of its members. At a later date,
Goethe speaks of his "considerate levity" and his "warm
coolness";[136] and in a succession of pieces which he threw off at
this time we have an interesting commentary on this characterisation
of himself. In these pieces we have an old vein reopened. We have seen
how in Leipzig he had burlesqued the professor of literature, Clodius,
but in the years that followed his departure from Leipzig--the
depressing period in Frankfort and the period of rapid development in
Strassburg--there was neither the occasion nor the prompting to
personal or general satire. Now, however, in the tumult of his own
feelings and in the follies of the society around him he found themes
for satirical comment which afforded scope for a side of his genius
rarely manifested in his later years. The short satirical dramas
produced at this time on the mere impulse of the moment have in
themselves only a local and temporary interest, but they derive
importance from the fact that they proceed from the same mental
attitude which was to find its definitive expression in the character
of Mephistopheles--essentially the creation of this period of Goethe's
development. In these trivial exercises he was practising the craft
which is so consummately displayed in the original fragments of
_Faust_.

[Footnote 136: Ich bin wie immer der nachdenkliche Leichtsinn und die
warme Kaelte.--Goethe to Sophie von la Roche, September 1st, 1780.]

The first of these sallies--_Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern,
Ein Schoenbartspiel_--was written in March, 1773, and was sent as a
birthday gift to Merck--an appropriate recipient. Written in doggerel
verse, which Goethe took over from the shoemaker poet Hans Sachs, the
piece brings before us the motley crowd of persons who frequented the
fairs of the time, each vociferating the cheapness and excellence of
his own wares. The humour of the spectacle, however, is that the
_dramatis personae_ were individuals recognisable by contemporaries in
traits which now escape us. Goethe himself appears in the guise of a
doctor, Herder as a captain of the gipsies, and his bride, Caroline
Flachsland, as a milkmaid. The satire is directed equally against the
idiosyncrasies of individuals and against the follies of the time, the
sentimentalism which Goethe himself had not escaped, but of which he
saw the inanity, the petty jealousies of authors which had also come
within his personal experience. A mock trage