apparently conversational ease, 
 were addressed to all literary Paris. Though 
 the American critic was far more prodigal of 
 recondite lore than the German, Austrian and 
 French, all four possessed a wholesome dread of 
 pedantry, and they never criticised in order to 
 demonstrate their own superior wisdom. They 
 bore in mind Lessing's warning: "A writer of 
 note will not write merely to show his wit and
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 83 
 
 scholarship; he addresses himself to the best and 
 most enlightened of his time and deigns to write 
 only what may please them or what will afifect 
 their feelings." In this aspect the critical work 
 of Goethe, Grillparzer, Sainte-Beuve and 
 Lowell is identical, however different in form 
 and expression. 
 
 No critic has condemned more severely than 
 Goethe the empty parade of knowledge. "Some 
 books," he said, "seem to have been written not 
 for the purpose of teaching us something, but to 
 let us know that the author knew something," 
 and as for the limitations of the critic, he 
 remarked: "Rightly considered we learn only 
 from books which are beyond our ability to 
 criticise. The author of a book which we can 
 criticise would have to learn from us." But no 
 one has spoken with greater emphasis than 
 Goethe upon the importance of constantly add- 
 ing to our knowledge if we would rightly judge 
 literature and life. "Talent of every kind," he 
 said to Eckermann, "is fed by knowledge, and 
 only through it can it exercise its strength." He 
 said of himself to Chancellor Miiller, in 1830: 
 "Would it have been worth my while to live to
 
 84 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 the age of eighty if I had always thought the 
 same thoughts? I strive to think every day of 
 something different, something new, in order not 
 to get stale. One must change incessantly, and 
 renew and rejuvenate himself, in order not to 
 become rigid." 
 
 In the steady pursuit of wisdom all the great- 
 est geniuses attained their perfection. Young 
 talents, conscious of their power, shrink from 
 the slow process of weeding and pruning with 
 which even genius in its prime cannot dispense. 
 Vehemence of assertion is a natural concomitant 
 of youth, but recognition of this fact does not 
 absolve the critic from the duty of pointing out 
 to gifted minds the value of moderation and self- 
 discipline. It is well known how Goethe, after 
 emerging from the period of his own youthful 
 turbulence, recoiled from the seething spirit of 
 Schiller's Robbers. He speaks of Schiller's 
 powerful but immature talent which had 
 "flooded the country with a torrent of moral and 
 dramatic paradoxes." 
 
 The period of Schiller's intellectual lawless- 
 ness was brief and perhaps a necessary condi- 
 tion of the development of his genius. In the
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 85 
 
 case of so many writers of the day who defy tra- 
 dition and set up standards of their own, law- 
 lessness is the only law^ of their being. No 
 growth is possible, because the seed is lacking. 
 They start with deliberate ignorance and deceit- 
 ful paradox, and end where they began. The 
 current insistence on the right of the individual 
 to cultivate his talent in his own way deceives 
 only the ignorant. Individual liberty of this 
 kind can result only in collective enslavement. 
 "You will find," said Goethe, speaking of art, 
 "that every great master has used what was 
 excellent in his predecessors, and this fact has 
 made him great. Men like Raphael do not 
 grow spontaneously. They had their root in 
 the great works of antiquity. Had they not 
 made use of the advantages open to them, there 
 would be little to say about them." What is 
 true of art is equally true of literature. The 
 restlessness of modern endeavor in literature 
 and art, call it by whatever name we please, 
 betokens only weakness. We are invited to call 
 the bewildering change progress, but for one 
 genius w^ho creates something original there are 
 a thousand blunderers, who, in attempting to
 
 86 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 throw discredit on the old, merely demonstrate 
 the hopelessness of the new. "To make inno- 
 vations," says Lessing, "may be the characteris- 
 tic of a great mind or a small one. The great 
 discards the old because it has been found insuf- 
 ficient or false, the small because it is old. 
 While the former is influenced by reason, the 
 latter is by disgust. Genius wants to do more 
 than its predecessor, he who apes genius, merely 
 something different." And Goethe wrote: 
 "There is no more stupid error than the belief 
 of talented young people that they lose all credit 
 for originality by admitting the truth of that 
 which has already been recognized as such by 
 others." "There is constant talk about origi- 
 nality," he said to Eckermann, "but what does 
 it mean? As soon as we are born the world 
 around us begins to act upon us, and so it goes on 
 until the end. And, after all, what can we call 
 our own but our energy, strength and determi- 
 nation. If I could recount all I owe to my great 
 predecessors and contemporaries there would be 
 little left indeed that I could call my own." 
 
 It is not easy to realize how much harm is 
 done by the complaisant laudator temporis
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 87 
 
 praesentis who decries all attempts of serious 
 critics to set bounds to the ambition of young 
 aspirants to literary laurels. It has indeed 
 always been an ungrateful task to check imma- 
 ture exuberance. Lessing wrote: "We have 
 now a school of critics whose chief criticism 
 consists in throwing suspicion on all criticism. 
 'Genius, genius,' they repeat endlessly. 'Genius 
 disregards all rules. What genius creates 
 becomes the rule.' Thus they flatter genius — in 
 my opinion — in order that they may be regarded 
 as geniuses themselves. But they show too 
 clearly that they have not a spark of it them- 
 selves when they add in the same breath: 'Rules 
 stifle genius.' As if genius could be suppressed 
 by any power in the world! . . . Not every 
 critic is a genius, but every genius is a born 
 critic. Genius proves its own rules." 
 
 The public cannot be argued into mistaking 
 mediocrity for genius, nor does it long mistake 
 genius for mediocrity. But the effect of the 
 so-called kindly critic on mediocre authors is 
 disastrous. He not only encourages feeble 
 efifort, but literally calls it into being. Dozens 
 of young authors spring into existence and find
 
 88 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 publishers because dozens of others have written 
 before them, who, thanks to the plaudits of 
 undiscriminating critics and the thoughtlessness 
 of undiscriminating readers, achieved a fleeting 
 notoriety. It is a misfortune to any country to 
 have its literary taste debauched by critical arbi- 
 ters who have so little equipment for their call- 
 ing. France, having for centuries cherished 
 veneration for literary genius, has perhaps set 
 the world the best example of an almost 
 unbroken line of critical authorities, of whom 
 Sainte-Beuve, in the recent past, was merely the 
 foremost representative. 
 
 The trite warning to the sceptical critic to 
 look out for unrecognized genius need scarcely 
 be met by the obvious observation that unmis- 
 takable genius cannot be mistaken, and that even 
 striking talent is quick to find recognition. Nor 
 is it profitable, in the case of contemporaries, to 
 raise the question of the diflference between 
 genius and talent. Posterity alone, that is to say, 
 the best international judgment, in the ripeness 
 of time, can assign to creative force its definite 
 rank. Grillparzer, referring to the extravagant 
 claims made for the lawless genius we all so w^ell
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 89 
 
 know, penned the lines: "Denn das Genie, es 
 laiift in alien Gassen, doch seltener als je ist 
 das Talent." (Genius indeed may be met with 
 at every street corner, but talent is scarcer than 
 ever.) Goethe has said the final word on the 
 subject in his remark: 
 
 "What is genius but the power of doing deeds 
 that can stand before God and Nature, of pro- 
 ducing permanent results? All of Mozart's 
 works are of this kind; there is in them a pro- 
 ductive powTr which acts upon generation after 
 generation, and it will be many a day before 
 that is exhausted. This is equally the case with 
 other great composers and with all great artists. 
 How potent has been the influence upon suc- 
 ceeding centuries of Phidias and Raphael, of 
 Diirer, and Holbein! He who first invented the 
 forms and proportions of Old-German archi- 
 tecture, which in the course of time made pos- 
 sible the Strassburg Minster and the Cologne 
 Cathedral, was likewise a genius; for his 
 thought has retained its productive power to this 
 day and still exerts its influence. Luther was a 
 very formidable genius. His influence has lasted 
 many a day, and we cannot foretell how many
 
 90 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 centuries may elapse before he will cease to be 
 productive. Lessing disclaimed the lofty title 
 of genius, but his permanent influence tells 
 against his disclaimer. There are in literature, 
 on the other hand, other great names who during 
 their lifetime were considered great geniuses, 
 but whose influence ceased with their life, and 
 who therefore were less important than they 
 and others thought." 
 
 It is the crowning merit of the great inter- 
 national critics that they held their balance true. 
 The recognition of talent never led them to over- 
 praise its power, and as there can be no just 
 criticism of others which is not based on the 
 clear recognition of one's own limitations, so 
 they saw clearly what they themselves could and 
 could not do. Goethe gave a striking illustra- 
 tion of the wholly impersonal attitude of self- 
 criticism in an oft-quoted remark concerning 
 Tieck. 
 
 'Tieck," he said to Eckermann, "is a man of 
 great talent, and no one can be more sensible of 
 his great merits than myself, but it is a mistake 
 to raise him beyond his own height and place 
 him on the same level with me. I can say so
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 9 1 
 
 plainly, for it matters nothing to me, inasmuch 
 as I have not made myself. I should act simi- 
 larly if I compared myself with Shakespeare, 
 who also did not make himself, but who is 
 nevertheless a being of a higher order, to whom 
 I look up with reverence." Now this just recog- 
 nition of the limits of praise is precisely what 
 distinguishes the true critic from his counterfeit. 
 Every nation furnishes instances of this inability 
 ''to see ourselves as others see us." In its worst 
 manifestation it leads to blind chauvinism, and 
 it is a national calamity if great literary talent 
 lends its influence to this perversion of the nat- 
 ural love of one's country. It would be easy 
 to point to conspicuous examples of the harm- 
 ful stimulus given to imperialistic ideas by 
 seductive poetic appeals — ideas which, in the 
 long run, lead only to national isolation. It 
 may be said without exaggeration that the 
 recrudescence of the mediaeval idea accord- 
 ing to which the interests of nations are always 
 opposed to each other is fostered by the thought- 
 less literary critic who magnifies the impor- 
 tance of the achievements of his own country. 
 Self-glorification on the part of one nation
 
 92 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 is certain to arouse self-glorification on the part 
 of another. It is to be regretted that even so 
 eminent a critic as Hermann Grimm allowed 
 himself to speak of Goethe's Faust as "the great- 
 est work of the greatest poet of all times and all 
 nations" — a statement which we may well con- 
 trast with Goethe's saner estimate of himself as 
 compared with Shakespeare. 
 
 As we turn the pages of the masters of criti- 
 cism, and compare their ways of treating the 
 subjects that interested them in common, we are 
 struck, above all, by their reverence for the 
 past, their deference to the great, their mod- 
 eration and modesty. There is in them not a 
 trace of the shallow piquancy, the elaborate 
 paradox, the cynical self-complacency of the 
 so-called brilliant critic of the day. No coun- 
 try in the world needs the example of these 
 sober, self-respecting and respectful men of let- 
 ters more than ours, where the teachings of our 
 own wise men of the past are in danger of being 
 forgotten. We shall, let us hope, again see the 
 rise of literary genius among us, but we must 
 beware lest we lose the standards by which 
 genius is measured. What avails all else if we
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 93 
 
 lack discrimination and self-restraint? "To miss 
 decorum," says Professor Irving Babbitt, in an 
 article on Diderot, "is to become incapable of 
 what is best in art and literature (not to speak 
 of life itself) ; it is to lose the secret of selection 
 and the grand manner." 
 
 To what else did the great critics owe their 
 influence but to this "secret of selection"? They 
 heard the call of the present as we do, but they 
 never exaggerated its claims, and they felt the 
 need of going back, again and again, to the great 
 masters who have permanently enriched the 
 world. He who does not feel this need merely 
 gives proof of his intellectual poverty. Surely, 
 what the wisest could not be without, lesser 
 minds can ill afford to spare. No one returned 
 more constantly to the perennial sources of inspi- 
 ration than Goethe. To read a great writer or 
 see a great picture was a constant incentive to 
 read and see again. "Moliere," he said to 
 Eckermann, "is so great that he astonishes us 
 anew every time we read him. He stands alone. 
 ... I read several of his plays every year, just 
 as, from time to time, I look at engravings of 
 pictures by the Great Italian masters. For we
 
 94 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 small men are not able to preserve within us the 
 greatness of such things, and must therefore 
 return to them from time to time in order to 
 refresh our impressions." 
 
 It is idle to imagine that literary genius can 
 afford to go its own solitary way, scorning knowl- 
 edge, and be the better for it. The gifted minds 
 may select their own manner of observing and 
 studying, but observe and study they must, and 
 ignorance becomes them as ill as it does the 
 average man. Matthew Arnold has well said: 
 "Wordsworth cared little for books, and dis- 
 paraged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he 
 is, so much that I cannot wish him different; and 
 it is vain, no doubt, to imagine such a man dif- 
 ferent from what he is, to suppose that he could 
 have been diflferent. But surely the one thing 
 wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater 
 poet than he is — his thought richer, and his 
 influence of wider application — was that he 
 should have read more books, among them, no 
 doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged 
 without reading them." 
 
