the first is much too long to be quoted, but it is substantially this: The primitive idea of forms does not exist in Nature, which works according to the pattern set by a First Designer. The realm of the original conceptions of things is therefore outside of Space and Time, and the Mothers are imaginary existences, who typify the unknown and unfathomable origin of all forms, and chiefly, here, of those eternal Ideals of Beauty which become more real to the Poet and Artist than the never utterly perfect work of Nature.
Kreyssig says: “The poet evidently prepares to lead the character of his hero towards that refining and purifying experience, to which he himself consciously owed his greatest gain and his highest joy,—the refinement following an earnest, creative worship of those ideals of Beauty which have descended to earth in the masterpieces of classic art. With what fervor Goethe and his equal friend (Schiller) reverenced these, with what sacred feeling, what severe, devoted solemnity they served at the same shrine, their common activity is a single, continuous evidence. Goethe, especially, dated a new life, a complete spiritual regeneration, from his penetration into the spirit of the ancient masters. A profound withdrawal into himself, an almost abrupt relinquishment of the society around him, characterized the first earnest beginning of his studies..... Only a firm, manly resolution leads Faust to the sacred tripod, the primitive symbol of Wisdom, through the contact of which he wins power over the primitive forms of things, over the radical conditions of that beautiful state of being, accordant with Nature, which the Artist must know before he can “call the Hero and Heroine from the Shades,” and create imperishable forms as the fair material revelations of his dreams. What Goethe here celebrates under the form of the Mothers enthroned in Solitude, is sung by Schiller, if our instinct does not deceive us, in that thoughtful poem, “of the regions where the pure forms dwell.”[1]
In Eckermann’s third volume, he describes a conversation which he had with Goethe, during a drive along the Erfurt
- ↑ Das Ideal und das leben
