Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/69

 thus Admetus's neatherds give Apollo a draught of their goatskin whey-bottle (well if they do not give him strokes with their oxrungs), not dreaming that he is the Sun-god! This man's name is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He is Herzog Weimar's Minister, come with the small contingent of Weimar; to do insignificant unmilitary duty here; very irrecognisable to nearly all! He stands at present, with drawn bridle, on the height near Sainte-Menehould, making an experiment on the 'cannon-fever'; having ridden thither against persuasion, into the dance and firing of the cannonballs, with a scientific desire to understand what that same cannon-fever may be: 'The sound of them,' says he, 'is curious enough; as if it were compounded of the humming of tops, the gurgling of water and the whistle of birds. By degrees you get a very uncommon sensation; which can only be described by similitude. It seems as if you were in some place extremely hot, and at the same time were completely penetrated by the heat of it; so that you feel as if you and this element you are in were perfectly on a par. The eyesight loses nothing of its strength or distinctness; and yet it is as if all things had got a kind of brown-red colour, which makes the situation and the objects still more impressive on you.'

This is the cannon-fever, as a World-Poet feels it.—A man entirely irrecognisable! In whose irrecognisable head, meanwhile, there verily is the spiritual counterpart (and call it complement) of this same huge Death-Birth of the World; which now effectuates itself, outwardly in the Argonne, in such cannon-thunder; inwardly, in the irrecognisable head, quite otherwise than by thunder! Mark that man, O Reader, as the memorablest of all the memorable in this Argonne Campaign. What we say of him is not dream, nor flourish of rhetoric, but scientific historic fact; as many men, now at this distance, see or begin to see.

But the large public thing we had to remark is this: That