 If we learned nothing else from the great 
 writers, we could still profit by their serenity.
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 95 
 
 which is so lamentably absent from the writing 
 of the day. They found pleasure in their work 
 and they gave pleasure to the reader. The mas- 
 ter dramatists wrote no problem plays, the mas- 
 ter novelists no pathological novels, the master 
 poets no morbid poetry, though they too knew 
 something of the problems of mankind and the 
 evils of society. Goethe, Grillparzer, Sainte- 
 Beuve and Lowell, with all their diversities of 
 temper and character, wrote in a serene spirit. 
 What they created and what they strove for 
 tended to make the world better and happier. 
 They had in common the trait which, as Emer- 
 son says, "properly belongs to the poet. I mean 
 his cheerfulness, without which no man can be 
 a poet, for beauty is his aim. . . . The true 
 bards have been noted for their firm and cheer- 
 ful temper." Indeed, the practice of all great 
 critics shows that cheerfulness is an important 
 part of their creed. The serene atmosphere 
 w^hich pervades the writings of Goethe, Grill- 
 parzer, Sainte-Beuve, and Lowell is the result 
 of an inner enthusiasm for what is beautiful and 
 excellent, and enthusiasm is incompatible with 
 a cynical spirit. Our modern brood of melan-
 
 96 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 choly, formless, paradoxical and insincere writ- 
 ers would have been intolerable to these critics, 
 with their keen detestation of sham. There were 
 unhappy poets in those days as well, but who 
 reads them to-day? "All the poets," says 
 Goethe, "write as if they were ill and the whole 
 world a hospital. They all speak of the woes 
 and the miseries of this earth and of the joys of 
 a hereafter; all are dissatisfied. . . . This is a 
 real abuse of poetry, which was given to us to 
 hide the petty discords of life and to make man 
 contented with the world and with his condi- 
 tion." 
 
 Lowell, in a passage of whimsical wisdom 
 enforces the lesson of cheerfulness in modern 
 life. His good humor smiles through his very 
 doubts. "It is noteworthy that literature, as it 
 becomes more modern, becomes also more 
 melancholy, and that he who keeps most con- 
 stantly to the minor key of hopelessness, or 
 strikes the deepest note of despair, is surest of 
 at least momentary acclaim. Nay, do not some 
 sources of happiness flow less full or cease to 
 flow as settlement and sanitation advance, even 
 as the feeders of our streams are dried by the
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 97 
 
 massacre of our forests? We cannot have a new 
 boulevard in Florence unless at sacrifice of those 
 ancient city-walls in which inspiring memories 
 had for so many ages built their nests and reared 
 their broods of song. Did not the plague, 
 brooded and hatched in those smotherers of 
 fresh air, the slits that thoroughfared the older 
 town, give us the Decameron? And was the 
 price too high? We cannot widen and venti- 
 late the streets of Rome without grievous wrong 
 to the city that we loved, and yet it is well to 
 remember that this city too had built itself out of 
 and upon the ruins of that nobler Rome which 
 gave it all the wizard hold it had on our imagi- 
 nation. The Social Science Congress rejoices in 
 changes that bring tears to the eyes of the 
 painter and the poet. Alas! we cannot have a 
 world made expressly for Mr. Ruskin, nor keep 
 it if we could, more's the pity. Are we to con- 
 fess, then, that the world grows less lovable as 
 it grows more convenient and comfortable? that 
 beauty flees before the step of the Social 
 Reformer as the wild pensioners of Nature 
 before the pioneers? that the lion will lie down 
 with the lamb sooner than picturesqueness with
 
 98 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 health and prosperity? Morally, no doubt, we 
 are bound to consider the Greatest Good of the 
 Greatest Number, but there is something in us, 
 vagula, blandula, that refuses, and rightly 
 refuses, to be Benthamized; that asks itself in a 
 timid whisper, 'Is it so certain, then, that the 
 Greatest Good is also the Highest? and has it 
 been to the Greatest or to the Smallest Num- 
 ber that man has been most indebted?' For 
 myself, while I admit, because I cannot help it, 
 certain great and manifest improvements in the 
 general well-being, I cannot stifle a suspicion 
 that the Modern Spirit, to whose tune we are 
 marching so cheerily, may have borrowed of the 
 Pied Piper of Hamelin the instrument whence 
 he draws such bewitching music." 
 
 What chiefly repels the cautious observer of 
 the various manifestations of the modern spirit 
 in literature is its vociferous positiveness and 
 pretence. The watchword "progress" covers a 
 multitude of reactionary sins. In the general 
 rejection of the standards of the past which we 
 are told must give place to the nameless wisdom 
 of an unknown future, we simply go back to 
 ancient barbarism. The devotees of "natural-
 
 PERMANENT LITERARY STANDARDS 99 
 
 ism" have wisely chosen their designation. 
 They have flung civilization to the winds and 
 returned to the state of savage nature. Little do 
 they reck or care what mankind loses in the 
 process. 
 
 How far have we wandered, in these days 
 when every literary aspirant insists on the 
 righteousness of his own gospel, from the exam- 
 ple of the great critics, whose whole activity 
 showed that they had no tolerance for the gospel 
 of infallibility, either in individuals or nations. 
 "Let no one in^agine," said the wise Goethe, 
 "that the world has been waiting for him as for 
 a Messiah." Modern literature is perpetually 
 on the lookout for some new prophet. Salva- 
 tion is to come now from one new preacher, now 
 from another — the text does not matter, so it be 
 new and startling. 
 
 Can the world in the long run dispense with 
 simplicity and loveliness and lose the posses- 
 sions which make literature and life precious? 
 "We cannot yet afford," answers Emerson, "to 
 drop Homer, nor /Eschylus, nor Plato, nor 
 Aristotle, nor Archimedes." Posterity will not 
 side with the modern critics who encourage the
 
 lOO INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 turbulent lawlessness of the moderns; for praise 
 of the ignoble is not only an offence against 
 aesthetics, but against the very order of society. 
 Literary conscience concerns itself with deeper 
 things than novelty of theme and piquancy of 
 treatment, and the sense of beauty refuses to be 
 satisfied with the realistic search for the surface 
 truth of things. Goethe has said a beautiful 
 word on this subject: 
 
 ''Until recently the world believed in the 
 heroism of a Lucretia or of a Mucius Scaevola, 
 and this belief inspired us with warmth and 
 enthusiasm. But now historical criticism tells 
 us that those heroes never lived and must be 
 considered as fables and fictions produced by 
 the lofty imagination of the Romans. But of 
 what use is such paltry truth to us? If the 
 Romans were great enough to invent such 
 heroes, we ought at least to be great enough to 
 believe in them." 
 
 It is this recognition of the power of the 
 deeper truth, this seriousness of purpose, this 
 perennial search for wisdom and loveliness, that 
 made the master critics what they are.
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE 
 PHILOSOPHER 
 
 Few works dealing with philosophic ques- 
 tions in a popular form have been as successful 
 as Feuchtersleben's Hygiene of the Soul (Zur 
 Didtetik der Seele). Published originally in 
 1838, at Vienna, it has maintained its interest 
 to this day. The book has been translated into 
 several languages, but the personality of its 
 author is still practically unknown to American 
 readers. Yet literature contains few nobler lives 
 than that of Ernst Baron von Feuchtersleben. 
 
 Grillparzer, whose caustic pen spared few 
 contemporary celebrities, wrote, in 1851, of the 
 philosopher as follows: 
 
 'T became acquainted with Feuchtersleben at 
 a comparatively late period. Therefore and 
 because our relations were mainly of a literary 
 nature, I know practically nothing of his pre- 
 vious life, and must limit myself to remarks con- 
 cerning his character and his intellect. These 
 are fairly open to the scrutiny of others; his own 
 innate and most genuine modesty would under 
 
 [101]
 
 I02 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 any circumstances have prevented him from 
 alluding to his personal afifairs. 
 
 "Married to a woman who was the opposite 
 of himself as to habits, temperament and edu- 
 cation, he succeeded by yielding no less than 
 insisting, by his intellectual superiority and his 
 easy good nature, in creating for himself a 
 wedded happiness the perfection of which has 
 perhaps never been equalled. This alone, while 
 testifying to the strength of his character, marks 
 him as what he was in every respect — a truly 
 wise man. 
 
 ''Honesty, truthfulness, kindliness and mod- 
 esty formed the basis of his character. He had 
 the right to say of himself: 'I have had to fight 
 for whatever I am,' for he never surrendered a 
 conviction, or deviated from the strictest path of 
 duty, in order to gain an advantage. 
 
 "In speaking of his truthfulness, I do not 
 mean truthful merely in his relation to others, 
 for that is included in the very term 'honesty'; 
 I mean truthful toward himself — a quality 
 which has become rare nowadays, particularly 
 in Germany. He never simulated great ideas, 
 improvised convictions, cherished imaginary
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE PHILOSOPHER 103 
 
 cravings. Not only in this thoughts, but in his 
 feelings, he was true and consistent. He knew 
 the limits of his capacity, and would not have 
 overstepped them if a hundred journals had 
 offered him pecuniary inducements. 
 
 "No field of human knowledge appears to 
 have been strange to him. In the domain of 
 philosophy Kant was the man after his own 
 heart. That philosophy of modesty, the cul- 
 minating point of whose system is the humble: 
 ^I know not,' a philosophy which starts with a 
 body of facts that neither requires proof nor can 
 be made to yield it, which is quite content to 
 comprise within itself all that is logically cor- 
 rect and conducive to the moral welfare of all, 
 which, precisely because it sets bounds to 
 thought, makes it possible for man's aspiration 
 and emotion to fill the existing gap by religion 
 and art — Kant's philosophy was also Feuchters- 
 leben's. 
 
 "His chief doctrine and his own aim and 
 practice were the attainment of culture, that is 
 to say, the fullest development and harmonious 
 agreement of all intellectual faculties and nat- 
 ural gifts. Hence Goethe was his ideal. He
 
 I04 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 watched with the most genuine devotion the 
 unfolding of youthful talent, even in those writ- 
 ers whose works were in no way influenced by 
 him; he was intent, in his criticism, on dwelling 
 upon every good point, emphasizing each happy 
 turn and thought, always looking for the hidden 
 meaning, endeavoring to supplement and sug- 
 gest what was lacking, and entering wholly into 
 the author's intentions. He was untiring in 
 critical appreciations of this sort. That is what 
 I meant in speaking of his kindliness. His self- 
 sacrificing devotion, joined to all his other quali- 
 ties, completed a nature endowed with the most 
 perfect charm." 
 
 Ernst Baron von Feuchtersleben was born in 
 Vienna, on the 29th of April, 1806. He was 
 descended from a Saxon family who had set- 
 tled in Austria at the beginning of the eigh- 
 teenth century. His father, whom the son 
 describes as ''a man of serious and stern charac- 
 ter, devoted to his civic duties in a spirit of tire- 
 less self-sacrifice," attained the rank of aulic 
 councillor in the Austrian civil service. The 
 child, delicate and early left motherless, passed 
 his first years in the country, and at the age of
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE PHILOSOPHER 1 05 
 
 six was placed in the Theresianische Akademie 
 at Vienna, an institution where the sons of noble- 
 men were educated for the service of the state. 
 There he remained until his nineteenth year. 
 The education he received was, according to his 
 own statement, "wholly WTong. The instruc- 
 tion was in the hands of priests, over whom was 
 placed a soldier. I saw the talents of the most 
 promising young men wither away under the 
 influence of priestly pride and soldierly bru- 
 tality. Twice every day, not infrequently three 
 times, we had to go to church, and thus every 
 religious feeling was stifled in us. However, 
 men develop regardless of wind and weather 
 and tyranny, and I saw under this system young 
 men grow up whose brows bore the stamp of 
 Sparta and Rome." 
 
 There was, indeed, a good deal of the Spartan 
 in young Feuchtersleben himself. His teacher 
 of history, the enlightened Father Boniface, 
 fired his susceptible heart with his tales of 
 antique stoicism. Friedrich Hebbel, the editor 
 of Feuchtersleben's w^orks, relates that the young 
 inmate of the Theresianum at one time resolved 
 to do without his bed, and slept many nights on
 
 Io6 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 the bare floor; in order to train his will-power 
 still further, he left his favorite dishes untouched 
 and half starved himself. He even refused to 
 avail himself of the occasional permission to 
 visit his paternal home, much as he longed for it. 
 He gave a still greater proof of his self-control 
 when one of his closest friends, in order to test 
 his moral strength, accused him publicly of 
 some delinquency of which he himself had been 
 guilty. Feuchtersleben, after having heard who 
 his accuser was, silently submitted to punish- 
 ment, and when his friend, bursting into tears, 
 craved his forgiveness, he quietly answered: "I 
 only regret that you found it necessary to resort 
 to a lie in order to learn the strength of my 
 friendship for you." 
 
 With all its defects, the Theresianum fur- 
 nished the eager young student sound instruc- 
 tion in the classics and the natural sciences. He 
 found abundant opportunity to indulge his 
 poetic fancy as well as his early tendency toward 
 philosophic reflection. In addition to the 
 ancient thinkers, he studied Spinoza, Lessing, 
 Herder, Kant, Schiller and Goethe. Much 
 against his father's will, Feuchtersleben, on
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE PHILOSOPHER 107 
 
 leaving the academy, decided to study medicine. 
 He entered the University of Vienna in 1825, 
 and in the same year, at the age of nineteen, 
 published two philosophic papers — "On the 
 Study of Nature" and "Concerning Genius." 
 He remained nearly nine years at the university, 
 engaged in the study of medicine, physiology, 
 philosophy, aesthetics, and Oriental literature. 
 In an autobiographic memoir — a model of mod- 
 est brevity — which Feuchtersleben prepared, in 
 1849, for the Vienna Academy of Sciences, of 
 which he had been elected a member, he alludes 
 to the inspiration which he derived during his 
 academic years from a circle of intimate friends 
 which included, among others who later 
 achieved fame, the composer Franz Schubert. 
 
