But Goethe, the man of widest acquirement in modern times,
did precisely the same thing. In his character of poet he set as little
store by useless learning as Shakespeare did. He learned to write
hexameters, not from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them faulty;
yet somehow _Hermann und Dorothea_ is more readable than _Luise_. So far
as all the classicism then attainable was concerned, Shakespeare got it
as cheap as Goethe did, who always bought it ready-made. For such
purposes of mere aesthetic nourishment Goethe always milked other
minds,--if minds those ruminators and digesters of antiquity into asses'
milk may be called. There were plenty of professors who were forever
assiduously browsing in vales of Enna and on Pentelican slopes among the
vestiges of antiquity, slowly secreting lacteous facts, and not one of
them would have raised his head from that exquisite pasturage, though Pan
had made music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe wish to work up a
Greek theme? He drove out Herr Boettiger, for example, among that fodder
delicious to him for its very dryness, that sapless Arcadia of
scholiasts, let him graze, ruminate, and go through all other needful
processes of the antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a corner
and milked him.
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