hat_--and if the hyaena's howl,
from the filthy marshes of earth's weird edge and the thick saliva on
his oozing jaws, nauseates our preciosity, and besmirches our
self-esteem, we must remember that this is the way the Lord of "the
Prologue in Heaven" has willed that the scavengers of life's
cesspools go about their work!

Probably it will not be the "indecency" of certain things in Goethe
that will most offend our modern taste; it will be that curious, grave
pre-occupation of his, so objective and stiff, with artistic details, and
architectural details, and theatrical details!

One must remember his noble saying, "Earnestness alone makes life
Eternity" and that other "saying" about Art having, as its main
purpose, the turning of the "Transitory" into the "Permanent"! If the
Transitory is really to be turned into the Permanent, we must take
ourselves and our work very seriously indeed!

And such "seriousness," such high, patient, unwearied seriousness,
is, after all, Goethe's bequest to our flippant and fanciful generation.
He knows well enough our deepest doubt, our most harrowing
scepticism. He has long ago "been through all that." But he has
"returned"--not exactly like Nietzsche, with a fierce, scornful,
dramatic cry, to a contemptuous "superficiality"--he has returned to
the actual possibilities that the world offers, "superficial" and
otherwise, of turning the whole strange business into a solid,
four-square "work of art." We must reject "evil," quietly and ironically;
not because it is condemned by human morality, but because "we
have our work to do"! We must live in "the good" and "the true," not
because it is our "duty" so to do, but because only along this
particular line does the "energy without agitation" of the "abysmal
mothers" communicate itself to our labour.

And so we come back, like the grief-stricken children over Mignon's
grave, to Life and Life's toil. There only, in the inflexible
development of what taste, of what discernment, of what power, of
what method, of what demonic genius, we may have been granted
by the gods, lies "the cosmic secret." That is all we have in our
human hands, that malleable stuff out of which Fate made us--and
only in the shrewd, unwearied use of that shall we prove our love to
the Being "who cannot love us in return" and make our illusion of
Free-Will part of his universal Purpose!

MATTHEW ARNOLD

It is easy to miss the especial grandeur of Matthew Arnold's w