 Shortly after Feuchtersleben had taken his 
 degree of doctor of medicine, in 1834, his father, 
 in a fit of nervous despondency, committed sui- 
 cide, and the young physician and his only 
 brother were left absolutely without means. 
 Nevertheless, Feuchtersleben was courageous 
 enough to marry the girl to whom he had long 
 been paying court, and to enter upon the prac- 
 tice of medicine. The results of his professional
 
 Io8 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 activity were pitifully meagre. The few 
 patients whom he found, abashed by his baronial 
 title, hesitated to ofifer him a pecuniary compen- 
 sation for his services, and sent him instead some 
 token of their gratitude, generally useless trin- 
 kets, so that the young couple were soon in the 
 grip of the most grinding poverty. They were 
 compelled to spend their evenings in the dark, 
 as they could not afford the luxury of a candle 
 light. Fortunately, Feuchtersleben's literary 
 ability enabled him gradually to eke out a mod- 
 est living. He wrote articles on historical, 
 philosophical and aesthetic subjects for some 
 Vienna periodicals, and published in 1835 his 
 first medical work. Professor Max Neuburger, 
 in his memorial address on Feuchtersleben, 
 delivered at the Vienna Medical Society on the 
 hundredth anniversary of his birth, speaks of 
 this work, Ueber das hippokratische erste Buck 
 von der Diat, as "one of the gems of medico- 
 historical literature." 
 
 The Hygiene of the Soul was not originally 
 written for publication. In his autobiographic 
 data for the Vienna Academy of Sciences 
 Feuchtersleben modestly remarks: 'T may per-
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE PHILOSOPHER 109 
 
 haps take occasion to speak in this place of the 
 influence exerted, much to my astonishment, by 
 a little book, similar in spirit to the work just 
 mentioned [a treatise on psychiatry], but written 
 for an entirely different purpose. This little 
 book, entitled Zur Didtetik der Seele, was really 
 the result of silent self-contemplation after many 
 trials and much suffering, and was intended as 
 a solace to myself only. The kindly interest of 
 a few friends, who had read some parts in manu- 
 script, is alone responsible for the publication 
 of the book. 1 had no reason to expect a loud 
 resDonse and never looked for one. But the old 
 habent sua fata libelli once more proved true, 
 and I attained a result that took me completely 
 by surprise. Judging from many remarks and 
 letters that reached me, it looked as if during a 
 period of public agitation a faithful observer of 
 his own emotions had succeeded in touching the 
 minds of others so as to call forth an imme- 
 diate response, rousing them, as it were, to a 
 consciousness of what had been felt by all, with- 
 out having been uttered by anyone." 
 
 The success of the book was instantaneous. 
 Feuchtersleben's place in the medical circles of
 
 no INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 Vienna, as well as in literature, was now secure. 
 In 1839 appeared his treatise, Ueber die Gewiss- 
 heit und Wiirde der Heilkunst (Concerning the 
 Precision and Dignity of Medical Science), of 
 which Professor Neuburger, in the memorial 
 address referred to, says : "Never have the cause 
 of the medical profession and the dignity of 
 medical science been upheld with more profun- 
 dity and moral fervor. Indeed, the present 
 moment seems most opportune for a republica- 
 tion of this work." 
 
 Feuchtersleben's merits as a medical thinker 
 and writer were acknowledged by his election, 
 in 1840, as Secretary of the Vienna Society of 
 Physicians, a position in which he displayed 
 during a number of years the greatest zeal and 
 ability. In 1841 appeared the epoch-making 
 Pathological Anatomy of Rokitansky, and 
 Feuchtersleben, says Professor Neuburger, was 
 foremost among Vienna scientists in seizing the 
 importance of that work and of the equally sig- 
 nificant diagnostic discoveries of Skoda.* In 
 his papers read before the Society of Physi- 
 
 * Joseph Skoda (1805-81), Professor at the University of 
 Vienna, whose Abhandlung iiber die Anskultation und Perkussion 
 marked a new era in medical diagnostics.
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE PHILOSOPHER 1 1 1 
 
 cians he "arrived at deductions which are con- 
 firmed, in their entirety, by the subsequent 
 development of medical science." 
 
 In 1844 Feuchtersleben began his famous lec- 
 tures on medical psychology, as the first incum- 
 bent of that chair at the University of Vienna. 
 The students thronged his lecture room to such 
 an extent that the professors whose hours coin- 
 cided with his own found their rooms deserted. 
 The results of these lectures were embodied in 
 his Lehrbuch der drztiichen Seelenkunde, 
 which appeared in London, in 1847, as "The 
 Principles of Medical Psychology." The work 
 was described by the English editors as "remark- 
 able for the clear and methodical arrangement 
 of its matter, for its depth of erudition and 
 research, and for the impartial and philosophi- 
 cal spirit in which it is written." 
 
 In 1845 ^he medical faculty of the University 
 of Vienna elected Feuchtersleben as its dean. 
 But although adored by the students, and 
 acknowledged everywhere as one of the leading 
 lights among the professors, he despaired of his 
 ability to carry out any of the reforms in the 
 educational life of Austria which were so
 
 112 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 urgently called for by every friend of progress 
 and so dear to his own heart. Metternich's rule 
 stifled every manifestation of independence and 
 liberalism in the university, as in the public 
 schools. The influence of the clergy was para- 
 mount and the press was muzzled. "Where 
 there is neither intelligence nor morality,"" 
 Feuchtersleben wrote in his diary, after enter- 
 ing upon his duties as dean, "I am power- 
 less to accomplish anything." Nevertheless, his 
 personality so impressed itself upon his col- 
 leagues and the governing classes that, in 1847, 
 he was appointed "Vice-Director of Medico- 
 Surgical Studies," a position which placed him 
 at the head of the conferences held by the entire 
 body of university professors. Among his pub- 
 lic utterances as dean was a remarkable address 
 delivered, in the presence of the court-chancel- 
 lor, in April, 1847, in which he outlined a plan 
 for the complete reform of public education, 
 with academic freedom as its corner stone. 
 What he then advocated was more emphatically 
 insisted on in the petitions to the government, 
 drawn up at Feuchtersleben's instigation, in 
 March and April, 1848, when the progress of
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE PHILOSOPHER 1 1 3 
 
 the revolutionary movement emboldened the 
 champions of liberty to formulate their demands 
 in unmistakable terms. 
 
 In the following July Feuchtersleben was 
 offered the portfolio of Public Instruction in the 
 liberal Cabinet which had assumed power. He 
 refused the ofTfer, but agreed to take the position 
 of Under Secretary in the ministry of Public 
 Instruction, where he thought he could wholly 
 devote himself, free from direct political respon- 
 sibility, to the task of educational reform.* The 
 place of Vice-Director of Medico-Surgical 
 Studies, which he temporarily resigned, was to 
 be kept open for him. He threw himself into 
 his new duties with all the ardor of his soul. 
 "I may say," he wrote in a memoir submitted 
 to the Academy of Sciences, "there could be no 
 more congenial task for me. It fulfilled all my 
 desires and suited perfectly whatever capacity 
 I had. Thus I ventured to make the attempt." 
 
 The educational reforms efifected by Feuch- 
 
 * Feuchtersleben's modest preference for the inferior position 
 recalls Condorcet's refusal to accept the post of Inspector of 
 Coinage offered him by Turgot, which refusal he coupled with 
 the suggestion that he be entrusted with the task of carrying 
 out some minor reforms.
 
 114 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 tersleben in the four months during which he 
 held office were of the most far-reaching char- 
 acter. Measures of this kind, which necessi- 
 tated the removal of professors who had out- 
 grown their usefulness by younger men, created 
 much ill-feeling against their author, and this 
 was augmented by the impatience of the revolu- 
 tionary hotspurs in whose eyes the pace of wise 
 Feuchtersleben was not rapid enough. The 
 events of October, 1848 — the fury of street 
 mobs, the flight of the Emperor, the murder of 
 the War Minister, Count Latour — which fore- 
 shadowed the speedy triumph of the reactionary 
 powers, forced him to tender his resignation. 
 "He had come into conflict," says Grillparzer, 
 "with something utterly antagonistic to his 
 nature — brute force." Feuchtersleben intended 
 to re-enter upon his duties at the university as 
 professor and vice-director, but all the members 
 of the faculty, swayed by various motives, 
 joined in an official protest to the new ministry 
 against his resumption of these offices. Deeply 
 wounded, Feuchtersleben retired into private 
 life. He busied himself with outlining a his- 
 tory of education and wrote some lectures on
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN THE PHILOSOPHER 1 1 ij 
 
 anthropology, but his physical strength was 
 unequal to the shock sustained. He lingered 
 four months in the grasp of an agonizing 
 malady, which, however, could not wholly extin- 
 guish the serenity of his soul. "For entire days," 
 says the poet Hebbel, "he lay motionless, his 
 eyes fixed upon one object, and uttered not a 
 single word; but when night came he grew 
 talkative and enjoyed the company of his faith- 
 ful wife; he took an interest in everybody and 
 everything, and sometimes even his old humor 
 and gaiety returned. It seemed as though his 
 strength increased tov/ard evening and fled with 
 the morning — as though the sun had ceased to 
 hold out blessings to him and had made way for 
 the stars." He expired September 3, 1848, in 
 his forty-fourth year. His death aroused 
 Austria to a sense of her loss. The leading citi- 
 zens of Vienna followed the remains of her 
 noble son to their resting place, and his praises 
 resounded far beyond the confines of the mon- 
 archy. English scholars and physicians assem- 
 bled to do honor to his memory, and French 
 scientific bodies sent, posthumously, a diploma 
 in recognition of his achievements. Nearly two
 
 Il6 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 years elapsed, owing to the political unrest, 
 before the Medical Society of Vienna could 
 assemble to do justice to Feuchtersleben's ser- 
 vices to science and humanity.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 
 
 FeucHTERSLEBEN's treatise is, in its essence, 
 a plea for moral, intellectual, and physical 
 health through the exercise of will power. 
 Firmness of will, he reasons, makes us what we 
 are, and as all created beings represent merely 
 force in action, man's best possession is the 
 energy with w^hich he asserts himself, even 
 though it be but energy imposed upon him from 
 without. If it does not spring spontaneously 
 from his own breast, let him, by a supreme 
 effort, put himself in a condition where his will 
 must obey. 
 
 Feuchtersleben claims for the human will not 
 only an inherent power of resistance to dele- 
 terious influences, but would have us exercise 
 our will power aggressively, so as to keep the 
 body in good health. In so far as the mind 
 influences the development of the body, that 
 influence will manifest itself in bodily beauty 
 as well as in bodily health. Emotional habits 
 and the exercise of the will determine character 
 and guide the spontaneous movements of the 
 
 muscles, hence they determine the facial fea- 
 
 [117]
 
 Il8 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 tures, which express what we generally call 
 beauty or its opposite. Every oft-repeated 
 facial trait, be it smiling, crying, twitching, 
 sneering or frowning, leaves its trace in the soft 
 parts of the face, recording, as it were, what has 
 taken place, and making each successive repro- 
 duction of the act easier, until finally the imprint 
 on the muscles and tissues becomes permanent. 
 And the play of the muscles cannot continue 
 long without leaving its traces on the under- 
 lying bony structure. Passionate persons have 
 in old age far more facial wrinkles than those 
 of a placid disposition; their skin is much more 
 frequently contracted and expanded by their 
 gestures, and the resulting lines, consequently, 
 remain forever. 
 
 What takes place in the tender parts which 
 give the face its expression, occurs equally in 
 other organs of the human system. When we 
 are freed from oppressive care we draw a deep 
 breath, and the chest necessarily expands in 
 doing so. Repeated action of this kind is cer- 
 tain to affect favorably the respiratory organs. 
 On the other hand, he whose circulation is 
 impeded by depressing emotional suffering and
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 119 
 
 who continues to languish, will not escape the 
 consequences of such a condition, as shown in 
 diminished secretion, impaired nutrition, etc. 
 The earlier in life and the more frequently such 
 conditions occur — the greater their intensity 
 and their influence upon the temperament of the 
 individual — the more inevitable and the more 
 plainly manifest will be the imprint, in form 
 and action, upon the body throughout life. The 
 human organism represents a living circle, all 
 parts of wiiich work together in close inter- 
 action. The story told by the pale, wrinkled 
 face is also betrayed by the feeble voice, the 
 faltering step, the characterless handwriting, 
 the irresolute mood, by susceptibility to changes 
 of weather, and the liability to the inroads of 
 disease. The body is poisoned, or — as the case 
 may be — preserved and healed by the products 
 of the seed sown by the mind. Beauty itself is 
 in a certain sense but the outward token of 
 health; the harmony of all bodily functions 
 shows itself in the harmonious result — beauty of 
 form. If thus virtue beautifies and vice vitiates, 
 who will deny that virtue preserves health, while 
 vice promotes disease?
 
 I20 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 Nature's judgments are secret; they are ren- 
 dered slowly, but infallibly; she keeps account 
 even of those transgressions which shun the eyes 
 of men and are not amenable to their laws. Her 
 actions, eternal as everything that emanates 
 from the source of all power, extend from gen- 
 eration to generation, and the late descendant, 
 who despairingly broods over the secret of his 
 sufferings, may find the solution in the sins of 
 his forefathers. But, in proportion as we recog- 
 nize that weakness and disease are due to moral 
 rather than physical causes shall we approach 
 the cure; only we must begin with practices of 
 a much higher sort than cold baths and the 
 hardening of our children in accordance with 
 the theories of Rousseau and other reformers. 
 Physicians, who are often charged with being 
 too materialistic, may meet the reproach by tak- 
 ing a hint from the moralist and the priest. The 
 true physician will see the road to salvation as 
 clearly as they. 
 
