Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/67

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 59

Truly, this was a most refined, delicate, beautiful, lov- able soul, worthy to inspire a deep and indestructible friendship. What a man is shows itself infallibly in what he at heart admires. The young mind which beholds in Rebecca's hymn the culmination of Scott's poetical genius tells its own story to all who can understand. Such a mind is safe from the dreary platitudes and inanities of "art for art's sake alone." It is capable of entering into sympathy with the profound intellect of Goethe, who knew that art is for the sake of truth and beauty in one, — that art is nothing but a mode of expression, and that beauty of form in expression without truth of sub- stance in meaning is nothing but the iridescence of a stagnant and fetid puddle. Emerson wrote in his first book : " The true philosopher and the true poet are one ; and a beauty which is truth and a truth which is beauty is the aim of both." Goethe's exquisite utterance of the same idea is untranslatable, but may be feebly echoed in the following paraphrase : —

As in myriad forms and dyes

Nature but one God reveals, Protean Art in each disguise

One eternal Truth conceals : Truth that her own charms arrays,

Viewless else, in Beauty's robe, Loveliest in the brightest blaze

Of the all-illuming globe.*

Goethe's idea of art, above all of the poetic art, as not for art's sake alone, but for the sake of beauty and truth

• Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, II. ix. The German is too fine to be withheld: — Wie Natur itn Vielgebilde Einen Goit nur offenbart. So lift wetien K loistgefilde

Webt Ein Sinji der eiv' gen Art:

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