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If Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann are still remembered and quoted, it is not so much for their language as for their profound, noble, and advanced ideas. Wingfield-Stratford says, Imagine any modern countryman of his capable of uttering such a sentiment as: "National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture." Even to the modern reader his talk is a mine of instruction (ibid., p. 167). Let us go further and imagine the average Englishman or American saying today what Goethe said in 1830. How many of them said during the late war, "How could I write songs of hate without hating"? The Sermon on the Mount lives because it is the truest, the most advanced, the most final set of ideas ever spoken. |
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