 There are human beings so happily endowed 
 by nature that their moral development pro- 
 ceeds with great ease; they may be said to pos- 
 sess moral genius, just as we speak of genius in
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 121 
 
 art. Such exceptional beings were Marcus 
 Aurelius, Socrates, Howard, and Penn. In indi- 
 viduals possessing this endowment the harmony 
 of their existence will unmistakably manifest 
 itself, even where, as in the case of Socrates, the 
 struggle of the mind with the imperfections of 
 the body is apparent. The scattered rays of an 
 inner light, illumining, as it were, the body, are 
 all the more glorious to behold. The saying of 
 Apollonius, "There are blossoms even in wrin- 
 kles," is as true to-day as of yore. 
 
 Modern psychologists, says Feuchtersleben, 
 reproach those of a former day with having split 
 up and destroyed, as it were, the unity of the 
 human mind by ascribing to it a number of 
 greater and lesser functions, such as reason, 
 intellect, higher and lower desires, imagination, 
 memory, etc. In so far as these so-called func- 
 tions were represented as agencies acting accord- 
 ing to special law^s, the criticism is well- 
 founded; for the human intellect is a complete 
 and indivisible w^hole, and its apparent parts are 
 but the various forms of its activity. These 
 forms, however, are clearly distinct from each 
 other, and may well be considered each by itself.
 
 122 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 The sum and substance of all our activities is 
 revealed in but three ways : we are able to think, 
 to feel, and to will. This makes up the whole of 
 man, the essence of his nature and his aims. In 
 philosophic language, it comprises "the totality 
 of his reasoning, imagining, and striving." 
 Thoughts are, as it were, the food, emotions 
 the atmosphere, and the acts of the will the pro- 
 pelling force of our intellectual life. 
 
 Assuming that there is a progressive order in 
 the realm of the mind, we shall assign the low- 
 est rank to the imagination and the highest to 
 reason, the will occupying a place between the 
 two. Such at least is the order in which the 
 functions of the mind are developed during life. 
 The child lets his imagination run riot, youth 
 has the expanding and fructifying force of 
 the intellectual organism and connects its vari- 
 ous parts with one another. Without this regu- 
 lating force our ideas would become stagnant, 
 our conceptions would remain rigid and lifeless, 
 our sensations coarse and sensual. 
 
 Kant has said that the propelling power of 
 imagination is more direct than that of any 
 merely mechanical agency. He remarks that
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 123 
 
 he who is very fond of social pleasures will eat 
 with far greater appetite than one who has spent 
 two hours on horseback, and cheerful books he 
 believes to be more conducive to health than 
 physical exercise. In this sense he considers 
 dreaming as a sort of exercise in sleep, provided 
 by nature in order to keep the wheels of the 
 human system going. 
 
 The power of imagination consists merely in 
 the ability to grasp the non-real, and with this 
 ability are implanted in us the germs of happi- 
 ness or misery. If the growth of the imagina- 
 tion is unchecked, we walk in day dreams and 
 stand at the threshold of insanity. Yet imagina- 
 tion exercises its slow and continuous influence 
 on all of us. We may say that it dwells within 
 us before we are conscious of our existence, and 
 it almost survives us, as in all those conditions 
 where reflection is overpowered by obscure 
 imaginings. It is most potent in infancy and it 
 is with us in sleep and insanity. As the outer 
 world surrounds us with its unnumbered influ- 
 ences, so imagination fills our inner being with 
 its boundless wealth. Hence how can its activity 
 fail to be decisive for health or illness? "Many
 
 124 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 an hour," says Lichtenberg,* "have I spent in 
 giving full rein to my fancy, and I should never 
 have reached the age I did had I not steeped 
 myself in that bath of imagination at the season 
 when people usually go to watering-places." 
 
 Our sentiments are at work while we give 
 scope to our imagination, and here lies the 
 opportunity of the observant physician. We 
 have all heard stories of the miraculous cura- 
 tive power of the imagination in disease, and we 
 are only too familiar with the part imagination 
 plays in bringing on disease or aggravating it 
 where it exists; may we not then assume that 
 what can cause and cure disease, can also pre- 
 vent it? How great and serious is the suffering 
 of those unfortunate beings who in their fixed 
 imagination surrender themselves to a threat- 
 ened or existing evil ! Sooner or later what they 
 fear overtakes them. The physiological cause 
 of this phenomenon lies in the constant nervous 
 excitation of the organ concerned, with its direct 
 sequels. There is on record the case of a pupil 
 of Boerhave, who went through the most terri- 
 
 * Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), a German physicist, 
 critic, and satirist, known for his discoveries in the field of elec- 
 tricity.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 12^ 
 
 ble experiences in the course of his medical 
 studies, because all the morbid conditions which 
 the eloquent teacher so vividly depicted grad- 
 ually made their appearance in his own body. 
 After having suffered from various fevers and 
 inflammatory diseases during his winter course, 
 and from nervous affections during the summer, 
 he thought it advisable to give up a profession 
 which had brought him to the brink of the 
 grave. The imaginary cases of hydrophobia 
 and cholera, at a time when the popular mind is 
 filled with anxiety on these subjects, are further 
 illustrations of the same phenomenon. While 
 Studying ophthalmology, says Feuchtersleben, 
 the future oculist sometimes sees mouclies volan- 
 tes (floating black specks) before his eyes, 
 which may thereby become actually weakened, 
 and his imagination may even conjure up the 
 spectre of a cataract. 
 
 If we turn to the comforting consideration of 
 the many cases where an actual cure is brought 
 about by a purely imaginary agency — have we 
 not all heard of bread pills and their marvellous 
 effect? — we must ask ourselves, Is the cure less 
 real because due to imagination? Feuchters-
 
 126 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 leben cites an amusing case in point. An Eng- 
 lish physician, who had been vainly treating a 
 man suffering from temporary paralysis of the 
 tongue, thought he would try in his case an 
 instrument, invented by himself, on whose effi- 
 cacy he built high hopes. In order to ascertain 
 first the temperature of the tongue, he inserted 
 under it a small pocket thermometer. The 
 patient, believing that this was the new instru- 
 ment which was to cure him, assured the doctor 
 after a few minutes, with every manifestation of 
 delight, that he could now move his tongue, and 
 proceeded to do so. Was he, asks Feuchters- 
 leben, less able to move the tongue because it 
 was only his imagination that had cured him? 
 
 The candid observer of his own self must 
 admit that he is most strongly influenced by the 
 vital energy of a single individual, which leaves 
 its stamp upon him. The courage of the hero 
 reanimates like a divine breath his terror- 
 stricken comrades, after trembling fear has 
 spread its contagion. The hearty laugh, the 
 merry mood, irresistibly infect the assembled 
 company, and even the surly misanthrope, fight 
 against it as he may, cannot wholly suppress the
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 127 
 
 smile that steals over his lips. Again, the yawn 
 of a single bored individual creates an epidemic 
 of yawns. What one person in a crowd professes 
 to have seen, all see, and thus it is possible for 
 a number of sane and truthful persons to testify 
 that they have seen the ghost which a medium 
 has conjured up. In an evil sense, as well as for 
 every good purpose, it may be said that faith is 
 all-powerful, and that the age of miracles is not 
 yet past. Think well of your fellowman, and 
 you will find him vv^orthy of your trust; confide 
 in him who is half honest, and he will become 
 wholly so; give your pupil credit for ability, 
 and he will manifest it; consider him incapable 
 of progress, and he will remain so. Believe that 
 you are healthy, and you may become sound. 
 All nature is but an echo of the spirit, and the 
 highest law which she discloses to us is that the 
 ideal may become the real, and that ideas grad- 
 ually conquer the world. 
 
 Imagination, we see, is thus the propelling 
 force in the realm of thought, and it behooves 
 the wise physician to avail himself of this fact 
 in all those cases where the innate stock of 
 imagination is too slender to enable the patient
 
 128 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 to follow out, of his own initiative, the plans 
 essential for the hygiene of the soul. In other 
 words, the physician will stimulate the feeble 
 will of his patient by imposing upon it his own. 
 "Soulsick," says Hippel,* "is everyone whose 
 imagination is weak." Hufeland was right in 
 considering an imagination busy with lovely 
 things among the most important means of pro- 
 longing life. "Kalobiotik" (the art of making 
 life beautiful) is thus a part of his famous 
 "Makrobiotik" (the art of prolonging life). 
 Imagination alone can render life beautiful. 
 The sad catastrophes which wrecked gifted writ- 
 ers like Novalist and KleistJ could not have 
 occurred if their imagination had not taken a 
 wrong direction, and led to the paralysis of all 
 capacity for enjoyment. The power of the 
 imagination, as it may be the most beneficial, 
 can also become the most dangerous element of 
 our emotional nature. It is a gentle Vestal 
 flame which, if guarded in its virgin purity, 
 
 * Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-96), a German satirist. 
 
 t "Novalis," the assumed name of Friedrich von Hardenberg 
 (1772-1801), a writer of the romantic school, whose troubled 
 life came to an early close. 
 
 JHeinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), the dramatist, who killed 
 himself and the woman he loved.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 129 
 
 gives light and life, but which, freed from 
 restraint, leaves desolation in its path. 
 
 It has been vouchsafed to man to nourish as 
 well as subdue the fire of imagination within 
 him by that glorious ingredient of human cul- 
 ture — wit and humor. How wholesome is the 
 power of wit in ridiculing vanity, pedantry, 
 irresolution, and dejection! It dispels gnawing 
 care, disarms puffed-up pride, and chases away 
 torturing delusion. The momentary cheerful- 
 ness to which even the gloomiest mind yields 
 while under the spell of pleasant diversion is of 
 priceless value in cases where no other distrac- 
 tion is of avail. And as the treasures of litera- 
 ture ofifer their cheering balm, so the entire field 
 of art holds out its sweet consolation. As in our 
 dreams the fatiguing struggle between the intel- 
 lect and the world of reality gives way to a state 
 of gentle passiveness which replenishes the pow- 
 ers of body and soul, so art creates waking 
 dreams which sustain our dual nature under its 
 most staggering burdens. Music, the creative 
 arts, and persuasive speech appeal to the body 
 as they do to the mind. Of music in particular 
 a keen observer has said that its most important
 
 I30 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 effect is to promote health. For health consists 
 in the full control of all bodily and mental func- 
 tions, and song and music reanimate our organs, 
 and cause the entire nervous system to vibrate in 
 harmonious accord. Thus every form of art 
 rests on the sense of harmonious relations, and 
 all the arts may become the very basis of health 
 and cheerfulness, if, dominated and guided by 
 the intellect, they lead us to peace and content- 
 ment. But it is only art in its ennobling forms 
 that can fulfil these functions. The question 
 whether the works of our modern painters and 
 sculptors can inspire us as do the treasures of 
 antiquity, and whether our poets can cheer us 
 as the immortal ones do, has a far greater bear- 
 ing on the hygiene of the soul than is commonly 
 supposed. 
 
 In speaking of the will as the motive power 
 of the imagination, Feuchtersleben has in mind 
 not the determination to attain one's desire, 
 whether of a higher or a lower kind, but that 
 assertion of individual energy which is the 
 crowning faculty of the soul and, in the last 
 analysis, expresses character. Toward the 
 strengthening of will power the moralist, law-
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 131 
 
 giver and teacher, as well as the physician, must 
 direct their efforts if reason is to exercise that 
 sway on which moral and physical health 
 depends. The task of the physician is often 
 almost completed if he succeeds in arousing the 
 will of his patient. It is idle to attempt to 
 reason with the insane, to try to show him that 
 his delusion is a phantom, but he can be cured 
 if we succeed in stimulating his activity, in get- 
 ting him to the point of exercising his will 
 power. And how much more certain will be the 
 result in the case of one who is merely feeble in 
 body and soul, and learns that there is a remedy 
 within him which he can apply as soon as he 
 wills. 
 
 The conditions of modern society are often 
 such as to militate against the free exercise of 
 the will, and we are only too prone to excuse 
 our lack of resolution on the score of absent- 
 mindedness, inability to come to a decision, 
 momentary distraction — ominous names all of 
 these, says Feuchtersleben, and fatal to the 
 hygiene of the soul. Nothing leads so easily to 
 final paralysis of will power as the habit of 
 indecision. Even physical collapse may be its
 
 132 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 ultimate consequence. He relates a striking 
 case in point, on the authority of Marcus Herz, 
 a Berlin physician, famous in the last decades of 
 the eighteenth century. The doctor was treat- 
 ing the writer Moritz,* who was to all appear- 
 ances in the last stages of a consuming fever. 
 The hope which he felt bound to hold out to his 
 patient seemed but to aggravate his condition. 
 He met the physician's statements with expres- 
 sions of utter despondency, and the struggle 
 between hope and fear sapped the sufferer's last 
 strength. Herz, knowing the character of his 
 patient, decided upon a desperate step. He told 
 him that all hope was indeed gone. The intense 
 excitement into which the sufferer was thrown 
 by this announcement was followed by listless 
 apathy. In the evening the pulse had improved, 
 and a quieter night followed. The fever dimin- 
 ished day by day, and within three weeks the 
 patient was well. 
 
 Absentmindedness or want of concentration, 
 so closely related to lack of will power, may be 
 said to correspond to that physical condition 
 
 * K. P. Moritz (1756-93), a writer on esthetics, prominent in 
 the "storm and stress" period of German literature.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 133 
 
 known as trembling of the muscles. It is a state 
 of psychical oscillation expressive of the ina- 
 bility of the spirit to pursue a certain aim, and 
 of a desire for constant relaxation and change. 
 And just as bodily weakness finally yields to 
 vigorous impulse, so the will works wonders in 
 overcoming the trembling of the soul. Feuch- 
 tersleben found in his own person that a ner- 
 vous condition in which the printed letters 
 seemed to dance before his eyes disappeared as 
 soon as he fastened his gaze steadily upon the 
 apparently trembling objects. Exactly so can the 
 will overcome the oscillations of the soul. To 
 diversion he opposes concentration. He con- 
 demns the popular expedient of resorting to dis- 
 tracting pastimes as a panacea for physical and 
 mental ailments. The contrary, that is to say, 
 the fixing of the will upon a certain activity pro- 
 ceeding from within, is the proper remedy in 
 such cases. Feuchtersleben is here in close 
 accord with Pascal, who says: 
 
 "The only thing which makes us forget our 
 miseries is distraction, yet this in reality is the 
 greatest of all miseries; for it is precisely dis- 
 traction that keeps us from thinking seriously
 
 134 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 about ourselves and insensibly destroys us. 
 Without it we should become weary, and weari- 
 ness would force us to seek a better way out of 
 our troubles. Distraction merely beguiles us 
 and gradually leads to death." 
 
