Goethe's Literary Essays - v. 2 Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Volume: v. 2 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1921 Original Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and company Subjects: Literature Art Drama / Shakespeare Literary Collections / Essays Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / German Literary Criticism / Shakespeare Notes: This is a b... more »lack and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPYLEA (1798) Theke is no more striking sign of the decay of art than when we find its separate provinces mixed up together. The arts themselves, as well as their subordinate forms, are closely related to each other, and have a certain tendency to unite, and even lose themselves in each other; but herein lies the duty, the merit, the dignity of the true artist, that he knows how to separate that department in which he labors from the others, and, so far as may be, isolates it. It has been noticed that all plastic art tends towards painting, all poetry to the drama; and this may furnish the text for some important observations hereafter. The genuine, law-giving artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless, following a blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The former leads to the highest pinnacle of art, the latter to its lowest step. ' This is no less true of the separate arts than of art in general. The sculptor must think and feel differently from the painter, and must go to work differently to execute a work in relief from what he would do with a round and complete piece of statuary. When the work in low relief came to be brought out more and more, and by degrees parts and figures were brought out from the ground, at last buildings and landscapes admitted, and thus a work produced, half picture half puppet-show, true ...« less