As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay
in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm,
infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling
down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true
value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want
of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
native land.