On his return to Weimar, in June, 1788, Goethe made it his first task to finish the remaining works that were called for by his contract with Goeschen. Egmont and Tasso were soon disposed of, but Faust proved intractable.  While in Rome he had taken out the old manuscript and written a scene or two, and had then somehow lost touch with the subject.  So he decided to revise what he had on hand and to publish a part of the scenes as a fragment.  This fragmentary Faust came out in 1790.  It attracted little attention, nor was any other of the new works received with much warmth by the public of that day.  They expected something like Goetz and Werther, and did not understand the new Goethe, who showed in many ways that his heart was still in Italy and that he found Weimar a little dull and provincial.  Thus the greatest of German poets had for the time being lost touch with the German public; he saw that he must wait for the growth of the taste by which he was to be understood and enjoyed.  Matters were hardly made better by his taking Christiane Vulpius into his house as his unwedded wife.  This step, which shocked Weimar society—­except the duke and Herder—­had the effect of ending his unwholesome relation to Frau von Stein, who was getting old and peevish.  The character of Christiane has often been pictured too harshly.  She was certainly not her husband’s intellectual peer—­he would have looked long for a wife of that grade—­and she became a little too fond of wine.  On the other hand, she was affectionate, devoted, true, and by no means lacking in mental gifts.  She and Goethe were happy together and faithful to each other.

For several years after his return from Italy Goethe wrote nothing that is of much importance in the history of his literary life.  He devoted himself largely to scientific studies in plant and animal morphology and the theory of color.  His discovery of the intermaxillary bone in the human skull, and his theory that the lateral organs of a plant are but successive phases of the leaf, have given him an assured if modest place in the history of the development hypothesis.  On the other hand, his long and laborious effort to refute Newton’s theory of the composition of white light is now generally regarded as a misdirection of energy.  In his Roman Elegies (1790) he struck a note of pagan sensuality.  The pensive distichs, telling of the wanton doings of Amor amid the grandeur that was Rome, were a little shocking in their frank portraiture of the emancipated flesh.  The outbreak of violence in France seemed to him nothing but madness and folly, since he did not see the real Revolution, but only the Paris Terror.

He wrote two or three very ordinary plays to satirize various phases of the revolutionary excitement—­phases that now seem as insignificant as the plays themselves.  In 1792 he accompanied the Duke of Weimar on the inglorious Austro-Prussian invasion of France, heard the cannonade at Valmy, and was an interested observer as the allies tumbled back over the Rhine.  Perhaps the best literary achievement of these years is the fine hexameter version of the medieval Reynard the Fox.