'It is well known that Goethe is no friend to eye-glasses.'
'"We should only utter higher maxims so far as they can benefit the world. The rest we should keep within ourselves, and they will diffuse over our actions a luster like the mild radiance of a hidden sun."'
12 October 1825
Compare this with the starred shadows of the Rubens painting (18 April 1827). The shadows of hidden suns, radiant with an art that improves on nature ('improves' in the wider 18th-century sense, as in Jefferson, 'In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories').
'We talked of Homer. I remarked that the interposition of the gods immediately borders on the Real.' 24 February 1830
&
'"In poetry, an annihilating criticism is not so injurious [as in religion which once lost is lost irretrievably]. Wolf has demolished Homer, but he has not been able to injure the poem; for this poem has a miraculous power like the heroes of Valhalla, who hew one another to pieces in the morning, but sit down to dinner with whole limbs at noon."'
1 Feb 1827
'"You appear," added I, "to call productiveness that which is usually called genius."
"One lies very near the other," said Goethe. "For what is genius but that productive power by which arise deeds that can display themselves before God and nature, and are therefore permanent and produce results? All Mozart's works are of this kind; there lies in them a productive power that operates upon generation after generation and still is not wasted or consumed...[i]t all comes to the same thing; the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on."
11 March 1828
As Eckermann to Goethe, so Goethe to his daemon (and to read Montaigne is a similar experience, except that there's a great candor to Montaigne, his house open to visitors, his windows open to the weather, that I haven't found anywhere else or at least to the same degree. 'With all my heart I embrace the grand old sloven,' said Emerson one day after reading him).
12 October 1825
Compare this with the starred shadows of the Rubens painting (18 April 1827). The shadows of hidden suns, radiant with an art that improves on nature ('improves' in the wider 18th-century sense, as in Jefferson, 'In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories').
'We talked of Homer. I remarked that the interposition of the gods immediately borders on the Real.' 24 February 1830
&
'"In poetry, an annihilating criticism is not so injurious [as in religion which once lost is lost irretrievably]. Wolf has demolished Homer, but he has not been able to injure the poem; for this poem has a miraculous power like the heroes of Valhalla, who hew one another to pieces in the morning, but sit down to dinner with whole limbs at noon."'
1 Feb 1827
'"You appear," added I, "to call productiveness that which is usually called genius."
"One lies very near the other," said Goethe. "For what is genius but that productive power by which arise deeds that can display themselves before God and nature, and are therefore permanent and produce results? All Mozart's works are of this kind; there lies in them a productive power that operates upon generation after generation and still is not wasted or consumed...[i]t all comes to the same thing; the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on."
11 March 1828
As Eckermann to Goethe, so Goethe to his daemon (and to read Montaigne is a similar experience, except that there's a great candor to Montaigne, his house open to visitors, his windows open to the weather, that I haven't found anywhere else or at least to the same degree. 'With all my heart I embrace the grand old sloven,' said Emerson one day after reading him).