“Do not believe that I am indifferent to the great ideas of freedom, people, fatherland.  No!  These ideas are in us, they are a part of our being, and no one can cast them from him.  I too have a warm heart for Germany.  I have often felt bitter pain in thinking of the German people, so worthy of respect in some ways, so miserable on the whole.  A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses painful emotions which I try in every way to surmount; and in science and art I have found the wings whereby I rise above them.  But the comfort which these afford is after all a poor comfort that does not compensate for the proud consciousness of belonging to a great and strong people that is honored and feared.”

In 1808 he published The Elective Affinities, a novel in which the tragic effects of lawless passion invading the marriage relation were set forth with telling art.  Soon after this he began to write a memoir of his life.  He was now a European celebrity, the dream of his youth had come true, and he purposed to show in detail how everything had happened; that is, how his literary personality had evolved amid the environing conditions.  He conceived himself as a phenomenon to be explained.  That he called his memoir Poetry and Truth was perhaps an error of judgment, since the title has been widely misunderstood.  For Goethe poetry was not the antithesis of truth, but a higher species of truth—­the actuality as seen by the selecting, combining, and harmonizing imagination.  In themselves, he would have said, the facts of a man’s life are meaningless, chaotic, discordant:  it is the poet’s office to put them into the crucible of his spirit and give them forth as a significant and harmonious whole.  The “poetry” of Goethe’s autobiography—­by far the best of autobiographies in the German language—­must not be taken to imply concealment, perversion, substitution, or anything of that gross kind.

[Illustration:  GOETHE’S MONUMENT IN ROME. (SCULPTOR, EBERLEIN)
 Presented to the City of Rome by the German Emperor (From Seidel’s Der Kaiser and die Kunst)]

It lies in the very style of the book and is a part of its author’s method of self-revelation.  That he devotes so much space to the seemingly transient and unimportant love-affairs of his youth is only his way of recognizing that the poet-soul is born of love and nourished by love.  He felt that these fleeting amorosities were a part of the natural history of his inner being.

And even in the serene afternoon of his life lovely woman often disturbed his soul, just as in the days of his youth.  But the poetic expression of his feeling gradually became less simple and direct:  he liked to embroider it with musing reflections and exotic fancies gathered from everywhere.  Just as he endeavored with indefatigable eagerness of mind to keep abreast of scientific research, so he tried to assimilate the poetry of all nations.  The Greeks