THE MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS

OF

GOETHE

TRANSLATED BY BAILEY SAUNDERS

WITH A PREFACE

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1906

Goethe

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
I
II
III
LIFE AND CHARACTER
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
LITERATURE AND ART
SCIENCE
NATURE: APHORISMS
INDEX

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

I

The translation of Goethe's "Prose Maxims" now offered to the public isthe first attempt that has yet been made to present the greater part ofthese incomparable sayings in English. In the complete collection theyare over a thousand in number, and not more perhaps than a hundred andfifty have already found their way into our language, whether ascontributions to magazines here and in America, or in volumes ofmiscellaneous extract from Goethe's writings. Some are at times quotedas though they were common literary property. To say that they areimportant as a whole would be a feeble tribute to a work eloquent foritself, and beyond the need of praise; but so deep is the wisdom ofthese maxims, so wide their reach, so compact a product are they ofGoethe's wonderful genius, that it is something of a reproach toliterature to find the most of them left untranslated for the sixtyyears they have been before the world. From one point of view, theneglect they have suffered is in no way surprising: they are too highand severe to be popular so soon; and when they meet with a wideacceptance as with other great works, much of it will rest uponauthority. But even for the deeper side of his writings, Goethe has notbeen denied a fair measure of popular success. No other author of thelast two centuries holds so high a place, or, as an inevitableconsequence, has been attacked by so large an army of editors andcommentators; and it might well be supposed by now that no corner of hiswork, and least of all one of the best, had remained almost unnoticed,and to the majority unknown. Many of these maxims were early translatedinto French, but with little success; and even in Germany it was only solate as the year 1870 that they appeared in a separate form, with theaddition of some sort of critical comment and a brief explanation oftheir origin and history.[1]

But although to what is called the reading public these maxims are asyet, no less in fact than in metaphor, a closed book, its pages havelong been a sour

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