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Part of the book: Matthew Arnold and Goethe

James Simpson

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 11

Modern Humanities Research Association

GermanPoetryopen

Abstract.  Science, Religion, and Politics, 1858-88. 'It is a mistake to think that the judgement of mature reason on our favourite author, even if it abates considerably our high-raised estimate of him, is not a gain to us.' The judgement of Arnold's mature reason on Goethe did indeed considerably abate the high-raised estimate of him expressed in the 1853 Preface. In 1885 Arnold was still able to speak of him as 'great', but also as 'the stiff, and hindered, and frigid, and factitious Goethe who speaks to us too often from those sixty volumes of his'? His mature judgement on the German poet - expressed in the essay 'A French Critic on Goethe' (1878) - was an ambivalent one: a 'double judgement' he himself called it. Note cues in this chapter refer to endnotes in the end matter of the book.

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