Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/22

12 been able to account for only on the hypothesis of an internal form and arrangement, not visible to the outward eye; and this explanation seems plausible enough in an author who professed to regard an inner meaning as a necessary adjunct to a work of art. Still, granting this view of the subject, such internal arrangement is a different thing from the literary form, of which we have been speaking; for, although all form may be said to have a body and a soul, an inward significance as well as an outward appearance, yet this outward appearance is its essential quality. As Goethe is, of all the moderns, the most complete master of form, we must look upon his defiance of it in the one case as being equally premeditated with his strict attention to it in others. It is easy to see, however high value be placed upon form, that those works of the opposite character were the ones that had the strongest hold upon him. &quot;Iphigenia&quot; and &quot;Tasso&quot; were finished and dismissed; but &quot;Faust&quot; and &quot;Wilhelm Meister&quot; seem to have been of perpetual recurrence to his mind. Of each he produced a second part in his old age; and, at a time when we might have looked for greater regularity and symmetry, the reader finds himself perplexed by a more inexplicable incoherence.

We have said above, that we may look upon the German literature as the most complete embodiment the world has seen of the critical element. The inquiry at once suggests itself, whether this side of literature is to follow the example of the preceding phases, and, having received a full development, cease to appear as the predominant idea; giving place in its turn to some new domination, if indeed the German may be considered as giving such full completion to the idea. Leaving this question for the present, shall we be far wrong if we assume that the greatest literary genius Germany has produced owes the peculiar form his development took, to his coincidence with this great national characteristic? If criticism be a real and living thing, and not a dead letter, its essence consists in this,—to see what has taken place in the world under a new point of view; to find a point from which facts arrange themselves in a new and unexpected manner, so that circumstances, before isolated, are seen as a part of