oncilable war. Moreover, in a journal recently started by
Wieland, there had appeared an unfriendly review of _Goetz von
Berlichingen_. By the publication of a play, _Alceste_, in which he
foolishly challenged comparison with Euripides' drama of the same
name, Wieland gave the enemy his opportunity. On a Sunday afternoon,
with a bottle of Burgundy beside him, as he tells us, Goethe tossed
off his skit at one sitting. As a piece of improvisation, it certainly
contains excellent fooling. We are introduced to the lower world,
where the four characters in Euripides' play, Admetus, Alcestis,
Hercules, and Mercury, as well as its author, are represented as in a
state of high indignation at the liberties which Wieland has taken
with them in his _Alcestes_. Summoned before them, Wieland appears in
his nightcap, and has to run the gauntlet of their several
reproaches--the purport of them all being that he has foolishly
misunderstood the Greek world which he had undertaken to portray.
Against Goethe's wish the satire was published in the following year,
and rapidly ran through four editions, but Wieland had a genteel
revenge. With that _Lebensweisheit_ which Goethe long afterwards
marked as his characteristic, he published in his review a notice of
the burlesque, in which it is recommended as "a masterpiece of
persiflage and of sophistical wit." "Wieland has turned the tables on
me," was Goethe's own admission; "Ich bin eben prostituiert."[142]

[Footnote 142: Max Morris, _op. cit._ iv. 81.]

These successive _jeux d'esprit_ were merely the crackling fireworks
of exuberant youth, and were regarded as such by their author himself.
At the very time he was writing them, he was planning and sketching
works, the scope of which reveals the true bent of his genius, and of
the ideals that were preoccupying him. "My ideals," he wrote to
Kestner (September 15th, 1773), "grow daily in beauty and grandeur";
and when he penned these words he was engaged on a production which,
though it remained a mere fragment, has justly been regarded as one of
the most striking manifestations of his powers. The subject, the myth
of Prometheus, he tells us, attracted him as one in which he could
embody his own deepest experience and the conclusions regarding the
individual life of man to which that experience had led him. In the
crises of his past life, he tells us, he had found that no aid had
been forthcoming either from man or any supernal power. "We mus