ed from Herder, who showed no mercy for "whatever of
self-complacency, egotism, vanity, pride and presumption was latent or
active" in him. Herder, he says elsewhere, "exercised such a
blighting influence on me that I began to doubt my own powers."
Whether or not Goethe learned from Herder the lesson of modesty
regarding his own gifts, it is the truth that of all the sons of
genius none has been freer than Goethe was in his maturer years from
every form of vanity and self-consciousness.

It is on his intellectual debt to Herder, however, that Goethe dwells
most emphatically in his account of their personal intercourse. Daily
and even hourly, he says, Herder's conversation was a summons to new
points of view. Poetry was the subject in which both had a common
interest, and from Herder Goethe learned to regard poetry "in another
sense" from that in which he had hitherto regarded it. He had hitherto
regarded poetry as an accomplishment; Herder taught him that it was a
gift of nature, of the essence of humanity, "the mother-speech of the
human race." This expression was Hamann's, who had been inspired to
utter it out of his revulsion against French literature and his study
of the literature of England. From England, indeed, came those
conceptions of the nature and function of poetry which, as expounded
and exemplified in the writings of Hamann, Herder, Goethe, and others,
were to effect a revolution in German literature. In a literary
manifesto, written by an Englishman, but apparently better known in
Germany than in England, German historians of their own literature
have found the main impulse that gave occasion to this revolution.
This manifesto was a pamphlet written by Edward Young, the author of
_Night Thoughts_, entitled _Conjectures on Original Composition, in a
Letter addressed to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison_. The
dithyrambic style of the Letter manifestly exercised a powerful
influence on the prose of Herder and Goethe--prose charged with
perfervid feeling, and hitherto unknown in German literature. Young's
main contention is that in literature genius must make rules for
itself, and that imitation is suicidal. "Genius," he says, "can set us
right in composition, without the rules of the learned; as conscience
sets us right in life, without the laws of the land." He lays it down
as a maxim that "the less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall
resemble them the more." The two golden rules in composition as in