On October 14, 1806, the battle of Jena was fought.  The court had fled from Weimar.  On the 15th Napoleon and Goethe met.  It was at the congress of Erfurt, where the sovereigns and princes of Europe were assembled.  Goethe’s presence was commanded by the duke.  He was invited to an audience on October 2.  The emperor sat at a large round table eating his breakfast.  He beckoned Goethe to approach him.  He asked how old he was, expressed his wonder at the freshness of his appearance, said that he had read Werther through seven times, and made some acute remarks on the management of the plot.  Then, after an interruption, he said that tragedy ought to be the school of kings and peoples; that there was no subject worthier of treatment than the death of Caesar, which Voltaire had treated insufficiently.  A great poet would have given prominence to Caesar’s plans for the regeneration of the world, and shown what a loss mankind had suffered by his murder.

The idea of writing Faust seems to have come to Goethe in his earliest manhood.  He was brooding over it at the same time with Goetz von Berlichingen.  Faust justly stands at the head of all Goethe’s works.  Founded on a well-known popular tale, indebted for its interest and pathos to incidents of universal experience, it deals with the deepest problems which can engage the mind of man.

In 1809 he finished The Elective Affinities.

It was natural at the beginning of a new course of life that Goethe should write an account of his past existence.  The study of his collected poems made it apparent to him how necessary it was to furnish a key by which they might be understood.  These various causes led to the composition of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), an autobiographical history of the poet’s life from his birth till his settlement at Weimar.  This work is the cause of much embarrassment to the poet’s biographers.  Where it ought to be the most trustworthy source of information, it is most misleading.

Once more in his old age Goethe came under the sovereignty of a woman.  She was Marianne von Willemer, the newly married wife of a Frankfort banker.  Goethe made her acquaintance in a journey which he took in the Rhine country.  The correspondence between Goethe and Marianne was published in 1877.  It extends almost to the day of his death, and includes letters from Eckermann giving an account of his last moments.

The last twelve years of Goethe’s life, when he had passed his seventieth birthday, were occupied by his criticisms on the literature of foreign countries, by the Wanderjahre, and the second part of Faust.  He was the literary dictator of Germany and of Europe.  The Wanderjahre contains some of Goethe’s most beautiful conceptions, The Flight Into Egypt, The Description of the Pedagogic Province, The Parable of the Three Reverences.