Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/183

 also that Goethe had not only undertaken it but performed it. Werther and the Lehrjahre on the one hand, Hermann und Dorothea upon the other, are instances which Carlyle might justly appeal to in proof of his assertion. What concerns us here, however, is the feeling which prompted this demand upon the poet; the craving in the mind of Carlyle which was answered, confirmed—perhaps even first called into clear consciousness of itself—by the creations of Goethe. What is the use, he seems to have thought, of going for our poetry to the past? and what is the worth of a poetry which makes us not less, but more, discontented with the world that lies around us? Is not such poetry an admission that we find no beauty or significance in the conditions which encircle us and which, when all is said, constitute our being; that all grace and charm has departed from our life; and that, in this as in other matters, our God is an 'absentee God', withdrawn from a world which he no longer recognizes to be good? Would it not be at once more noble and more 'practical' if the poet were to 'take his stand on the ground of universal humanity; and through all the complex, dispiriting, mean, yet tumultuous influences of these trivial, jeering, withered, unbelieving days to make his light shine before men, that it might beautify even our "rag-gathering age" with some beams of that mild, divine splendour, which had long left us, the very possibility of which was denied?' And is not this 'the state of the case with regard to Goethe?'

But, if Carlyle laid much stress on the poet's genius for painting the external conditions of modern life, he laid still more on his power of rendering its inward experience and struggles. Here it is plain that all for which the critic cared most deeply was at stake. In his view it was the chief function of the artist not merely to reproduce, but also to interpret, the experience of his own day; through its seeming triviality to make men realize its hidden worth, its