Goethe Reviewed After Sixty Years

Cover Goethe Reviewed After Sixty Years
Genres: Nonfiction

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. LET us try then to describe the kind and degree of the merit, which by every nation alike, and not by the Germans only, has been recognized in Goethe, and has been acknowledged to be such that it can never be forgotten. It would be possible to meet the lazy and superficial objection which I have been combating by an argument of the same superficial kind. By simply reckoning up Goethe's literary achievements, and comparing them, as an examiner might do, with those of other literary men, it may be shown that he is entitled, as it were, by marks to a place very near the top of the literary list. Besides the five or six consummate works which the world has agreed to admire, it may be affirmed that his lyrics, that is, his songs, ballads, and lyrical romances, a

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re the best in the world. Heine at least, no bad judge of songs and no over-indulgent critic of Goethe, thought so. Further,he may be called the greatest of all literary critics. And lastly, though he did not write formal essays, yet in the qualities of the essayist, in subtle and abundant observation of human life, in the number and value of his wise remarks and pregnant sentences, he is by far the greatest writer since Montaigne and Bacon. Even if we look no deeper, it is matter for astonishment that the most tender of lyrists, and one of the most inventive and sublime of dramatists, should be found discussing in " Wilhelm Meister" the duties of landowners, and the details of the management of a theatre, with a hard common-sense worthy of Johnson. In truth, however much men may differ about the merits of particular writings of Goethe, yet his literary greatness in general is so striking and so undeniable, that his fame is not in any way bound up with that of German literatur...

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Goethe Reviewed After Sixty Years
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