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XXI.—Matthew Arnold and Goethe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
When Matthew Arnold called Goethe “ the clearest, the largest, the most helpful thinker of modern times,” he paid tribute to one of the most significant and enduring influences of his life. In him without doubt Arnold found one of those few best things that he held it the critic's function to know and to make known. Yet it was not as a poet, even though he never failed to accord to Goethe the first place after Shakespeare, that he hailed him as the greatest of the moderns, but as the thinker who more than any other had achieved the great task of modern literature, the task of interpreting the modern world to itself. “ People joke about and take fright at the problems of life; few trouble themselves about the words that would solve them ;” so Goethe once wrote to Schiller. Matthew Arnold was preeminently one of the few. His special business was the criticism of literature, but he brought to it the indispensable profound and persistent reflection upon the world which literature is designed to interpret. So he came to his famous campaign to quicken intellectually and spiritually the lives of his people. To that end he drew the main lines of his program, the endeavor to foster and disseminate the critical spirit (which he made the basis of what he called the modern element), the gospel of culture, and the setting up of that ideal of literature that he found most perfectly realized in the classics.
“People joke about and take fright at the problems of life; few trouble themselves about the words that would solve them;” so Goethe once wrote to Schiller. Matthew Arnold was preeminently one of the few. His special business was the criticism of literature, but he brought to it the indispensable profound and persistent reflection upon the world which literature is designed to interpret. So he came to his famous campaign to quicken intellectually and spiritually the lives of his people. To that end he drew the main lines of his program, the endeavor to foster and disseminate the critical spirit (which he made the basis of what he called the modern element), the gospel of culture, and the setting up of that ideal of literature that he found most perfectly realized in the classics.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1921
References
1 Mixed Essays, “A French Critic on Goethe.”
2 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, Trans, by L. Dora Schmitz, London, 1877, II, 385.
3 Matthew Arnold's Letters, New York, 1895, I, 11.
4 Ibid., II, 165.
5 Ibid., II, 43.
6 Ibid., I, 249.
7 Culture and Anarchy, “Preface.”
8 Essays in Criticism, II, “Heine.”
9 Mixed Essays, “A French Critic on Goethe.”
10 Essays in Criticism, I, “Heine.”
11 Wilhelm Meister's Travels, Trans. and ed. by Edward Bell, London, 1882, 419 (not included in edition which Carlyle translated).
12 The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, Trans. by Baily Saunders, London, 1906, 133.
13 Characteristics of Goethe from the German of Falk, von Müller, etc., by Sarah Austin, London, 1833, II, 310.
14 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, II, 402.
15 Maxims, 84.
16 Essays in Criticism, I, “ The Function of Criticism.”
17 The Auto-Biography of Goethe, Trans. by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, London, 1868, II, 54.
18 Ibid., II, 26.
19 Essays in Criticism, I, “ Spinoza and the Bible.”
20 Criticisms, Reflections, and Maxims of Goethe, Trans. by W. B. Röunfeldt (The Camelot Series), “Shakespeare and No End.”
21 Maxims, 63.
22 Ibid., 200.
23 Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, Trans. by John Oxenford, London, 1874, 115.
24 Criticisms, 158.
25 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, I, 373.
26 Ibid., II, 438.
27 Ibid., I, 195.
28 Wilhelm Meister's Travels, II, 320.
29 Conversations with Eckermann, 171.
30 Criticisms, “Shakespeare and No End.”
31 Essays in Criticism, III, “On the Modern Element in Literature.”
32 Poems, London, 1894, ii, 225.
33 Conversations with Eckermann, 457.
34 Goethe's Travels in Italy, Trans. from the German, London, 1883, 123.
35 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, II, 61.
36 Auto-Biography, II, 74.
37 Maxims, 134.
38 Culture and Anarchy, “Sweetness and Light.”
39 The Study of Celtic Literature, ed. by Alfred Nutt, London, 1910, 143.
40 Culture and Anarchy, “Sweetness and Light.”
41 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, Trans. by Thomas Carlyle, London, 1858, I, 60.
42 Matthew Arnold's Notebooks, ed. by the Hon. Mrs. Wodehouse, London, 1903, 24.
43 Wilhelm Meister, I, 235.
44 Autobiography, II, 68.
45 Wilhelm Meister, I, 236.
46 Wilhelm Meister, II, 146.
47 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, II, 479.
48 Conversations with Eckermann, 254.
49 Ibid., 254.
50 Ibid., 496.
51 Life of Goethe, G. H. Lewes, London, 1890 (quoted Luden's Rückblicke in Mein Leben, 113), 520.
52 Literature and Dogma, New York, 1877, 461.
53 Life of Goethe, 387.
54 Goethe's Letters to Zelter, selected and trans. by A. D. Coleridge, London, 1887, 252.
55 Maxims, 174.
56 Conversations with Eckermann, 522.
57 Wilhelm Meister's Travels (Bell trans.), 387.
58 Wilhelm Meister, I, 68.
59 Ibid., II, 119.
60 Maxims, 175.
61 Conversations with Eckermann, 67.
62 Autobiography, I, 422.
63 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, I, 307.
64 Wilhelm Meister, II, 251.
65 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, I, 379.
66 Autobiography, I, 237.
67 Maxims, 175.
68 Criticisms, 26.
69 Ibid., 100.
70 Criticisms, 113.
71 Characteristics of Goethe, II, 2.
72 Goethe's Letters to Zelter, 453.
73 Maxims, 161.
74 Conversations with Eckermann, 556.
75 Essays in Criticism, II, “Joubert.”
76 Maxims, 113.
77 Conversations with Eckermann, 386.
78 Ibid., 236.
79 Maxims, 99.
80 Maxims, 162.
81 Mixed Essays, “A French Critic on Goethe.”