Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/184

 inherent capacity for being touched to issues of truth, beauty, and nobility. In one word, it was the highest task of the artist to idealize. And when we think of Carlyle as the champion of ideal art, as against that which is content merely to reproduce or reflect, it is in this sense that we must do so. With the art which rejects the actual conditions of life and creates, or strives to create, a fantastic world of its own he had no patience. Hence perhaps, at least in part, his undisguised contempt for Coleridge; and it may be—though this was yet more flagrantly unjust—for Keats also. To him the true art, the only art which is worth having, is at the same time ideal and real; ideal, in that it is not content with the mere reproduction of that which lies around us; real, in that, while reflecting, so far as may be, the outward conditions of the age, it is yet more concerned to read their inner meaning, to force its way behind the confused mass of detail to the ideas and conflicts which constitute the true life of the time, its abiding significance in the history of mankind. And it is because he held Goethe to have achieved these two ends—in particular, the second—more completely than any poet since Shakespeare, that his admiration for him was so unbounded.

All this—at least, as applied by Carlyle—involves a wider departure from the former position than might, at first sight, seem to be the case. Carlyle no longer insists that the poet should start from the outward conditions of his own time. So long as the inward life and spiritual conflicts of the present be, in any sense, the real theme, he is content that the outward setting, the material framework, should be taken from the past. In this spirit, he is willing to accept Faust—he is even willing to accept Tasso or Iphigenie—as fulfilling the necessities of the case. So far as Faust is concerned, this may readily be admitted. The story may be mediaeval; but the spirit of the piece is manifestly modern. It is the world-weariness of Faust rather than his magic, his