Goethe and Carlyle

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Excerpt from Goethe and Carlyle: An Inaugural Address Delivered to the Society by the President The English Goethe Society which we inaugurate to-day has been founded to promote and extend the study of Goethe's works and thoughts. We do not meet here simply to worship the poetical genius of Goethe and to call every line he wrote great and beautiful and divine. That kind of slavish idolatry is unworthy of Goethe, and it would be equally unworthy of our Society. The time has passed when Goethe was preached as a new Gospel, the time also when he was sneered at and cursed seems to have come to an end. We think the time has come to study him, and to study him seriously, critically, historically. If worship there must be, we cannot offer better and truer worship to the departed spirits of men of true genius than by trying to understand thoroughly the thoughts which they have bequeathed to us. Such study bestows on them their true immortality, nay, it proves that their spirit never will and never can die. And never was there a time when it seemed more necessary that Goethe's spirit should be kept alive among us, whether in Germany or in England, than now when the international relations between the leading countries of Europe have become worse than among savages in Africa, when national partisanship threatens to darken all wise counsel and to extinguish all human sympathies, when men are no longer valued by their intrinsic worth, but by their accidental wealth, when philosophy, in its true sense, as a passionate love of wisdom and truth is wellnigh forgotten, when religion has become a dry bone of theological contention, and nothing can be called true, honest, pure, lovely, or sublime without evoking the smiles and sneers of those who profess to be wisest in their generation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.