Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/127

112 strength and greatness under the veil of commonplace destiny or tragic collision, where there is no golden haze to flatter our indolence and luxury. And now as always one’s words seem a tale of little meaning, which goes on missing the heart of its own intention. Let me end with a quotation from an early tractate of Goethe, which contains in a few brief strokes all that I have been saying, and the germ, I think, of all that the last hundred years of aesthetic have taught us. Only I must give the warning that he employs the term beautiful sometimes in the sense which he and I alike are working against, the sense of easy beauty.

The passage, however, explains itself:

“When I first went to see the cathedral, my head was full of general conceptions of good taste. I reverenced, from hearsay, harmony of masses and purity of form, and was a sworn foe to the confused caprices of Gothic decoration. Under the rubric ‘Gothic’, like an article in a dictionary, I had collected all the mistaken