 Grillparzer, who in his own person learned 
 to know the torments of indecision, has in a 
 striking passage given poetic utterance to 
 Feuchtersleben's remarks as to the value of con- 
 centration: 
 
 "Concentered thought? Spoke thus mere accident? 
 Or dids't thou fully grasp its meaning, child? 
 The word thou utter'st balm is to my ear, 
 For thou has named the world's prodigious lever. 
 Which raises what is great a thousand fold. 
 And moves the smallest closer to the stars. 
 The hero's deed, the poet's holy song, 
 The seer's vision, and the hand of God, 
 Attention rapt conceives or comprehends. 
 Distraction idly mocks what ne'er it grasps." 
 
 "Lack of initiative," "poor spirits," "ill- 
 humor," or by whatever name society may 
 dignify insufficient self-control— all are repre- 
 hensible alike in the eyes of the philosopher 
 and the physician. Lavater wrote on the moral 
 aspects of ill-humor, Feuchtersleben condemns 
 it from a purely medical point of view. Sad-
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 135 
 
 ness, he says, is a condition which no one can 
 always successfully contend, but moroseness is 
 quite a different thing. There may be a certain 
 poetic element in sadness, but moodiness and 
 moroseness lack every element of attraction. 
 They and all their kin have their root in habit- 
 ual indolence, and the remedy lies in a continu- 
 ous and wise activity — serious in the hours of 
 work, diverting in leisure moments. Were we 
 not in the habit of passing the finest morning 
 hours in bed, we should never know that depres- 
 sing consciousness of being late with which we 
 so often begin the day. Had we from early 
 childhood accustomed ourselves to a pleasant 
 orderliness, our inner being would have acquired 
 a harmony in consonance with our outward 
 actions. If every moment were used in accord- 
 ance with the fitness of things, there would be 
 no time for being "out of sorts."* It is true we 
 cannot always be in the right humor for every- 
 thing, but we can always be in the right humor 
 for some things. A wise recognition of the value 
 
 * "The calm or disturbance of our mind does not depend so 
 much on what we regard as the more important things of Hfe 
 as on a judicious or injudicious arrangement of the little things 
 of daily occurrence." — La Rochefoucauld: Ma.v'uiis.
 
 136 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 of change of occupation does wonders in keep- 
 ing off the 'Vapors." Withdrawal from 'the 
 world engenders moroseness and, according to 
 Plato, promotes obstinacy. But so does constant 
 living with and in the world; therefore let us 
 learn to live both with and without the world, 
 and we shall find in suitable change health and 
 good spirits. 
 
 All the various conditions due to ill-regulated 
 nerves may be overcome by will power, just as 
 certain morbid conditions may be brought on 
 by the absence of that power. In the human 
 organism slumber unsuspected forces, which 
 may be awakened by the firm will. The stoi- 
 cism of the ancients — the purest, loftiest, and 
 most practical of all pre-Christian doctrines — 
 has proved to the world what may be accom- 
 plished by will power. Let no one imagine that 
 the disciples of the stoic schools were steeled by 
 cold syllogisms; it was the power of the will 
 that wrought their miracles of endurance. 
 
 There is perhaps no more remarkable phe- 
 nomenon in the develooment of man's nature 
 
 1 
 
 than the influence of abstract thought on his 
 concrete organism through that connecting link
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 137 
 
 which may be termed "intellectual emotion." 
 In the existence of such emotion, side by side 
 with the ethico-religious sentiment, lies the root 
 of all humanitarianism. Individuals of a lower 
 order do not think in connection with what they 
 feel; persons in whom the intellect unduly pre- 
 dominates think without reference to emotion; 
 only those who have attained a high degree of 
 both intellectual and moral culture think and 
 feel as man ought to. But everything depends 
 on what we mean by "culture." The sickly 
 scholar and the robust ignorant peasant repre- 
 sent alike human types in the composition of 
 which important elements of culture are want- 
 ing, even though the scholar may have neglected 
 his body because of his deep interest in mathe- 
 matical problems, and the peasant may know 
 enough to be a good citizen. True culture con- 
 sists in the harmonious development of all our 
 faculties, and in it alone lie health, happiness, 
 and wisdom. 
 
 The principal reason for a chronic, ill-defined 
 state of invalidism must often be sought in an 
 exaggerated attention to the concerns of the 
 body, and no surer way of counteracting this
 
 138 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 evil can be found than by turning the attention 
 toward higher intellectual and spiritual aims. 
 Nothing is more pitiful than to observe a petty 
 mind eternally busy w^ith the care of its material 
 welfare, which this very care is undermining day 
 by day. Patients recruited from this class, who 
 are despised by their own physicians, die from 
 sheer longing to live. And why? Because they 
 lack spiritual and intellectual culture, which 
 alone could have given them mastery over their 
 miserable physical state. 
 
 Greater even than those wonderful disciples 
 of stoicism who owe their spiritual triumphs 
 to force of will, are those lofty and serene minds 
 the range of whose interests embraces every 
 form of sane enjoyment open to man. Of such 
 was preeminently Goethe. Spinoza, often con- 
 sidered the most austere of philosophers, said: 
 "It is impossible to overdo gaiety of spirits, for 
 every sort of gaiety is of value; sadness, how- 
 ever, is ever an evil." And he also said: "The 
 more we cultivate our intelligence, the happier 
 we become." 
 
 It is interesting to find Schopenhauer turning 
 from the darker aspects of life and coinciding
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 139 
 
 with Feuchtersleben's view of the philosophic 
 value of serenity. "Nothing," he says, "con- 
 duces so directly to happiness as cheerfulness. 
 It is a quality which is its own immediate 
 reward. He who is gay has always a reason for 
 being so, namely, the fact that he is gay. Cheer- 
 fulness alone can make up for the loss of every 
 other possession, while nothing can take its 
 place. We may be young, handsome, rich, and 
 high in station; still, in estimating our happi- 
 ness, the question will be asked : Are w'e cheer- 
 ful with it all? But if we see a person who is 
 cheerful, no matter whether he be young, or 
 old, straight of limb or deformed, poor or rich, 
 he is happy. Therefore let us open wide the 
 door to cheerfulness whenever it knocks. It can' 
 never come amiss. Instead of thinking thus, 
 however, we often hesitate whether to admit it 
 at all, and begin to reflect whether we really 
 have every cause for contentment, or fear that 
 gaiety will disturb our serious thoughts and 
 anxious problems. But what good these will do 
 is very uncertain, while cheerfulness is a direct 
 gain." 
 
 If thus mere thoughtless gaiety, the uncon-
 
 I40 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 scious expression of a natural elasticity of 
 spirits, can become a salutary and sustaining 
 force, how much more powerful will be the 
 stimulus of the conscious feeling that we have 
 made the most of our endowments and oppor- 
 tunities and live our lives sanely, as complete 
 parts of a harmonious whole. 
 
 If we observe the hypochondriac closely and 
 with an unprejudiced eye, we shall find that his 
 condition consists at bottom of a dull, sad ego- 
 tism. He lives, thinks and suffers only for his 
 pitiful little self. He turns away from every- 
 thing that is beautiful in nature and man and — 
 what is worse — from the sufferings of his fel- 
 low-men, and so far from taking that philosophi- 
 cal view to which nothing human is foreign, 
 becomes a stranger to everything human. If it 
 be important to act upon such a mind before it 
 sinks into final darkness, hovv^ much more impor- 
 tant is it to counteract in time that tendency 
 toward gloomy dissatisfaction which lurks in 
 so many of us. Self-control, which is nothing 
 else than a wise moderation, is the lever which 
 lifts the mind into willing obedience to law — 
 the source of all real contentment.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 141 
 
 Nothing conduces to inward serenity so much 
 as the contemplation of the eternal works of 
 nature. The Brahmin, oblivious of his self in 
 his devotion to the problems of the universe, 
 passes his days in frugal contentment, and 
 attains a span of life vouchsafed to few of his 
 restless fellow men in other parts of the world. 
 Kant, to whom nature had given a frail body, 
 wrested from her permanent health by thinking 
 great thoughts. Wieland,* than whom few 
 have lived a more harmonious life, has shown 
 that the vivid imagination of the poet may 
 accompany the uniform development of all the 
 other intellectual powers, and lead to the hap- 
 piest and healthiest old age. Nothing is more 
 salutary than to regard those luminous minds 
 that triumphed over advancing years. Plato 
 studied and taught till nearly eighty; Sopho- 
 cles wrote his Oedipus at Colonus when still 
 older; Cato retained his active interest in public 
 affairs till his death, at eighty-five; Isocrates 
 composed brilliant orations at the age of ninety- 
 
 * Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), one of the most 
 prominent writers of the classic period of German literature, the 
 friend of Goethe and Herder, chiefly known for his romantic 
 epic Oberon.
 
 142 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 three; Fleury, at ninety, still guided the desti- 
 nies of France, and Goethe's vision ranged 
 undimmed over the universe until death closed 
 his eyes in his eighty-third year. 
 
 Let us not rashly assume that the spirit of the 
 modern age is opposed to the harmonious 
 development of body and mind, that diminished 
 physical power is a necessary concomitant of the 
 universal spread of intelligence. Cultivation of 
 the intellect alone, it is true, is not culture; but 
 where judicious reading, stimulating conversa- 
 tion, independent thinking, and the free play of 
 the imagination, are joined to a firm will, the 
 result is to-day, as of yore, sound physical 
 health. Truly cultured, that is to say, sagacious 
 and clear-minded persons, are far less prone to 
 complaining about physical ailments and men- 
 tal depression than those whose horizon includes 
 nothing more prominent than their bodily con- 
 cerns. With Brigham,* Feuchtersleben believes 
 that the progress of that civilization in which 
 
 * Amariah Brigham (1798-1849), an American physician, whose 
 treatises on insanity and diseases of the brain were authoritative 
 in their day. He wrote : Influence of Mental Cultivation on the 
 Health, and Influence of Religion upon the Health and Physical 
 Welfare of Mankind.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 143 
 
 the cultivation of the arts goes hand in hand 
 with moral and intellectual enlightenment, and 
 in which rational diversions occupy as impor- 
 tant a place as sane temperance measures, is cer- 
 tain to lead to decreased mortality and height- 
 ened physical welfare. 
 
 It is our duty to inform our intellect if we 
 would learn to subdue our passions. The more 
 closely we conform to truth, the freer we are to 
 act, and activity means health. He who cannot 
 master his passions and emotions spends his life 
 in servitude. Tears and sighs are evidences of a 
 weak soul and obstacles in the pursuit of virtue 
 and health. The mind insensibly conforms to 
 such mechanical expressions of inner feebleness. 
 Hence the importance of establishing physical 
 habits to aid in the regeneration of faulty men- 
 tal traits — experiments that arc within the power 
 of everyone. Let those prone to act with pre- 
 cipitation accustom themselves to walk and write 
 slowly. The irresolute should try to work 
 rapidly; those who walk about sad-eyed and 
 with bowed head, lost in fanciful day dreams, 
 should be taught to walk erect, look others 
 straight in the face, and to speak in a loud and
 
 144 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 distinct voice. If we attune our minds to joy we 
 shall do nature's bidding. She has implanted 
 in every organic being the conditions of self- 
 preservation. Pie who has retained his individ- 
 ual freedom will not waste time in thinking of 
 death. Wisdom lies not in the contemplation 
 of death, but in that of life. We shall live a 
 rational life if we keep from us whatever im- 
 pedes our action and prevents our enjoyment 
 — hatred, envy, anger, pride and arrogance. 
 There is no more effective way of conquering 
 the passions and emotions than by learning to 
 know their causes. All experience shows this. 
 Even grief yields to reason. We mourn those 
 we have loved and lost less when we reflect upon 
 the laws of nature. 
 
 Before we arrive at a definite knowledge of 
 the nature of our passions we must establish for 
 ourselves certain principles, and imprint them 
 so firmly on our minds that we may apply them 
 in any emergency that may arise.* If, for in- 
 stance, as the result of our reflection that love 
 is the source of universal happiness, we have 
 
 * "When the need of each opinion comes, we ought to have it 
 in readiness," says Epictetus.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 14c; 
 
 adopted the dogma that love can conquer 
 hatred, the wrong done us by some enemy will 
 not easily excite our ire.* In thus arranging, as 
 it were, our thoughts beforehand, it is, however, 
 essential to keep before us the good inherent in 
 most things, so that we may ever be animated 
 by a certain feeling of pleasure in translating 
 our thoughts into action. If, for instance, we 
 are conscious of a desire for fame, let us think 
 of the good there is in fame, and of how true 
 fame may be attained ; but let us not dwell on 
 false glory, its transitoriness, and on whatever 
 is unpleasant in connection with the subject and 
 may give rise to morbid doubt. The ability to 
 acquire habits is the kindest gift of Providence. 
 Through habit are we enabled to assert the vigor 
 of our individuality, while gradually assimilat- 
 ing what at first was foreign to us. To acquire 
 good habits, bred of a joyous submission to the 
 divinity, is the essence of morality, and hence of 
 the hygiene of the soul. 
 
