failure of hope, will
always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.

* * * * *

GOETHE

Letters to Zelter

The correspondence of Goethe with his friends, especially his
voluminous letters to his friend Zelter, will always be
resorted to by readers who wish for intimate knowledge of the
innermost processes of the great poet's mind. Zelter was
himself an extraordinary man. By trade he was a stonemason,
but he became a skilled musical amateur, and a most versatile
and entertaining critic. To him fell the remarkable
distinction of becoming the tutor of that musical genius,
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, while he also acquired the glory
of being "the restorer of Bach to the Germans." Like
Eckermann, the other beloved friend of Goethe, he possessed
the power of eliciting the great poet-philosopher's dicta on
all imaginable topics. Zelter wrote to Goethe on anything and
everything, trivial and otherwise, but his letters never
failed to educe strains of the most illuminating comment. The
"Letters to Zelter" were published in Berlin in 1833, and the
following epitome is prepared from the German text.

_I.--Art Greater than the Beauty of Art_

Lauchstadt, _September_ 1, 1805. As we are convinced that he who studies
the intellectual world, and perceives the beauty of the true intellect,
can also realise the Father of them, who is supreme above all sense, let
us therefore seek as best we may to achieve insight into the beauty of
the mind and of the world, and to express it for ourselves.

Suppose, then, two blocks of stone, side by side, one rough and
unshaped, the other artistically shaped into a statue. To you the stone
worked into a beautiful figure appears lovely not because it is stone,
but because of the form which art has given it. But the material had not
such a form, for this was in the mind of the artist before it reached
the stone. Of course, art is greater than that which it produces. Art is
greater than the beauty of art. The motive power must be greater than
the result. For as the form gains extension by advancing into the
material, yet by that very process it becomes weaker than that which
remains whole. For that which endures removal from itself steps aside
from itself--strength from strength, warmth from warmth, force from
force, so also beauty from beauty.

Should any