The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous, engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The reconciling word,--is there a reconciling word? Here, now, comes one who answers, Yes. And he answers thus, not by a bald assertion, but by a picture wherein these opposites lose their antagonism,--by a picture which is true to both, yet embraces both, and shapes them into a unity. That is Goethe. This attempt represents the grand _nisus_ of his life. It is most fully made in "Wilhelm Meister." Above the world he places the growing spirit of man, the vessel of all uses, with his resource in eternal Nature. Then he seizes with a sovereign hand upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization, he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand rolling organ-harmonies of life. That he succeeds to perfection I do not say. I could find fault enough with his book, if there were either time or need. There is no need: its faults are obvious. In binding himself by such unsparing oaths to recognize and admit all the outward truth of society, he has, indeed, grappled with the whole problem, but also made its solution a little cumbrous and incomplete. Nay, this which he so admits in his picture was also sufficiently, perhaps a touch more than sufficiently, admitted in his own being. He would have been a conventionalist and epicurean, unless he had been a seer. He would have been a mere man of the world, had he not been Goethe. But whereas a man of the world reads up from man to dignity, estate, and social advantage, he reverses the process, and reads up from these to man. Say that he does it with some stammering, with some want of the last nicety. What then? It were enough, if he set forth upon the true road, though his own strength fail before the end is reached. It is enough, if, falling midway, even though it be by excess of the earthly weight he bears, he still point forward, and his voice out of the dust whisper, "There lies your way!" This alone makes him a benefactor of mankind.