Encourage the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself.
I first came across this quote, with its attribution to Goethe (1749-1832), on a lovely 1905 bookplate by Louis Rhead. I wanted to use the bookplate to decorate a page on one of my blogs, and naturally (being me), I wanted a more precise source for the aphorism.
That turned out not to be easy. As of this writing (March, 2024), “Encourage the beautiful…” is currently listed as "Disputed" on the Wikiquote page for Goethe. An internet search for the quote will find it in many places, in texts going back more than a century and a half. Sometimes it is unattributed, but it’s more often credited to Goethe. This is a classic case of a “factoid,” mindlessly repeated—repeated for so long that we may never get to the truth of it.
But we can try.
After a solid day of digging, I traced the quote all the way back to 1850, to the appearance of the British political and literary review, The Leader (later The Saturday Analyst and Leader). The literary section of The Leader was called “The Portfolio,” and our favorite quote served as its epigram, from the first issue (March 30, 1850), until mid-November of 1854, when “The Portfolio” disappeared from the paper. “The Portfolio” appeared until at least Volume 5, Issue 241 (November 4, 1854). It was gone by Issue 243 (November 18, 1854). Issue 242 is not available at the Internet Archive, so I didn’t check. The complete(?) archives are also available at ncse.ac.uk, but my connection to them was slow and fairly unusable. The complete epigram ran:
We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful, for the useful encourages itself.
and was attributed to Goethe.
The literary editor for The Leader from its inception until about July 1854 was George Henry Lewes, who today is best known as the long-time companion of George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), author of Silas Marner. According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, Lewes went to Germany to study in about 1838. In 1846, he published The Biographical History of Philosophy The link is to both volumes bound together, at the Internet Archive. in two volumes, and in 1855 he published the two volume Life of Goethe. Here's Life of Goethe, Volume 1; and here's Volume 2.
So, it seems plausible that Lewes could be the originator of this factoid. He was clearly fond of Goethe. A quick skim of volume two of The Biographical History of Philosophy turned up a couple of unsourced “Goethe quotes” that I didn’t spot in either Wikiquotes or in Goethe Global, an extensive German/English compendium of Goethe quotes, with sources. “Encourage the beautiful,” unfortunately, was not one of them, nor did it show up in Life of Goethe.
Nonetheless, Lewes’s background indicates that he was familiar with German Romantic thought in philosophy and literature. It’s entirely possible that he did in fact come across something like “Encourage the beautiful,” in his reading, and simply misattributed it to Goethe.
This is as far as I can take it. If anyone who is an expert on Goethe, and/or the German Romantic period would like to try to fill in more holes—please do! I welcome any additional research and leads. Until then, I’ll assign George Henry Lewes as the tentative source of this quote, and its likely spurious attribution.