Who can escape the conflict with the outer world? Even our friend is drawn into this strife; reluctantly he submits to contradiction by experience and by life; and since, after a long struggle, he succeeds not in uniting these august figures with those of the vulgar world, or that high desire with the demands of the day, he resolves to let the actual pass current as the necessary, and declares that what has thus far seemed real to him is phantasy.
Yet even here the individuality and the energy of his spirit reveals itself to be worthy of admiration. Despite all the fulness of his life, despite so strong a joy of living, despite noble inward talents and honorable spiritual desires and purposes, he feels himself wounded by the world and defrauded of his greatest treasures. Henceforth he can in experience nowhere find what had constituted his joy for so many years, and what had even been the inmost content of his life; yet he does not consume himself in idle lamentations, of which we know so many in the prose and verse of others, but he resolves upon counter-action. He proclaims war on all that cannot be demonstrated in reality; first and foremost, therefore, on Platonic love, then on all dogmatizing philosophy, especially its two extremes of Stoicism and Pythagoreanism. Furthermore, he works implacably against religious fanaticism, and against all that to reason appears eccentric.
But he is at once overwhelmed with anxiety lest he go too far, lest he himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle against commonplace reality. He opposes everything which we are accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism—musty pedantry, provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied to all these unclean spirits, whose name is Legion.
Herein he proceeds in an absolutely natural manner, without preconceived purpose or self-consciousness. He stands before the dilemma of the conceivable and the real, and, as he must advise moderation to control or to unite the two, he must hold himself in check, and must be many-sided, since he wishes to be just.
He had long been attracted by the pure, rational uprightness of noble Englishmen, and by their influence in the moral sphere, by an Addison, by a Steele; but now in their society he finds a man whose type of thought is far more agreeable to him.
Shaftesbury, whom I need only mention to recall a great thinker to the mind of every well-informed man,—Shaftesbury lived at a time when much disturbance reigned in the religion of his native land, when the dominant church sought by force to subdue men of other modes of thought. State and morals were also threatened by much that must arouse the anxiety of the intelligent and right-thinking. The best counter-action to all this, he believed, was cheerfulness; in his opinion, only what was regarded with serenity would be rightly seen. He who could look serenely into his own bosom must be a good man. This was the main thing, and from it sprang all other good. Spirit, wit, and humor were, he held, the real agencies by which such a disposition should come in contact with the world. All objects, even the most serious, must be capable of such clarity and freedom if they were not bedizened with a merely arrogant dignity, but contained within themselves a true value which did not fear the test. In this spirited endeavor to become master of things it was impossible to avoid casting about for deciding authorities, and thus human reason was set as judge over the content, and taste over the manner, of presentation.
In such a man our Wieland now found, not a predecessor whom he was to follow, nor a colleague with whom he was to work, but a true elder twin brother in the spirit, whom he perfectly resembled, without being formed in his likeness; even as it could not be said of the Menæchmi which was the original, and which the copy.
What Shaftesbury, born in a higher station, more favored with worldly advantages, and more experienced by travel, office, and cosmopolitan knowledge, did in a wider circle and at a more serious period in sea-girt England, precisely this our friend, proceeding from a point at first extremely limited, accomplished through persistent activity and through ceaseless toil, in his native land, surrounded on every side by hills and dales; and the result was—to employ, in our condensed address, a brief but generally intelligible term—that popular philosophy whereby a practically trained intelligence is set in decision over the moral worth of things, and is made the judge of their aesthetic value.
This philosophy, prepared in England and fostered by conditions in Germany, was thus spread far and wide by our friend, in company with countless sympathizers, by poems and by scholarly works, even by life itself.
And yet, if we have found Shaftesbury and Wieland perfectly alike so far as point of view, temperament, and insight are concerned, nevertheless, the latter was far superior to the former in talent; for what the Englishman rationally taught and desired, the German knew how to elaborate poetically and rhetorically in verse and prose.