f foreign
countries, rare natural phenomena, experiments that have been made,
historical events of which they were witnesses, or have spent both time
and trouble in inquiring into and specially studying the authorities for
them.

On the other hand, it is on _form_ that we are dependent, where the
matter is accessible to every one or very well known; and it is what has
been thought about the matter that will give any value to the
achievement; it will only be an eminent man who will be able to write
anything that is worth reading. For the others will only think what is
possible for every other man to think. They give the impress of their
own mind; but every one already possesses the original of this
impression.

However, the public is very much more interested in matter than in form,
and it is for this very reason that it is behindhand in any high degree
of culture. It is most laughable the way the public reveals its liking
for matter in poetic works; it carefully investigates the real events or
personal circumstances of the poet's life which served to give the
_motif_ of his works; nay, finally, it finds these more interesting than
the works themselves; it reads more about Goethe than what has been
written by Goethe, and industriously studies the legend of Faust in
preference to Goethe's _Faust_ itself. And when Buerger said that "people
would make learned expositions as to who Leonora really was," we see
this literally fulfilled in Goethe's case, for we now have many learned
expositions on Faust and the Faust legend. They are and will remain of a
purely material character. This preference for matter to form is the
same as a man ignoring the shape and painting of a fine Etruscan vase in
order to make a chemical examination of the clay and colours of which it
is made. The attempt to be effective by means of the matter used,
thereby ministering to this evil propensity of the public, is absolutely
to be censured in branches of writing where the merit must lie expressly
in the form; as, for instance, in poetical writing. However, there are
numerous bad dramatic authors striving to fill the theatre by means of
the matter they are treating. For instance, they place on the stage any
kind of celebrated man, however stripped of dramatic incidents his life
may have been, nay, sometimes without waiting until the persons who
appear with him are dead.

The distinction between matter and form, of which I am here speaking, is
true