elf. In the unstable
Weislingen he represents a weakness of his own nature of which he was
himself well aware. "You are a chameleon," Adelheid tells Weislingen;
and, as we have seen, Goethe so described himself. It is, therefore,
in the relations of Weislingen to Marie and Adelheid that we must look
for the spontaneous expression of the poet's genius, working on
material drawn from self-introspection. In Weislingen's hasty wooing
and equally hasty desertion of Marie we have an exaggerated
presentment of Goethe's own conduct to Friederike, to which objection
may be taken on the score of delicacy, though he himself suggests that
it is to be regarded as a public confession of his self-reproach. In
depicting Marie and Weislingen he had Friederike and himself before
him to restrain his imagination within the limits of nature and truth.
In the case of Adelheid he had no model before him, and the result is
that, with youthful exaggeration, he has made her a beautiful monster
with no redeeming touch, and, therefore, of little human interest.
Such a character was essentially alien to Goethe's own nature, and so
are the melodramatic scenes which depict her desperate attempts to
escape from her toils and the proceedings of the avenging tribunal
that had marked her for judgment.

[Footnote 105: As we have seen, the Leipzig book of verses did not
attract general attention.]

As in the case of all Goethe's longer productions, critical opinion
has been divided from the beginning regarding the intrinsic merits of
_Goetz_. In the opinion of critics like Edmond Scherer it is a crude
imitation of Shakespeare with little promise of its author's future
achievement, while other critics, like Lewes, regard it as a "work of
daring power, of vigour, of originality." On one point Goethe himself
and all his critics are agreed: the play as a whole is only a
succession of scenes, loosely strung together, with no inner
development leading up to a determinate end. In his later life Goethe
characterised Shakespeare's plays as "highly interesting tales, only
told by more persons than one." Whatever truth there may be in this
judgment in the case of Shakespeare, it exactly describes _Goetz_. It
is as a tale, a narrative, and not as a drama, that it is to be read
if it is to be enjoyed without the sense of artistic failure. The
anachronisms with which the piece abounds, and which Hegel caustically
noted, have been a further stumbling-block to the criti