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Updated: May 25, 2025
Or perhaps we come nearer our meaning, if we say that in Goethe we discover by far the most striking instance, in our time, of a writer who is, in strict speech, what Philosophy can call a Man.
"What a wonderful work Klindworth has accomplished in his editions of Beethoven and Chopin! As Goethe said of himself, we can say of Klindworth he has carved his own monument in this work. We should revere him for the great service he has done the pianistic world. "I always love to play in America, and each time I come I discover how much you have grown. The musical development here is wonderful.
It is this deeper knowledge which holds a lighted torch aloft in the deepest recesses of the soul, or over those abysses of possible experience which open on all sides about every man, which is to be found in the pages of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and of all those great artists who have seen men in those decisive and significant moments when they strike into the movement of history, or, through their deeds and sufferings, the order of life suddenly shines forth.
Oxford has more criticism now, more knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination still; his genius and his style are things of power..... A greater voice still, the greatest voice of the century, came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe.
His clever but too deeply metaphysical romances are not only full of domestic sentimentality and domestic scenes, but they also imitate the over-refinement and effeminacy of Goethe, and yet his sound understanding and warm patriotic feelings led him to condemn all the artificial follies of fashion, all that was unnatural as well as all that was unjust.
I. Why has his poetic fame in England decreased so much from the estimate of his contemporaries, by whom he seemed worthy of a place beside Goethe? The answer is to be sought in the fact that Byron reflected so powerfully the mood of that special time. That reactionary period in history has passed and with it much of Byron's influence and fame.
The first quality which strikes us in Goethe, and which dazzled his contemporaries, and continues to dazzle posterity, is his universality. He appears to us as one of the most receptive, one of the most encyclopædic intellects of modern times.
Here I saw the names of Goethe and Herder. Here they have walked many a time, I suppose. But the inside! a forest-like firmament, glorious in holiness; windows many hued as the Hebrew psalms; a gloom solemn and pathetic as man's mysterious existence; a richness gorgeous and manifold as his wonderful nature.
On his fair name the terrible Aristophanes himself affixes no brand . The sweetness of his genius extended indeed to his temper, and personal popularity assisted his public triumphs. Nor does he appear to have keenly shared the party animosities of his day; his serenity, like that of Goethe, has in it something of enviable rather than honourable indifference.
In the introduction to his treatise Metamorphosis of Plants, when referring to the regressive metamorphosis of stamens into petals as an example of an irregular metamorphosis, he remarks that 'experiences of this kind of metamorphosis will enable us to disclose what is hidden from us in the regular way of development, and to see clearly and visibly what we should otherwise only be able to infer'. In this remark Goethe expresses a truth that is valid in many spheres of life, both human and natural.
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