 * "Whenever any man dotli trespass ag^ainst thee, presently 
 consider with thyself what it was that he did suppose to he 
 good, what to he evil, when he did trespass. For this when thou 
 knowest, thou wilt pity him ; thou wilt have no occasion either 
 to wonder, or to be angry." — Meditations of Marcus Aitrcliiis 
 (Casaubon's translation).
 
 146 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 It is easy to trace the influence of the ancients 
 on Feuchtersleben's philosophy. A striking pas- 
 sage from Epictetus makes this influence still 
 clearer. "It is impossible," says he, "for habits 
 and faculties, some of them not to be produced 
 when they did not exist before, and others not 
 to be increased and strengthened by correspond- 
 ing acts. In this manner certainly, as philoso- 
 phers say, also diseases of the mind grow up. 
 For when you have once desired money, if reason 
 be applied to lead to a perception of the evil, 
 the desire is stopped, and a ruling faculty of our 
 mind is restored to the original authority. But 
 if you apply no means of cure, it no longer 
 returns to the same state, but being again excited 
 by the corresponding appearance, it is inflamed 
 to desire quicker than before, and when this 
 takes place continually it is henceforth hard- 
 ened, and the disease of the mind confirms the 
 love of money. For he who has had a fever, 
 and has been released from it, is not in the same 
 state that he was before, unless he has been com- 
 pletely cured. Something of the kind happens 
 also in diseases of the soul. Certain traces and 
 blisters are left in it, and unless a man shall com-
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 1 47 
 
 pletely efface them, when he is again lashed on 
 the same places, the lash will produce not blis- 
 ters, but sores. If then you wish not to be of an 
 angry temper, do not feed the habit; throw noth- 
 ing on it which will increase it; at first keep 
 quiet, and count the days on which you have not 
 been angry. I used to be in passion; now every 
 second day, then every third, then every fourth. 
 But if you have intermitted thirty days, make a 
 sacrifice to God. For the habit at first begins to 
 be weakened, and then completely destroyed. 
 . . . Every habit and faculty is maintained and 
 increased by the corresponding actions. . . . 
 When you have been angry, you must know that 
 not only has this evil befallen you, but that you 
 have also increased the habit, and in a manner 
 thrown fuel upon fire. . . . Generally, then, if 
 you would make anything a habit, do it; if you 
 would not make it a habit, do not do it; but 
 accustom yourself to do something else in place 
 of it."* 
 
 Emerson, in his essay on "Compensation," 
 speaks of the polarity, or action and reaction, in 
 every part of nature, of the dualism that under- 
 
 * George Long's translation.
 
 148 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 lies the condition of man. "Every excess," he 
 says in a famous passage, "causes a defect; every 
 defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; 
 . every evil its good. Every faculty which is a 
 receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on 
 its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with 
 its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain 
 of folly. For everything you have missed, you 
 have gained something else; and for everything 
 you gain, you lose something." 
 
 Feuchtersleben expresses the same thought as 
 follows: "The life of man, as that of all nature, 
 consists of contrasts, which follow, accompany, 
 and condition each other. There is at work in 
 the universe a law of equilibrium according to 
 which these contrasts are equalized as soon as 
 manifested. ... In the entire realm of nature 
 there exists no advantage without a defect, no 
 profit without a loss, no ascent without a fall, 
 no discord without harmony. Thus, too, in that 
 microcosm, the life of man, there is constant 
 action and reaction: sleeping and waking, joy 
 and sorrow, inspiration and expiration. The 
 stronger the impulse, the more vigorous the 
 onset of the opposite conditioned by it." If the
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 1 49 
 
 force or frequency of these contrasts is increased, 
 or if the tendency in any one direction becomes 
 pronounced and permanent, there results a dis- 
 turbance of that equilibrium without which life 
 cannot exist. It is then all-important to know 
 how to deal with these contrasts. Happy is he 
 who, when old age creeps upon him, can revive 
 youth within his soul, and equally happy he who 
 in the struggle between youth and age, can con- 
 serve his remaining strength by undisturbed pla- 
 cidity of temper and emotion. But only he can 
 attain this end who has learned to control him- 
 self. It does not suffice to exercise care in the 
 matter of food and drink, to regulate the hours of 
 work and rest, to know by heart Hufeland's Art 
 of Prolonging Life; it is necessary to force one's 
 self to acquire moral and intellectual strength, 
 in order to learn the meaning of true health. 
 And the art of self-control is beyond no one. 
 
 Without pain there would be no pleasure, just 
 as there would be no day without night. Nature 
 has consciously added the thorn to the rose. He 
 who would free us from all sorrow would also 
 deprive us of all pleasure; care-free persons, 
 whose every wish is gratified, and v/ho are not
 
 I50 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 spurred on to an active life, easily become hypo- 
 chondriacs. Only fools will envy those who, 
 while draining every source of pleasure, feel in 
 the depth of their hearts that there is somehow 
 a gap in their lives which no enjoyment can fill. 
 The wise man will not invite this torturing senti- 
 ment, but will welcome the shadows which cross 
 the path of every pilgrim on earth. He v/ill find 
 contentment in that subdued twilight which is 
 alike removed from the glaring day of happi- 
 ness and the dark night of misery. The longing 
 for a better and more perfect world, so natural 
 to the human breast, is of value only as long as 
 it remains a vague dream. Longings and aspira- 
 tions are given to man in order to lift his 
 thoughts to a higher sphere, but not to bring 
 that realm down to earthly cognizance. It is 
 our duty not to abandon ourselves to religious 
 yearnings; abuse of devotional sentiment ends 
 in dissatisfaction with the world in which we 
 live. It is a wise institution to have but one 
 Sunday a week. The desire for perfectibility is 
 far more likely to be gratified by one who in 
 resigned contentment takes the world as it is than 
 by him who constantly longs for a more perfect
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 151 
 
 one. Let us not ransack heaven and earth for 
 sources of enjoyment. Permanent satisfaction 
 can be secured only in one way: by devotion to 
 duty and by work. And man's activity is entirely 
 compatible with, nay, is conditioned on, an inner 
 restful serenity, and to this, if we choose, we 
 may all surrender ourselves. A state of half 
 voluntary, half unconscious contentment is that 
 which is most conducive to health. When we 
 are both busy and cheerful, attentive to the 
 world and in accord with it, we are not likely to 
 fall into fitful moods. Such a state of content- 
 ment represents the ripest result of culture. 
 
 Hypochondria, the opposite of this serenity 
 of the soul, is the saddest and most senseless of 
 all human afflictions. Reason, morality, re- 
 ligion, satire, have in vain exhausted their 
 armories in attacking it; it survives, unmoved 
 even by the reproach that it is in reality the 
 result of sheer selfishness. It has become fash- 
 ionable to look upon egotism as proof of a supe- 
 rior intellect. Perhaps the best way of dealing 
 with hypochondria is to shov'/ that it is a phan- 
 tom of the imagination, a mere nothing. 
 
 There is, it is true, a form of hypochondria
 
 1^2 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 which can be treated only by the physician, but 
 what is commonly understood by that term is a 
 purely imaginary evil, and deserves a harsher 
 name. There would seem to be no need of con- 
 juring up imaginary ailments, since there are 
 enough real ones. All of us are only relatively 
 well. Every one, if he chooses, and has eyes to 
 see, may discover the road that will lead him to 
 his grave, and if he looks about him, with eyes 
 dimmed by an obscure half-knowledge of the 
 world, he will discover the road all the more 
 readily — and follow it at an accelerated pace. 
 As long as we are well enough to do each day 
 what the day calls for, and can enjoy our rest 
 after the day's work is done, it is our duty — 
 alike from the standpoint of the citizen and that 
 of the physician — to pay no attention to our 
 bodily condition. Pain is an arrogant nothing 
 which becomes something only when we ac- 
 knowledge its existence. We ought to be 
 ashamed to fondle and nourish it until it over- 
 masters us. It becomes great only because we 
 are small. Who can think of a Themistocles or 
 a Regulus looking at his tongue in a mirror or 
 feeling his pulse! Let us invoke the root of the
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 153 
 
 evil, that it may cure what it causes. Does not 
 the hypochondriac die daily from fear of death? 
 Nothing is more pathetically ludicrous than to 
 see these petty unfortunates who ransack medi- 
 cal books in order to copy prescriptions and rules 
 for the preservation of health. To one of these 
 Dr. Herz once said: "My dear fellow, you will 
 some day die of a misprint." Such hypochon- 
 driacs are the human failures whom Plato would 
 banish from the state. They are as old as civil- 
 ization. 
 
 Kant explained away as a mere nothing the 
 hypochondria v/hich threatened to assail his own 
 clearness of intellect, and pronounced those as 
 lacking in sense who believed in the reality of 
 such an evil. "If anyone," he says, "becomes a 
 prey to gloomy moods, let him ask himself 
 whether there is any cause for them. If he finds 
 no cause, or recognizes that, while there exists 
 a reason for his anxieties, nothing can be done 
 to remove the effect, he will quietly content him- 
 self with this expression of his inner feeling, let 
 his anxieties stay where they are, as though they 
 did not concern him in the least, and go about 
 the business which claims his attention."
 
 154 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 A sound resolve, in truth, says Feuchtersleben, 
 and one which worked well, for by brushing 
 aside the nothing — which in his case really 
 meant a narrow chest that did not afford suffi- 
 cient space to his lungs — the sage of Konigsberg 
 managed to attain a respectable old age.* The 
 philosopher Lichtenberg thought of his own 
 whimsies and moods very much as Kant did. 
 ''There are," he says, "serious illnesses of which 
 one can die, and there are others of which one 
 does not die, but which one can recognize and 
 feel without much effort, and finally there are 
 
 * Kant's own words are : "Owing to my flat and narrow chest, 
 which did not afford sufficient scope to the movements of the 
 heart and lungs, I had a natural inclination toward hypochondria, 
 which in earlier years bordered on disgust with life. But by 
 reflecting that the causes of this difficulty in breathing were 
 perhaps merely mechanical, and therefore irremediable, I suc- 
 ceeded in ignoring it completely. Thus, while my chest felt 
 oppressed, there was peace and serenity in my head, and this 
 state of my mind expressed itself when I was with others quite 
 naturally and intentionall}^ and not (as in the case of hypochon- 
 driacs) according to varying moods. And since one enjoys life 
 more by doing, to the full extent of one's opportunities, than by 
 giving one's self up to pleasure, mental activity, which engenders 
 a sort of heightened consciousness of life, can overcome obstacles 
 that concern the body alone. The oppression of the chest has 
 remained with me, for its cause lies in my bodily constitution ; 
 but I have conquered its influence on my thoughts and actions, 
 by turning my attention away from my physical sensations, as 
 though they did not concern me in the least." — Vo)i dcr Macht 
 dcs Gcinulhs, etc.
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 1 55 
 
 those which one cannot see without a micro- 
 scope. But seen through the microscope they 
 look horrible. The name of that microscope is 
 hypochondria." 
 
 A hypochondriacal delusion very common in 
 former days was the belief of delicate persons 
 that they were doomed to die of consumption — 
 a belief fostered by sentimental novels, with their 
 hectic heroes and heroines. More than a cen- 
 tury ago the German physician Weikard spoke 
 of a certain species of mental aberration as 
 "imaginary consumption." Hippel suggested 
 as a remedy for the imaginary ailments of the 
 hypochondriac inoculation with a real disease. 
 "Let the patient get sick, so that he may know 
 what sickness is, and he will get well." In 
 whatever light we may consider the wretched 
 plight of the hypochondriac, says Feuchters- 
 leben— whether we call it weakness, delusion, 
 laziness, stupidity, selfishness, disease, or incipi- 
 ent insanity — activity is the only cure for it, and 
 it is a cure that ought to be recommended with 
 very little ceremony. Those whose ailments are 
 purely imaginary neither excite nor deserve 
 pity, and there is no reason why they should not
 
 1^6 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 be plainly told that they are intolerable and unfit 
 for human society. Heroic treatment like this 
 may sometimes end the matter much more 
 quickly than all fine-spun philosophical argu- 
 ments. We have the moral right to plague those 
 that plague us, and we are, moreover, rude only 
 for the good of the patient. 
 
 Besides selfishness and indolence, habits of 
 pedantry are among the chief causes of hypo- 
 chondria. Such habits are often misinterpreted, 
 being overlooked where they may be found in 
 full flower, or wrongly attributed to individuals 
 who are quite free from them. Pedantry in this 
 sense does not consist in exaggerated devotion to 
 minute matters of orderliness and punctuality, 
 but in that littleness of mind which loses sight 
 of the end while reaching out for the means, and 
 makes of us slaves to self-created or conventional 
 idols. The true pedant is not the secluded 
 scholar who shuns society because he prefers to 
 it the companionship of his books, but he who 
 prizes the conventionalities of literature more 
 than the world of thought, of which the book is 
 merely the symbol. Such a pedant is he to 
 whom a particular edition of Aristotle is of
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 157 
 
 greater importance than his teachings, and who 
 venerates not the spirit of antiquity, but the 
 mere records of the past because it is the past. 
 The most absurd of all the varieties of the 
 pedant is he who least of all dreams that he can 
 be reckoned among such — the drawing-room 
 fop, whose life-breath is fashion and all the 
 petty formalities which, from having been the 
 means of facilitating agreeable social inter- 
 course, have been elevated by ignorant custom 
 into the chief aim and end of existence. To such 
 an one the trifles of life have become the reality 
 and realities mere trifles. 
 
