. To the gift of a set of puppets
by his grandmother he attributes his first awakened interest in the
drama; and the extraordinary detail with which Wilhelm Meister
describes his youthful absorption in the play of his puppets proves
that in his Autobiography Goethe does not lay undue stress on the
significance of the gift. To another event which occurred when he was
entering his seventh year, he ascribes the origin of an attitude of
mind which in his own opinion he did not overcome till his later
years. In 1756 broke out the Seven Years' War, in the course of which
there was a cleavage in German public opinion that disturbed the peace
of families and set the nearest relatives at bitter feud. Such was the
case in the Goethe circle--the father passionately sympathising with
Frederick; the maternal grandfather, Textor, the chief magistrate of
Frankfort, as passionately taking the side of Maria Theresa. In this
case the son's sympathies were those of his father, and in boyish
fashion he made a hero of the king of Prussia, though, as he himself
is careful to tell us, Prussia and its interests were nothing to him.
It was to the pain he felt when his hero was defamed by the supporters
of Austria that he traced that contempt of public opinion which he
notes as a characteristic of the greater part of his manhood, yet we
may doubt if any external event was needed to develop in him this
special turn of mind. As his whole manner of thinking proves, it was
neither in his character nor his genius to make a popular appeal like
a Burns or a Schiller.[12] In his old age Goethe said of himself that
he was conscious of an innate feeling of aristocracy which made him
regard himself as the peer of princes; and we need no further
explanation of his contempt of public opinion. Yet if the worship of
heroes has the moulding influence which Carlyle ascribed to it, in
Goethe's youthful admiration of Frederick this influence could not be
wanting. To the end Frederick appeared to him one of those "demonic"
personalities, who from time to time cross the world's stage, and
whose action is as incalculable as the phenomena of the natural world.
"When such an one passes to his rest, how gladly would we be silent,"
were his memorable words when the news of Frederick's death reached
him during his Italian travels, and the remark proves how deeply and
permanently Frederick's career had impressed him.

[Footnote 12: His remark to Eckermann (1828) is well kn