To have attempted,
to have begun this enterprise, may be accounted the greatest praise.
That Goethe ever meditated it, in the form here set forth, we have no
direct evidence: but indeed such is the end and aim of high poetry at
all times and seasons; for the fiction of the poet is not falsehood,
but the purest truth; and if he would lead captive our whole being,
not rest satisfied with a part of it, he must address us on interests
that _are_, not that _were_, ours; and in a dialect which finds a
response, and not a contradiction, within our bosoms.
How Goethe has fulfilled these conditions in addressing us, an
inspection of his works, but no description, can inform us. Let me
advise the reader to study them, and see. If he come to the task with
an opinion that poetry is an amusement, a passive recreation; that its
highest object is to supply a languid mind with fantastic shows and
indolent emotions, his measure of enjoyment is likely to be scanty,
and his criticisms will be loud, angry, and manifold. But if he know
and believe that poetry is the essence of all science, and requires
the purest of all studies; if he recollect that the new may not always
be the false; that the excellence which can be seen in a moment is not
usually a very deep one; above all, if his own heart be full of feelings
and experiences, for which he finds no name and no solution, but which
lie in pain imprisoned and unuttered in his breast, till the Word be
spoken, the spell that is to unbind them, and bring them forth to
liberty and light; then, if I mistake not, he will find that in this
Goethe there is a new world set before his eyes; a world of Earnestness
and Sport, of solemn cliff and gay plain; some such temple--far
inferior, as it may well be, in magnificence and beauty, but a temple
of the same architecture--some such temple for the Spirit of our age,
as the Shakespeares and Spensers have raised for the Spirit of theirs.
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