names him with Wieland and Oeser as
one of his masters. "Voltaire," he wrote to Oeser, "has been able to
do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a
greater one."[60] The German writers who now stood highest in his
esteem were Lessing and Wieland. Lessing's aesthetic teaching he
accepted with some reserves, but this did not abate the admiration
which he retained for him at every period of his life. "Lessing!
Lessing!" he wrote in the same letter to Oeser; "if he were not
Lessing, I might say something. Write against him I may not; he is a
conqueror.... He is a mental phenomenon, and, truly, such apparitions
are rare in Germany."[61] That Goethe, at this period, should have had
such an unbounded admiration for Wieland is an interesting commentary
on his pietistic leanings; for Wieland was now in his full pagan
phase, so distasteful to moral Germany, as Goethe himself indicates.
"I have already been annoyed on Wieland's account," he writes--"I
think with justice. Wieland has often the misfortune to be
misunderstood; frequently, perhaps, the fault is his own, but as
frequently it is not." At a later day Goethe clearly saw and marked in
Wieland that lack of "high seriousness" on which he himself came to
lay such stress as all-important in literature and life, but in the
meantime he freely acknowledged what Wieland had been to him.[62]
"After him (Oeser) and Shakespeare," he wrote in the letter just
quoted, "Wieland is still the only one whom I can hold as my true
master; others had shown me where I had gone astray; they showed me
how to do better."

[Footnote 60: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 205.]

[Footnote 61: _Ib._ p. 230.]

[Footnote 62: Goethe has this entry in his _Tagebuch_ (April 2nd,
1780): "Wieland sieht ganz unglaublich alles, was man machen will,
macht, und was hangt und langt in einer Schrift."]

What is noteworthy in the serious passages of Goethe's Frankfort
letters is the advance in maturity and self-knowledge which they
reveal when compared with those written from Leipzig. Penetrative
remarks on men and things, such as give its value to his later
correspondence, now begin to fall from his pen by the way. He
consciously takes the measure of his own powers, and forms clear
judgments on the literary and artistic tastes of the time. The poems
which he had written in Leipzig now seemed to him "trifling, cold,
dry, and superficial," and, as in Leipzig he had made a holocaust of
his boyish p