her, "shall I then also
become like this when I am old? Shall my soul no longer attach itself
to what is good and amiable? Strange the belief that the older a man
becomes, the freer he becomes from what is worldly and petty. He
becomes increasingly more worldly and petty."[130] His father's
insistence on his attention to legal business was a permanent cause of
mutual misunderstanding. "I let my father do as he pleases; he daily
seeks to enmesh me more and more in the affairs of the town, and I
submit."[131]

[Footnote 130: Goethe to Kestner, November 10th, 1772. _Werke,
Briefe_, Band ii. 35.]

[Footnote 131: To the same, September 15th, 1773. _Ib._ p. 104.]

In his sister Cornelia, as formerly, he had a sympathetic confidant
equally in his affairs of the heart and in his literary and artistic
ambitions, but in the course of the year 1773 he was deprived of her
soothing and stimulating influence. In October she was betrothed to
J.G. Schlosser, who has already been noted as one of Goethe's sager
counsellors, and the marriage took place on November 1st. "I rejoice
in their joy," he wrote to Sophie von la Roche, "though, at the same
time, it is mostly to my own loss." Other friends, also, in the course
of the same year, he complains, were departing and leaving him in
dreary solitude. "My poor existence," he writes to Kestner, "is
becoming petrified. This summer everyone is going--Merck with the
Court to Berlin, his wife to Switzerland, my sister, and Fraeulein
Flachsland, you, everybody. And I am alone. If I do not take a wife or
hang myself, say that life is right dear to me, or something, if you
like, which does me more honour."[132] So in May he describes himself
as alone and daily becoming more so; in October as "entirely alone,"
and as indescribably rejoiced at the return of Merck towards the close
of the year.

[Footnote 132: _Ib._ pp. 82-3.]

CHAPTER IX

SATIRICAL DRAMAS AND FRAGMENTS

If, during the year that followed his return from Wetzlar, Goethe was
distracted by his wandering affections, he was no less divided in mind
by his intellectual ambitions. The doubt which had possessed him since
boyhood as to whether nature meant him for an artist or a poet
remained still unsettled for him. In one of the best-known passages of
his Autobiography he has related how he sought to resolve his
difficulty. As he wandered down the banks of the Lahn, after he had
torn himself away from Wetzlar, the beauty of t