The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful I shall soon enter into the period which was selected by the judgment and experience of the sage Fontenelle as the most agreeable of his long life.  I am far more inclined to embrace than to dispute this comfortable doctrine.  I will not suppose any premature decay of the mind or body; but I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.

* * * * *

GOETHE

Letters to Zelter

The correspondence of Goethe with his friends, especially his voluminous letters to his friend Zelter, will always be resorted to by readers who wish for intimate knowledge of the innermost processes of the great poet’s mind.  Zelter was himself an extraordinary man.  By trade he was a stonemason, but he became a skilled musical amateur, and a most versatile and entertaining critic.  To him fell the remarkable distinction of becoming the tutor of that musical genius, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, while he also acquired the glory of being “the restorer of Bach to the Germans.”  Like Eckermann, the other beloved friend of Goethe, he possessed the power of eliciting the great poet-philosopher’s dicta on all imaginable topics.  Zelter wrote to Goethe on anything and everything, trivial and otherwise, but his letters never failed to educe strains of the most illuminating comment.  The “Letters to Zelter” were published in Berlin in 1833, and the following epitome is prepared from the German text.

I.—­Art Greater than the Beauty of Art

Lauchstadt, September 1, 1805.  As we are convinced that he who studies the intellectual world, and perceives the beauty of the true intellect, can also realise the Father of them, who is supreme above all sense, let us therefore seek as best we may to achieve insight into the beauty of the mind and of the world, and to express it for ourselves.

Suppose, then, two blocks of stone, side by side, one rough and unshaped, the other artistically shaped into a statue.  To you the stone worked into a beautiful figure appears lovely not because it is stone, but because of the form which art has given it.  But the material had not such a form, for this was in the mind of the artist before it reached the stone.  Of course, art is greater than that which it produces.  Art is greater than the beauty of art.  The motive power must be greater than the result.  For as the form gains extension by advancing into the material, yet by that very process it becomes weaker than that which remains whole.  For that which endures removal from itself steps aside from itself—­strength from strength, warmth from warmth, force from force, so also beauty from beauty.

Should anyone disparage the arts because they imitate nature, let him note that nature also imitates much besides; and, further, that the arts do not precisely imitate what we see but go back to that rational element of which nature consists, and according to which she acts.