Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill by Edward Alexander

Author:Edward Alexander [Alexander, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135026981
Google: X6PKAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 20787615
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1965-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

But Arnold also offered a less drastic solution for those poets sufficiently gifted to adopt it. In ages such as the Athenian or the Elizabethan, the poet was absolved from the duty to acquire intellectual culture by the arduous reading of many books; but in less fortunate ages and nations, the reading of many books and the keeping abreast of the thought and achievement of the country’s intellectual elite did help the poet to make up for much, though never all, of what society failed to give him.26

Goethe was, in Arnold’s view, the best example of the success which may come to such a poet. Goethe himself had said to Eckermann that ‘if a great talent is to be speedily and happily developed, the great point is that a great deal of intellect and sound culture should be current in a nation.’27 And Arnold thought Goethe had done more than any other modern poet to recreate the cultural atmosphere favorable to poetic creation. As early as 1853, he proclaimed that Goethe was ‘the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of all times.’28 In one of his lectures on the study of Celtic literature he announced his opinion that the ‘only first-rate body of contemporary poetry’ was the poetry of Goethe himself. Despite his frequent flatness of speech, Goethe had to be considered the most important of modern poets. It is useless, Arnold maintained, to object that, as a poet, Goethe hardly deserves comparison with men who possessed the poetic style and the infinite power that Dante and Shakespeare did. For the special task which was Goethe’s could not have been accomplished only by ‘style, eloquence, charm, poetry.’ Goethe was obliged, as Dante and Shakespeare (who had materials available for exposition) were not, to create his world anew:

When Goethe came, Europe had lost her basis of spiritual life; she had to find it again; Goethe’s task was,—the inevitable task for the modern poet henceforth is,—as it was for the Greek poet in the days of Pericles, not to preach a sublime sermon on a given text like Dante, not to exhibit all the kingdoms of human life and the glory of them like Shakspeare, but to interpret human life afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it.

For the fulfillment of this task, Arnold argued, a German was peculiarly suited, since it was as much a task for science as for poetry; and here Goethe’s prosaic, serious, patient—in a word, scientific—German nature stood him in good stead.29

The Goethe whom Arnold esteemed is the thinker and critic rather than the poet. ‘It is by no means as the greatest of poets,’ Arnold later wrote, ‘that Goethe deserves the pride and praise of his countrymen. It is as the clearest, the largest, the most helpful thinker of modern times.’30 Even in the 1853 Preface, where he proclaimed Goethe the greatest of modern poets and critics, Arnold called Faust defective when ‘judged strictly as a poetical work.’31 It is, after all,

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