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Whether he studies the rose exhaling its Eastern perfume to the sky, or the ocean casting its countless wrecks upon the shore, the brow of the poet remains equally calm: to him they are but two forms of the beautiful; two subjects for art. Goethe has been called a pantheist. I know not in what sense critics apply this vague and often ill-understood word to him.
And yet when Frederick Robertson asked, "What is this world itself but the form of Deity whereby the manifoldness and beauty of His mind manifests itself?" and still farther, when he quotes with approval Channing's word, that "perhaps matter is but a mode of thought," the most earnest Pantheist would hardly desire more.
A pantheist, withal a poet and a direct descendant in the line of Watteau, Boucher, Monticelli, with an individual touch of mundane grace and elegance. Mme. Charpentier it was who cleverly engineered the portrait of herself and children and the portrait of Jeanne Samary into the 1879 Salon. The authorities did not dare to refuse two such distinguished women. Renoir's prospects became brighter.
Timotheus firmly clung to this pantheist creed; still, he held the honorable post of head of the Museum in the place of the Roman priest of Alexander, a man of less learning and was familiar not only with the tenets of his heathen predecessors, but with the sacred scriptures of the Jews and Christians; and in the ethics of these last he found much which met his views.
He is a painter par excellence, a man born for painting, and this power of penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist, Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.
He has less self-consciousness, less self-dependence, lives as a part of the world by which he is surrounded a real practical pantheist. The child lives in the present, not in the future, nor much even in the past, till the world has been some time with him, and he by degrees shares the common heritage of retrospect and anticipation.
He is the true Pantheist going out of nature for a week, but bursting forth afresh in a day, and so insinuating himself into the history of our era that it is beginning to be hard to find out where the event ends and the writer begins. Next week Ford's Theater opens with the "Octoroon." The gas will be pearly as ever; the scenes as rich.
But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things? since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself. There have been many pantheist poems suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones. The pantheist cannot wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise anything as really distinct from himself. And surely its effect is sufficiently obvious.
The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes.
His philosophy was not so much a philosophy of nature as it was a natural philosophy the long, serene thoughts of a man who had lived in the tranquil spirit of the trees. He was not pagan; he was not pantheist; but he did not much divide between nature and human nature, nor between human nature and divine. John Burroughs lived a wholesome life.
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