OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 



33 



be best understood by pointing to the difference 

 between Art and Beauty. This difference became em- 

 phasised as soon as poets and artists on the one side, 

 and writers on art on the other, took a wider view than 

 had been the custom both with the artists and the 

 critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ; 

 when the former evolved a style of their own, and the 

 latter ceased to lay down formal rules. In two direc- 

 tions the view was widened. It was widened first 

 through the growing love of nature, through the re- 



the end of the eighteenth century. 

 For the English mind a "very spirited 

 and interesting but somewhat 

 superficial picture of Goethe was 

 drawn by G. H. Lewes, and this 

 defect was not removed even by 

 Carlyle's sympathetic Essays, and 

 still less by the oft-quoted passage 

 from Matthew Arnold ('Memorial 

 Verses,' 1850), where he said 



" The end is everywhere, 

 Art still has truth, take refuge there ! " 



The latter marks only a passing 

 phase in Goethe's as well as in 

 Schiller's thought, which is readily 

 explained by the hopeless conditions 

 which surrounded them, following 

 on the track of revolution and war. 

 Out of this Goethe had, for a time, 

 withdrawn into the serene atmo- 

 sphere of classicism in art and 

 poetry ; but the classical ideal could 

 not, in the long - run, satisfy his 

 nature, and after giving living tes- 

 timony to it in some of his most 

 perfect works, he again returned 

 to a conception of art in its relation 

 not only to nature but also to 

 practical life and its deeper ethical 

 and religious interests. And here 

 we must note a neglected side 

 in Goethe's philosophy of life : his 

 appreciation of human labour, of 

 the dignity of honest and useful 

 work, even of simple handicraft 



VOL. IV. 



or manual toil. It has perhaps not 

 been generally recognised, though 

 it is pointed out by Bosanquet 

 ('History of ^Esthetic,' p. 306), 

 how a kindred spirit actuated 

 the two greatest unsystematic 

 philosophers of the nineteenth 

 century, Goethe and Ruskin : 

 " Goethe's short paper, ' German 

 Architecture ' [1773], is perhaps the 

 profoundest aesthetic utterance of 

 the eighteenth century. For in it 

 we have the germ of those ideas 

 which were to find their full ex- 

 pression eighty years after in the 

 chapter on the ' Nature of Gothic ' 

 in Mr Ruskin's ' Stones of Venice.' 

 I fear that the indifference of our 

 philosophic historians to the former 

 utterance is but too well explained 

 by their unfamiliarity with the 

 latter and all that it implies. The 

 relation of all work to the life of 

 the individual workman is not 

 indeed insisted on by Goethe, but 

 the point of view which he adopted 

 was one in which this relation was 

 necessarily involved." Two pro- 

 minent articles of a practical religi- 

 ous creed were common to both 

 thinkers ; the blessing and dignity 

 of useful labour carried on with 

 reverence for a spiritual end. It 

 does not appear as if Schelling had 

 appreciated this side of Goethe's 

 conception of Art. 



