Humanity, however, is not swung away from its mud-moorings so easily; probably would only go adrift and come to wreck, if it were: witness the French Revolution. Sing, bird, in the tree-tops! but when you fly, think not to make the pines fly with you! It is only by slow vital assimilations that man is ameliorated. We do our best in digging and fertilizing a little about the roots, or in bearing pollen, like bees, from flower to flower. We do our best by a little meek furtherance of Nature. And this meekness of labor is no less necessary for ourselves than for those we would serve. Ambitious world-mending is, on one side, self-flattery.
Meanwhile horrible tragedies of charlatanism, or terrible tragedies of disgust and despair await an incontinent enthusiasm for the rôle of Providence.
Wilhelm's nature has now been greatly enriched. But all that has enriched has also imperilled. Imagination, love, self-feeling, and philanthropy have stored his breast with golden wealth; but they are one and all making over that wealth to a false tendency. Long before this, however, Goethe has brought in chastening, tempering forces, by which these riches may be economized.
First, and in the person of Jarno, enters the Critical Understanding. True as steel, cold and keen as steel also, antipathetic to all sentiment, clear and decisive partly by what he has and partly by what he has not, Jarno offers with unsparing rigor to shear away Wilhelm's illusions, not seeing that in these very illusions runs an artery rich in his reddest life-blood.
Critical understanding, the disenchanter,—light without heat or color,—begins at a certain period in nobly imagining and impassioned youth to break through the cloudy glories, and shame all with its cold glare. That sudden skeptic shame! Do you know it, reader? Do you remember moments when all that had glorified life seemed suddenly to stand before you a detected impostor, a beggar playing king, and now stripped to his rags? Ah, me! and how pathetically old and wise the neophyte becomes all at once! He will be fooled no longer, he! Love, friendship, philanthropy,—he has looked under the words, and found all they covered, namely, nothing. Henceforth he will hunt sentiment out of him, as it were a wolf. Henceforth he will measure out his life by hand, and be purely—and barrenly—"reasonable."
Unhappy, could he succeed. A mere life of the understanding is just one degree better than idiocy. Sweep out imagination, and all the angels go with it. To freeze the heated geysers of the soul? It were to freeze the core of the world. Better to be nobly moonstruck than turned into a pillar of salt, even were it Attic salt. Better to be Don Quixote than a very archangel Sancho.
And yet unhappy is the nobly impassioned and imagining soul that can never discriminate, never distinguish between the central suggestions of the soul and the chance directions these may have taken. It is he of all men who needs just this, discrimination. Is there any tragedy like that of Don Quixote? A god blinded by his own light! An Olympian charging upon windmills, while a toad squats aside and grins at the spectacle! The ludicrousness is but the last sting of the tragedy. On the whole, critical understanding must have heed. The divine mania of the soul must listen even to this Sancho with his wise saws. Hard it is for the higher to become pupil of the lower, to accept and use its very contempt, and yet forbear to learn contempt of itself, stooping only to conquer. Yet even this must be. Heat is divine, but cold also is necessary. The cloudy glories of rich impassioned spirits, the vapors that float, scarlet and gold, in their heavens, must strike against the icy mountain-tops of common-sense, that the cold may condense them into fruitful rain. Hence thunder, lightning, storm, and wild commotion in the soul; but hence harvest also. The first great inward struggle is this between heat and cold; and where the heats are tropical, the collision is violent. Yet these contraries must both work into the great economies of life.
Cold—cold prudence and choice—appears first in its embodiment, Jarno, who symbolizes its secret beginnings in Wilhelm. But then and there its beginnings are only symbolized. Soon, however, disappointment bitterer than death, with sickness, remorse, horror, enters and chills him to the core. Ah, and so these clouds of glory are only raw vapor and mist, after all! The rainy season has set in. "Let's into the house," says Prudence; "let's box ourselves up nicely, and get some comfort, since that is the whole of life." No, he will not do that; he will stand out, and be drenched, and realize the full extent of his illusion. Henceforth his one employment shall be to taunt his heart with its own hopes, to put all the summer blossom and beauty of his former imaginations beside this wintry death-in-life, and shame them by the contrast.
This period in Wilhelm's life is wrought out in Goethe's picture with extreme power.
But he recovers himself, slowly. And Goethe's great knowledge of human nature is shown in this, that Wilhelm does not regain his ennobling imaginations while holding fast to the cool suggestions of prudence. No, he reverts to the former, forsaking the latter. The cold season has passed over him, and seemingly left nothing behind. With health and joy, his illusions, one by one, one and all, return. I find this true. Oscillation between opposite poles,—how long it lasts! A powerful experience comes, and all seems changed in one's being; it passes, and nothing seems changed. "Is there for me," one might cry, "only this aimless see-saw? To-day Don Quixote, to-morrow Sancho, next day Don Quixote again,—is that to go on forever?" Happy is he, provided his poverty be not his exemption, who has never wrung his hands in utter despair of finding centrality, unity, at last,—a centre where the divine passion and afflatus of the heart are reconciled with the hard-eyed perceptions of common-sense.