Goethe And The Twentieth Century Classic Reprint

Download or read book Goethe and the Twentieth Century (Classic Reprint) written by John George Robertson and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-09 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Goethe and the Twentieth Century Goethe is one of those chameleon-like personalities that change in value and meaning from generation to generation. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare have been given, once and for all, their place in the world's literature, and what we think about them to-day is not materially different from what our forefathers thought; but then those poets are, in comparison, infinitely far away from us; Goethe still stands too near. We must revise our opinion of him from time to time: keep, as it were, a check. on the pulse of our intellectual attitude to him. And this revision of judgment is something which we must do for ourselves. Germany, for the past five and twenty years at least, has been assiduously remoulding her literary opinions, and has progressed very far indeed from the old Hegelian self satisfaction with which she established the hierarchy of her classical poets about the middle of the past century. But we obviously cannot rely on Germany for our opinions of Goethe, any more than Germany can turn to us to find what she has to think about English poets. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.