it is whole and living. Of this you see numberless degrees among nations and individuals.
“The more that this beauty penetrates the being of a mind, seeming to be of one origin with it, so that the mind can tolerate nothing else, and produce nothing else, so much the happier is the artist.”[1]
That, ladies and gentlemen, is pretty much what I have been trying to say to you.
In the discussion on p. 85 ff. the reader might be puzzled as to the relation of the two phases of beauty, “easy” and “difficult,” together with the three suggested cases of “difficulty” in beauty, to the various species of the beautiful, such as beauty proper, sublimity, and others, which are mentioned here and there in the text, but are not methodically discussed.
I should explain that I held a methodical account of the species of beauty too much to undertake in the limits of these lectures, and therefore confined myself to explaining how there can at all be a genuine beauty which yet falls beyond that to which the name is currently given. The distinctions of pp. 85 and 87 are akin to the specific distinctions but do not coincide with them.
- ↑ From Goethe’s Von deutscher Baukunst, written when he was twenty-four. Werke, ed. Stuttgart, 1858, Bd. 25, S. 1. The subject is Strasburg Cathedral.
