cs.[106] In
the second scene of the first Act, Luther is introduced for no other
purpose than to expound ideas which come strangely from his mouth,
but which were effervescing in the minds of Goethe and his
contemporaries--the ideas which they had learned from Rousseau
regarding the excellence of the natural man. Similarly, in the scene
following, educational problems are discussed which sound oddly in the
castle of a mediaeval baron, but which were awakening interest in
Goethe's own day. In the supreme moments of his career--on the
occasion of the surrender of his castle and in his last
hour--Gottfried is made to utter the word _freedom_ as the watchword
of his aspirations, but in so doing he is expressing Goethe's own
passionate protest against the conventions of his age in religion, in
philosophy, and art, and not a sentiment in keeping with the class of
which he is a type.

[Footnote 106: Lessing strongly disapproved of _Goetz_ as flouting the
doctrines laid down in his _Dramaturgie_. When his brother announced
to him that _Goetz_ had been played with great applause in Berlin, his
cold comment was that no doubt the chief credit was due to the
decorator.]

These blemishes in the play as a work of art are apparent, yet it may
be said that it was mainly owing to these very blemishes that the
"beautiful monster," as Wieland called it, took contemporaries by
storm and retains its freshness of interest after the lapse of a
century and a half. The successive scenes are, indeed, without organic
connection, but each scene by itself has the vivacity and directness
of improvisation. Nor do the anachronisms to which criticism may
object really mar the interest of the work. Rather they constitute
its most characteristic elements, proceeding as they do from the
poet's own deepest intellectual interests, and, therefore, from his
most spontaneous inspiration.

But the most conclusive testimony to the essential power of the play
is the effect it produced not only in German but in European
literature. Its publication in its altered form in 1773 had the effect
of a bomb on the literary public of Germany. It sent a shudder of
horror through the sticklers for the rules of the classical drama
which it ignored with such contemptuous indifference; a shudder of
delight through the band of effervescing youths who shared Goethe's
revolutionary ideals, and to whom _Goetz_ was a manifesto and a
challenge to all traditional conventions in l