OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 



39 



ornamentation or grace produces beauty, and the sketch 

 becomes perfect only by the elaboration of detail. 1 This 

 charming effusion of Goethe's, a piece of fiction in 26. 



. Schelling on 



letters and dialogue, must have been before the mind Art and the 



problem of 



of Schelling when he wrote and delivered before the 

 Academy of Munich, nine years later, his celebrated 

 address " on the relation of the fine arts to nature." 2 He 

 there succeeds in giving a yet corrector expression of 

 what must have been an underlying thought in Goethe's 

 mind. The passage is worth repeating in full: "How 

 does it come about that to every person of fairly educated 

 taste imitations of so-called reality which are so close 

 as to become deceptive, appear nevertheless to be untrue, 

 that they make the impression of spectres ; whereas a 

 work of art in which a thought is dominant captivates 

 with a full power of truth, placing you as it were in 

 the truly real world ? How does it come to pass except 

 through the, more or less, hidden feeling which declares 

 that thought is the only living principle in things, every- 

 thing else being without substance, a vain shadow ? On 

 the same ground all the reverse instances are explained 

 which are brought up as examples to show how nature 

 has been surpassed by art. If the artist stays the rapid 

 current of man's years, combining the power of developed 



1 The term characteristic had been 

 introduced by Hirt (1759-1836), 

 had been commended by Goethe 

 in correspondence with his friend 

 Meyer, and had then been playfully 

 treated in the Dialogue mentioned 

 in the text. It has, however, been 

 correctly remarked, e.g., by Biel- 

 chowsky, loc. cit., vol. iii. p. 238), 

 that for Goethe himself these 



marked differences, expressed by 

 the terms Real, Ideal, and Char- 

 acteristic, do not exist, as his view 

 was eminently synoptic, and averse, 

 as we have seen before (vol. iii. p. 

 608), to minute analysis and philo- 

 sophical distinctions. 



2 Published in Schelling's'Werke,' 

 sec. i., vol. vii. pp. 289 sqq. 