 Let us turn to the melancholy of great men, 
 which has so often been commented upon. 
 Aristotle's observation that "men of profound 
 and noble mind are generally inclined to sad- 
 ness" has been taken as an axiom. We think of 
 Camoens, Tasso, Young, and Byron as wrapt in 
 gloom. The hypochondria of Camoens and 
 Tasso has been used as the subject of dramatists, 
 and we are moved by their sufferings, as we are 
 by the sorrows of Young and Byron. But all this 
 has no bearing on the everyday world about us. 
 Let great men express and explain, as best they
 
 158 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 may, the nature of their feelings; but let us not 
 mistake the moroseness and mawkishness of the 
 modern writer for evidence of genius. 
 
 The hypochondriac, no matter what his men- 
 tal endowments, is always an egotist. Poets, 
 accustomed to analyze their feelings and to look 
 upon themselves as exceptional beings, are par- 
 ticularly liable to distorted views of life. Culti- 
 vate sympathy with the world, says Feuchters- 
 leben, study history, and you will cease to mag- 
 nify your petty vexations. 
 
 There are but two real sources of enjoyment 
 — the cultivation of the mind and the study of 
 nature. The two go hand in hand, for the beauty 
 and grandeur of nature cannot unfold themselves 
 to our senses without elevating and broadening 
 the mind. After saying all that can be said in 
 praise of the society of our fellow-men — and we 
 cannot forget that it teaches us the greatest les- 
 son we can learn, namely, to do our duty — it 
 remains true that only in the companionship of 
 nature can we find true happiness. Of all classes 
 of scholars, naturalists live longest and enjoy the 
 happiest old age. Just as genuine love of nature, 
 in order to be truly fruitful, requires of us a
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL 159 
 
 childlike disposition, so, in turn, fondness for 
 nature begets in her devotees a peculiar child- 
 like simplicity, and restores to them their youth. 
 Every intellectual effort is, in the last analysis, 
 an inquiry into the laws of nature; and we retain 
 mental health and happiness only by thinking 
 and acting in accordance with these laws, thus 
 bringing our inner life into harmony with the 
 harmony of all nature. Even the savage instinc- 
 tively recognizes the truth of this, for nature has 
 implanted in his breast a sense of her beauty, 
 just as she has implanted it in the heart of every 
 child. Beyond this even a Newton cannot go, 
 as he contemplates the wonders of the universe, 
 and only in this way do all created beings answer 
 the purpose of nature — that they learn to know 
 their place and find satisfaction in filling it. 
 Every one of us is like Antaeus, receiving strength 
 from loving contact with Mother Earth. Na- 
 ture recognizes and reinforces whatever individ- 
 ual capacity we possess; she excites no passions, 
 but rather counteracts them and makes apparent 
 their futility. She educates us gently, but surely 
 and ceaselessly. 
 
 Communion with nature develops all the pow-
 
 l6o INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 ers within us. She addresses herself to every 
 part of our organic being, filling our imagina- 
 tion with lofty images, and restraining the will, 
 while giving it iron firmness. Her vast silence 
 instructs us; the grand but simple workings of 
 her eternal laws awal^en in us fruitful thought, 
 the unvarying course of her events establishes 
 our mental equilibrium; the beauties which she 
 scatters in endless profusion across our path, in 
 lovely blossoms as in the starry skies, dispel our 
 petty cares and selfish anxieties; her greatness 
 lifts us above our own self, until all our feelings, 
 thoughts and desires, merge in the contemplation 
 of the universe, which in turn leads us gently to 
 religion — the highest sentiment of wiiich man 
 is capable. But while all moral and intellectual 
 efforts tend to fit into the universal plan, we must 
 keep in mind that the individual is called upon 
 to cultivate his own narrow field, and to bestow 
 on it the same care which the husbandman gives 
 to his little farm; for each of us can do no more 
 than perform the part assigned to him. 
 
 In summing up the lessons which his Hygiene 
 of the Soul endeavors to inculcate, Feuchters- 
 leben lays stress on the necessity, for purely prac-
 
 THE HYGIENE OF THE SOUL i6l 
 
 tical reasons, of starting with the belief that the 
 mind possesses the power to influence the body. 
 "I shall leave it to theorists," he says, "to explain 
 the mystery of this influence; I am only con- 
 cerned with the practical task of proving its 
 possibility by actual facts." A firm belief in 
 the power of the mind over the body is, how- 
 ever, not the only prerequisite of mental and 
 physical health. We must acquire the art of 
 looking at ourselves objectively. He who con- 
 stantly watches his bodily conditions turns into 
 a self-tormentor and may end in madness, while 
 he who goes his way heedless of himself will 
 never acquire self-control. Yet let us not take 
 our task too seriously. A cheerful glance at our- 
 selves is all that is necessary, for a species of sane 
 self-irony is the sum and substance of the true 
 philosophy of life. Let us strengthen our will, 
 learn to concentrate our attention, cultivate our 
 esthetic sense, "pray for a pure heart and great 
 thought," and study nature — thus shall we enjoy 
 peace of mind, which means happiness.
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN'S APHORISMS 
 
 Next to the Diatetik, none of the writings of 
 Feuchtersleben appeal to so wide a public as his 
 maxims and aphorisms, which may be found 
 scattered through his collected works under such 
 headings as: "Leaves from the Diary of a 
 Lonely Man," "Concerning Knowledge," "Art," 
 and "Life." Feuchtersleben, like Grillparzer, 
 was in the habit of confiding to his diary, with- 
 out thought of publication, much of what he 
 wrote on the multitude of subjects which 
 claimed his attention. The specimens here 
 selected cannot convey an adequate idea of the 
 wide range of his intellectual interests, though 
 they sufficiently illustrate the humane and philo- 
 sophic spirit which animates whatever he wrote. 
 
 It is a useful occupation to look in great writ- 
 ers for a treatment of those problems that are 
 not strictly within their province, such as, for 
 instance, questions of natural science in the writ- 
 ings of poets. We often find that he who is at 
 home in any department of knowledge accepts 
 only what is handed down by other authorities, 
 
 [162]
 
 feuchtersleben's aphorisms 163 
 
 while the amateur looks upon the matter in an 
 entirely new light. Thus I found in Kant's 
 minor writings — which, by the way, are of ines- 
 timable value— hints which are of the greatest 
 interest to the physician. 
 
 To read books in foreign languages has this 
 good result: it emancipates us from the tyranny 
 of empty phrases, and forces us to stop and think 
 when we come across a word which we do not 
 understand. We Germans feel happy when 
 what we read sounds like tinkling bells. 
 
 Let no one say: This is a book after my own 
 heart, it expresses just what I should have said. 
 One ought never to read in order to be con- 
 firmed in one's pet views. Books ought to lead 
 us on, limit our horizon, or enlarge it, and cor- 
 rect and instruct us. 
 
 The elements of natural history ought to be 
 taught to children; art, that is to say the beauti- 
 ful, to youths; with philosophy — abstract truth 
 - — let the mature grapple as best they can; while 
 the old may have their say about history.
 
 164 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 The cry of the day is ever for the new. We 
 want to be surprised, amused, and helped to 
 kill time. This is the extent of our interest in 
 art and literature. Yet how much more profit- 
 able is it to become thoroughly acquainted with 
 one single noble character, one solitary great 
 intellect. 
 
 What is called "flattery" is for the right- 
 minded generally humiliating, for when we are 
 flattered we secretly have the feeling that vv^hat 
 we are credited with is the opposite of the quali- 
 ties we possess. Why be flattered at being 
 thought capable of doing what we know we can- 
 not perform? 
 
 We can acquire and learn everything, except 
 delicacy of feeling. 
 
 We all have reason, and yet how few of us 
 are reasonable. "Public opinion!" We are suf- 
 ficiently plagued by the opinions of single indi- 
 viduals. What must be an opinion made up of 
 such units! And yet what should we call that 
 instinct which gradually recognizes what is gen-
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN'S APHORISMS 1 65 
 
 nine, and rejects and consigns to oblivion what 
 is worthless? 
 
 Happy is he to whom life becomes a poem, 
 but woe to him who substitutes poetry for life. 
 
 What do we most admire in the Athenians? 
 That they recognized the greatness of Aristo- 
 phanes side by side with that of Socrates. 
 
 Refinement and good manners cannot be too 
 highly appreciated, for they are the outward 
 form of the intrinsically good and beautiful, and 
 even imitation cannot fail gradually to awaken 
 in us a desire to be in reality what we merely 
 seem to be. Like honor itself, prevailing cus- 
 tom is a lever which lifts us in the direction of 
 virtue. Decorum, like virtue, consists in self- 
 control; it improves him who practises it, for he 
 soon perceives that there is no better way of 
 appearing refined than by being so. 
 
 ■ It is unjust to condemn the use of foreign 
 words in cases where one's own language proves 
 inadequate. The educated writer will sacrifice
 
 1 66 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 a narrow grammatical patriotism to the demands 
 of higher culture. As into a vast sea of fluid 
 thought, which surrounds and unites all coun- 
 tries, he will delve into the linguistic treasures 
 of all and appropriate what he needs in order 
 to create definite images. Rich sources of 
 knowledge and rare opportunities for the broad- 
 ening of human ties will thus be open to him. 
 
 What I teach and confess to is not optimism 
 (as has been asserted somewhere), for I insist 
 that the dark side of things must not be ignored; 
 not quietism, for I lay stress on constant activity 
 in the search for what is right, and in the doing 
 of it; not scepticism, for the assertion that there 
 are two sides to all things, and that there is some 
 truth in each, does not mean that everything is 
 either true or false; not objectivism, for I would 
 not deprive the individual of an iota of his 
 rights; least of all indiflferentism, for my concep- 
 tion of life presupposes an active interest in 
 every form of human thought and endeavor, 
 be it knowledge, art, or the ordinary concerns of 
 life, in all of which there is room for an endless 
 variety of opinions and deeds.
 
 feuchtersleben's aphorisms 167 
 
 Mathematicians and musicians often display 
 a certain intellectual narrowness, while jurists 
 manifest great keenness and vivacity of mind. 
 Mathematicians and musicians, up to a certain 
 point, exhibit but the workings of a mechanism 
 which deals, in a prescribed fashion, with 
 objects that can be perceived by the senses; it is 
 only wdien they reach out into a higher sphere, 
 attained by the few who attempt to find the laws 
 of this mechanism, that the higher intellect is 
 called into play. The jurist, on the other hand, 
 deals wath laws that have to take cognizance 
 of constantly changing circumstances. All prob- 
 lems of life may be regarded in the light of cases 
 at law and treated as such. Indeed, what is 
 practical philosophy but jurisprudence as ap- 
 plied to God and man? 
 
 We find it much easier to think of the immor- 
 tality of the soul in connection with a soldier 
 who has fallen in battle than with a man who 
 has been devoured by a bear. Why? Because 
 we think only in an anthropomorphic way. 
 
 Literary clubs never promote anything but
 
 1 68 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 mediocrity. Small talents come there to the sur- 
 face and produce a momentary impression sim- 
 ply because they are parts of a whole. 
 
 Gifted young men must not be much lectured 
 to or contradicted, else there is danger of pro- 
 voking in them a secret pride which may become 
 all the more arrogant because secret. In fact, 
 an enforced humility is ever both cause and 
 symptom of an inner conceit. 
 
 Only he impresses me permanently, and has 
 my fullest confidence, who is capable of smiling 
 at his own limitations. 
 
 It is immoral and leads to ruin, to coddle one's 
 feelings, even those that are moral. 
 
 Genius needs and deserves no praise. It is 
 not the result of its own efforts. But industry 
 and moral worth deserve recognition and glory. 
 Such will be the rule when mankind shall have 
 attained a higher state of perfection. Then the 
 world will enjoy its Homers, and it will erect 
 monuments to its Aristideses.
 
 feuchtersleben's aphorisms 169 
 
 Benefactions, alms, a kindly and charitable 
 behavior, are but poor substitutes for true 
 morality. Indeed, there are many men who buy, 
 as it were, their exemption from the higher obli- 
 gations of honesty and the practice of real vir- 
 tue by a show of these practices. They pass in 
 life and in society for good people, but the 
 Almighty reads their hearts. Truly good deeds 
 are those that render doing good unnecessary. 
 
 Both the panegyrists and the detractors of 
 so-called simple common sense ought to take 
 pains to distinguish between sound sense and 
 common sense. Sound sense never refuses to 
 recognize that there are higher things, while 
 common sense, in its narrow selfishness, often 
 denies the existence of anything better than 
 itself. 
 
 Nothing is morally so inefifective as undue 
 moralizing; indeed, nothing is more certain to 
 produce the contrary of what is intended. If, 
 for instance, we depict the misfortune of being 
 rich so graphically as to provoke a smile on the 
 part of the rich man present, other listeners will
 
 I JO INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 refuse to believe even what is true in our story. 
 This ought to be particularly impressed upon 
 writers who undertake to paint the tortures of 
 an evil conscience in too glaring colors. They 
 overlook the fact that there must be a highly 
 developed conscience before its voice can be 
 heard. Only he who is good is troubled in con- 
 science by his lapses, not the common evil-doer. 
 The mediocre man, who is neither good nor bad, 
 consoles himself in listening to some writer's 
 harrowing story, with the reflection: "Thank 
 Heaven, I am spared such tortures!" — and 
 becomes more than ever confirmed in his 
 mediocrity. 
 
 It is a common thing to say that one may 
 compel respect, but not love. Precisely the con- 
 trary is true. It is possible to call forth love by 
 a charm of manner which tells on every one; 
 respect, on the other hand, is rendered only by 
 the few who are themselves worthy of it. It is 
 a sentiment which presupposes a far higher de- 
 gree of ethical development than is found in the 
 average man. You may be ever so deserving of 
 respect, yet you will never compel the masses
 
 feuchtersleden's aphorisms 171 
 
 to render you a tribute which is foreign and 
 burdensome to their feelings. 
 
