A Possible Origin for "Encourage the Beautiful"

A couple of years ago, I came across the lovely quote

Encourage the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself.

which is commonly (mis)attributed to Goethe. And of course, I wanted to investigate.

After some digging, I came to the tentative conclusion that the originator of this quote, and its misattribution, was George Henry Lewes, who used the quote as an epigraph for the literary section of the British periodical The Leader from March 1850 until mid-November 1854. My guess is that either Lewes misquoted Goethe, or misremembered the quote as being by Goethe.

I've never been able to find "Encourage the Beautiful" attributed to anyone other than Goethe^[1]. And I am not familiar enough with Goethe to suggest what Lewes might have misquoted.

But recently, I got an email from Mr. Artur Zwolski, who proposes the following as the closest actual Goethe quote:

Es ist nämlich ein Vorrecht des Schönen, daß es nicht nützlich zu sein braucht.

which he translates as "It is namely the privilege of the beautiful that it does not have to be useful."

This comes from Goethe's essay "Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen" ⊕ You can find a scan of the original here (courtesy of Bielefeld University). (On the Formative Imitation of the Beautiful), first published in Der Teutsche Merkur (The German Mercury), July 1789. I don't read German, but the essay appears to be Goethe's commentary on a 1788 essay of the same name by Karl Philipp Moritz. Here's the quote in context ⊕ This section of Goethe's essay seems to be a paraphrase of Moritz's. So in a way, we might credit 'it is the privilege of the beautiful' to Moritz. (translation courtesy of Kagi):

The question now arises, how is the imitation of the noble and good distinguished from the imitation of the beautiful?

The former strives to form itself inwardly, the latter, outwardly. [...]

The noble and the good stand, as it were, midway between the beautiful and the useful; good and noble ascend to the beautiful. The useful can be combined with the bad, the bad with the useless; and where the concepts seem to diverge most, they meet again as if in a circle. For it is a prerogative of the beautiful that it need not be useful.

The point being, I guess, that beauty is a higher ideal than usefulness; that goodness and nobility aspire to beauty; yet, paradoxically, beauty transcends usefulness, or even good:

...the beautiful came into being, without regard to utility, indeed, without regard to the harm it might cause. [...]

If we now ascend through all the stages, we find the beautiful at the summit of all things, which, like a deity, brings happiness and misery, benefits and harms, without our being able or permitted to call it to account for it.

-- Goethe, "Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen." Translation by Kagi

This isn't quite the same sentiment as "Encourage the beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself." But it's plausible to me that someone can "remember" a quote, or paraphrase it, the way they want it to be, rather than as it really is.