orces
that were coming into play. As the son of an earlier age he could only
conceive a people's welfare as the gift of a wise ruler. He thought of
politics as the affair of the great. He hated war and all eruptive
violence, being convinced that good would come, not by such means, but
by enlightenment, self-control and attending to one's work in one's
sphere. To the historian Luden he said in 1813:

"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