May 6, 1827.  At a dinner-party at Goethe’s, after conversation on certain poems, he said, “The Germans are certainly strange people.  They make life much more burdensome to themselves than they ought by their deep thoughts and ideas, which they seek everywhere and fix on everything.  Only have the courage to surrender yourself to your impressions, permit yourself to be moved, instructed and inspired for something great.  But never imagine that all is vanity, if it is not abstract thought and idea.

“Next they come and ask what idea I meant to embody in my ‘Faust’?  As if I knew that myself, and could inform them. From Heaven through the world to hell would, indeed, be something; but that is no idea, only a course of action.  And further, that the devil loses the wager, and that a man, continually struggling from difficult errors towards something better, should be redeemed, is truly a more effective, and to many a good, enlightening thought; but it is no idea lying at the basis of the whole, and of each individual scene.  It would have been a fine thing, indeed, if I had strung so rich and diversified a life as I have brought to view in ‘Faust’ upon the slender thread of one single, pervading idea.

“It was altogether out of my province, as a poet, to strive to embody anything abstract.  I received in my mind impressions of an animated, charming, hundredfold kind, just as a lively imagination presented them; and as a poet I had nothing more to do than artistically to elaborate these impressions, and so to present them that others might receive like impressions.  But I am somewhat of the opinion that the more incommensurable, and the more incomprehensible to the understanding a poetic production is, so much the better it is.”

June 20, 1831.  At Goethe’s, after dinner, the conversation fell upon the use and misuse of terms.  Said he, “The French use the word ‘composition’ inappropriately.  The expression is degrading as applied to genuine productions of art and poetry.  It is a thoroughly contemptible word, of which we should seek to get rid as soon as possible.

“How can one say, Mozart has composed ‘Don Juan’!  Composition!  As if it were a piece of cake or biscuit, which had been mixed together with eggs, flour, and sugar!  It is a spiritual creation, in which the details as well as the whole are pervaded by one spirit.  Consequently, the producer did not follow his own experimental impulse, but acted under that of his demoniac genius.”

June 27, 1831.  We conversed about Victor Hugo.  “He has a fine talent,” said Goethe.  “But he is altogether ensnared in the unhappy romantic tendency of his time, by which he is constrained to represent, side by side with the beautiful, the most hateful and intolerable.  I have recently read his ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ and needed no little patience to endure the horror that I felt.  It is the most abominable book ever