New
truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only
wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant
conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and
the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first
at least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the
influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and
few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of
time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to
inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there
dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked
like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find
there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its
loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two
qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes
him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my
gratitude to Herbert Spencer.
Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it
first fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of
man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than
Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking
open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in
that crowning offence of Werther, and in his own character a mere
pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of
superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the
rights and duties of his office.
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