SCOTT AND GOETHE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 193, 30 July 1932, Page 5

SCOTT AND GOETHE

EFFECTS OF THEIR WORK. CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE. The Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute held the second meeting of its present session last evening in the Athenaeum Hall, when the president, Mr W. Dinwiddie, delivered an adress on “Two Centenaries; Scott and Goethe. ” After remarking that each of the men had effected in his own time and place a literary revolution, he gave a brief epitome of their lives which brought out certain resemblances in the formative influences which had effected them and in the character of their work. Scott had established the modern novel and made it the most important type of literary work for the world of to-day. He was not a mere romanticist; his drawing of character had laid tho foundation of the realist school of fiction. All is great in his novels, as Goethe said, material effect, characters and description. For twenty years ho was the most popular writer in Europe. He was defended from the charge of paltry ambition, and his gallant struggle against adversity touched one.

Goethe was more a man of tho eighteenth century, and his work was an important factor in breaking the chains in which the writers of the classical period had bound literature. Before he was twenty-five he had published two works which made him famous all over Europe. After that he settled in Weimar, and his writing took on a more laboured and more reflective tone. He found a difficulty in bringing his works to completion. It took him over thirty years to finish the first part of “Faust” and as long to complete his greatest novel. As a lyric poet he ranked with the finest of the century, touching almost every chord except that of patriotism. His work in science, over valued at times, was described. He was an evolutionist in the modern sense, and his attack on Newton’s theory of light was farcical But he was regarded by many not so much as the greatest of the poets but as the clearest and most helpful thinker of modern times.