 Conscience is but good taste in ethical mat- 
 ters. We are more disgusted by what is vulgar 
 than by crime itself. But, again, good taste may 
 be defined as conscience in aesthetic matters. 
 
 Whoever enters upon public office ought to 
 pledge himself to continue for at least one year 
 rigidly in the ways of his predecessor. Thor- 
 ough reforms can be introduced only by one who 
 knows from personal experience what needs re- 
 forming, and progress will then be possible with- 
 out provoking reaction. There is a moral value 
 in established forms which those familiar with 
 the ways of the world know how to appreciate.
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN'S INFLUENCE 
 
 Feuchtersleben's Didtetik has, in a singular 
 degree, won alike popular success and the en- 
 comiums of physicians. Dr. Max Neuburger, 
 professor of the history of medicine at the Uni- 
 versity of Vienna, speaks of it as a work "popu- 
 lar in the best sense of the word but far removed 
 from the ordinary run of books w^hich deal with 
 medical matters in a popular way, and merely 
 breed dilettanteism and hypochondria, while 
 undermining faith in medicine itself, to the 
 detriment of the patient." "This little book," 
 he continues, "is among the most beautiful and 
 valuable possessions of German literature. It 
 is wholly superfluous to speak of its contents, 
 for who does not know this song of songs of the 
 power of the will? The mere mention of its 
 title awakens in most of us recollections of our 
 youth, of our hours of irresoluteness, weariness, 
 despondency and, again, of self-conquest, of 
 awakening confidence and renewed joy of life. 
 What makes this book permanently great is that, 
 reflecting as it does Feuchtersleben's own life, 
 it takes hold of our inmost being, so that, in read- 
 
 [172]
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN'S INFLUENCE 173 
 
 ing it, we seem to live over the author's experi- 
 ences. . . . We rise from its pages with a feel- 
 ing of renewed strength; indeed, a single one of 
 his aphorisms outweighs volumes of discourses 
 on moral treatment." 
 
 Feuchtersleben's success would not have been 
 as real as it was had he lacked a sense of humor 
 — that delicate gift without which moral writ- 
 ings rarely pass into literature. In a treatise 
 republished in 1849 under the title of Physicians 
 and the Public, there are some passages that 
 recall our own philosopher-physician Holmes, 
 and they are as true to-day as when first penned, 
 nearly eighty years ago. "Everybody," says 
 Feuchtersleben, "wants to be a physician, and 
 everybody thinks himself entitled to ridicule the 
 doctors. Old women (and young ones, too) 
 dabble in our art, and pass judgment on us. . . . 
 Their ranks are reinforced by the hypochon- 
 driacs, who feed on the poison which they suck 
 out of medical books, and which they get rid of 
 only to wish that it might kill the doctors." 
 What was so well said in the New York Evening/ 
 Post apropos of a celebration in honor of Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes may be applied, mutatis mu-
 
 174 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 tandis, to Feuchtersleben: "In these days of 
 Christian Science, psycho-therapy and ghost- 
 craft, nothing would be more attractive, and few 
 things would be more enlightening, than such 
 comment as he would have made on these 
 developments." 
 
 M. Adrien Delondre, in his sympathetic study 
 of Feuchtersleben, has pointed out a certain 
 vagueness in his language, beginning with the 
 very title of his book. It may be granted that 
 his use of the word "soul" may at times be puz- 
 zling alike to the scientist and the theologian. 
 Above all, the logician will find a contradiction 
 between Feuchtersleben's effort to establish the 
 sovereignty of the will over the soul, and the 
 doubt implied as to the very existence of a soul 
 in such a passage as this: 
 
 "I shall leave it to philosophers who have time 
 to waste to inquire into the distinction between 
 body and soul, or even to try to prove the exist- 
 ence of one and the other. It matters little 
 whether I assign to the soul the power which 
 materialists attribute to a certain portion of the 
 body, whose function it is to think and to will. 
 By whatever name we may designate the cause,
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN'S INFLUENCE 175 
 
 the effect does not change, nor does the lesson 
 which I draw from it." 
 
 Feuchtersleben's unique distinction is that all 
 his vast scientific equipment and all his literary 
 pursuits served only one purpose — the welfare 
 of his fellow men. He w^as, as Professor Richard 
 M. Meyer says, above all "an educator of the 
 people," and amidst all his interests the interests 
 of humanity were ever the highest. Lessing's 
 Nathan der W else was to him the embodiment 
 of wisdom in literature. "Nothing purer than 
 this book," he wrote, "ever came from man's 
 soul and hand." Purely metaphysical specula- 
 tion, aside from ethical purposes, was not to his 
 liking, and therefore the Fichtes, Hegels and 
 Schellings had little attraction for him, al- 
 though he knew them as well as his Goethe, 
 Herder and Kant. In all philosophic systems he 
 looked, above all, for the man behind the writer 
 and for the genuineness of his interest in his fel- 
 low men. His aesthetic ideals he found in Plato; 
 his own unbiased spirit of observation made 
 him an admirer of the method of Bacon. What 
 he thought as a philosopher, he practised as a 
 physician. He demanded for his profession the
 
 176 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 highest ethical and scientific standards. "Shall 
 we believe," he wrote in a paper on Aerzte und 
 Publicum (Physicians and the Public), "that 
 medicine is nothing but a collection of names for 
 diseases and remedies which can be learned by 
 heart and made available, at will, by purely 
 mechanical practice? Nothing can be further 
 from the truth. Medicine is a science which, to 
 use the striking expression of a high authority, 
 'keeps all the faculties of the physician busy, 
 because it busies itself with all the faculties of 
 man.' Nay, it is more than a science, it is an 
 art. For art is simply knowledge turned into 
 action, and action always calls for all there is 
 in us — our intellectual powers as well as our 
 physical. No man of weak character can suc- 
 ceed in any art. Every profession and occupa- 
 tion has its peculiar requirements that have to 
 be understood; it is so with the priest, the gov- 
 ernment official, the soldier, and the scholar. 
 How, then, can the half-educated physician 
 understand the conditions surrounding a Goethe, 
 Kant, and a Rahel?* Woe to the physical wel- 
 
 *Rahel Levin (1771-1833), one of the most brilliant women 
 of her day, who married in 1814 the writer Varnhagen von Ense. 
 She was a centre of attraction in the literary circles of Berlin.
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN'S INFLUENCE 1 77 
 
 fare of such highly gifted beings if their family 
 physician be unable to judge of the requirements 
 of their individuality." 
 
 Equally emphatic was his voice in those politi- 
 cal questions for whose solution he so disinterest- 
 edly labored. Though devoted to mankind, he 
 was no flatterer of the people, and when, during 
 the revolutionary agitation of 1848, thoughtless 
 demands for the uprooting of all existing con- 
 ditions were loudest, he, like his friend Grill- 
 paizer, dared to call for moderation and quiet 
 reflection. 
 
 "The great question of the day," he wrote, 
 "presses for solution, yet finds us irresolute. The 
 source of all precious gifts, liberty, is disclosed 
 to our eyes. Our parched lips thirst for its 
 blessings, yet, like Tantalus of old, again and 
 again we see it disappear. We all know what 
 obstructions are in the path of the progressive 
 development of constitutional life in all those 
 European states that are now shaken by tremen- 
 dous convulsions. . . . Are questions which 
 have taxed the greatest thinkers and legislators 
 of all times and all nations — a Moses, Solon, 
 Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Leib-
 
 178 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 nitz, Spinoza and Kant — to be decided by the 
 most ignorant?" 
 
 Feuchtersleben cannot, any more than Plato, 
 be considered to have been a friend of democ- 
 racy, but, as Jowett has said, the term has hardly 
 any meaning when applied to a philosopher 
 whose writings are not meant for a particular 
 age and country, but for all times and all man- 
 kind. The word "democracy" meant as little to 
 Feuchtersleben as the catch-words "nation" and 
 "race." With Herder, his fatherland was hu- 
 manity, but if he saw no magic virtue in the 
 ignorant will of the common man, neither, on the 
 other hand, did he share the conservative dread 
 of "republicanism." "From our earliest youth," 
 he wrote, "we have always heard of republican 
 virtues, never of republican vices. The justice 
 of an Aristides, the severity of a Cato, the self- 
 denial of a Brutus, the heroic obedience of a 
 Regulus, the nobility of a Sidney, Washington, 
 Bolivar, the humanity of a Franklin — are these 
 the horrible spectres against which we are now 
 warned with such extreme anxiety? Are not a 
 love of the commonwealth and unshakable fidel- 
 ity to the law, as it exists, the characteristics
 
 FEUCHTERSLEBEN'S INFLITEXCE 1 79 
 
 of republican virtue? The error lies solely in 
 confounding the words 'republic' and 'democ- 
 racy.' " 
 
 If Feuchtersleben wasted no time in trying 
 to build up a system of metaphysics — "the art of 
 going astray methodically" — he drew constant 
 inspiration from the great thinkers of antiquity. 
 Yet, a wide gulf separates him, in one impor- 
 tant aspect, from the two ancients whose views 
 of life most resembled his own — Epictetus and 
 Marcus Aurelius. The image of death, as a 
 factor to be daily reckoned with in man's 
 thoughts, had no place in Feuchtersleben's phi- 
 losophy, not even as a means of arousing man to 
 a higher morality. Epictetus's indifference to 
 the inquiries of the physical philosophers, more- 
 over, is in marked contrast to Feuchtersleben's 
 insatiable thirst for scientific data, as the safe 
 basis of metaphysical speculation. Marcus Au- 
 relius's lofty character, rather than the cast of 
 his philosophy, must be considered as one of the 
 permanent influences on Feuchtersleben's mind. 
 The two were akin in that their philosophy did 
 not spend itself in systematic search for abstract 
 truth, but proceeded from pronounced ethical
 
 l8o IXTERXATIONAL MINDS 
 
 convictions and an active, though unformed, re- 
 ligious feeling. Feuchtersleben had all of Mar- 
 cus Aurelius's virtue of moderation, his sense of 
 the futility of ambition, his ideals of peaceful 
 happiness within the home; but he never coun- 
 selled renunciation of the pleasures of life. 
 Least of all had he the gloomy resignation of a 
 Pascal. "All our pleasures are but vanity; there 
 is no good in this life save in the hope of an- 
 other" — this doctrine had no part in Feuchters- 
 leben's creed. His theory and practice were in 
 accord with Montaigne's saying that "of all the 
 benefits of virtue the contempt of death is the 
 chiefest, a means that furnishes our life with an 
 easeful tranquility, and gives us a pure and 
 amiable taste of it." As a teacher of practical 
 morality, Feuchtersleben, in some respects, re- 
 sembled Locke. He had in common with Locke 
 the deep interest in popular education, the sim- 
 plicity of method and sincerity of expression, the 
 blending of idealism and realism in the variety 
 of intellectual pursuits. The direct effect of all 
 of Feuchtersleben's writings is one of elevating 
 stimulation, an increased sense of the beautiful 
 and enjoyable in life — the very opposite of what
 
 feuchtersleben's influence i8i 
 
 Matthew Arnold describes as the result of read- 
 ing Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius: "a sense of 
 constraint and melancholy." 
 
 Perhaps Feuchtersleben's spirit was most 
 closely akin to that of Vauvenargues, "one of 
 the most tender, lofty, cheerful, and delicately 
 sober of all moralists," as Morley calls him, and 
 as Feuchtersleben equally was. He possessed 
 all of Vauvenargues's humaneness, his wide 
 tolerance and gentle persuasiveness, and was 
 like him in that poetic phrasing which heightens 
 the efifectiveness of a thought while apparently 
 veiling it. Do we not seem to hear the voice 
 of Feuchtersleben in the saying of Vauvenar- 
 gues : "Every condition has its shadows and its 
 lights; every nation has its morals and its 
 genius, according to its fortune; the Greeks, 
 whom we surpass in fastidiousness, surpassed us 
 in simplicity"? 
 
 The permanent influence of Feuchtersleben's 
 Diiitetik may be traced in the uninterrupted 
 flow of popular works on psychological subjects, 
 both in this country and abroad, whose keynote 
 is the cultivation of will power. If we eliminate 
 from this mass of books those whose main or
 
 1 82 INTERNATIONAL MINDS 
 
 subsidiary motive is a commercial one, or which 
 are intended to pander to the crazes of the day, 
 there still remains a respectable substratum of 
 literature whose legitimate object is the cultiva- 
 tion of serenity of mind. 
 
 One cannot close a summary of the life of 
 Feuchtersleben without reverting to the com- 
 panion who was the source of his greatest hap- 
 piness. Feuchtersleben's essays contain several 
 allusions to his beloved Helene and, in one place, 
 a faithful portrayal of her principal characteris- 
 tics. She is described as having been "endowed 
 by Providence with a healthy, frank and cheer- 
 ful nature, which won her every true heart, as 
 well as with the blessed gift of looking at the 
 world clearly and serenely, without ever making 
 selfish demands or assuming superior airs." An 
 uneducated young girl of the lower Vienna 
 bourgeoisie when she first became acquainted 
 with him, she learned to enter into his every 
 thought and aspiration, and her natural intelli- 
 gence ripened under his influence and direct 
 teaching into a discriminating knowledge of life 
 and literature. She shared to the full his admir- 
 ation for the great writers of antiquity, and
 
 feuciitersleben's influence 183 
 
 read after his death in her cloister-like retire- 
 ment, besides his own works, solely the Greek 
 dramatists. She survived her husband nearly 
 thirty-three years, until May 21, 1882.
 
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