om
human folly and ignorance.[144] By its protest against the conception
of the mechanical god who "pushes the universe from without," and by
the Spinozistic pantheism which it implicitly proclaims, the ode
dismayed the more timid spirits of the time. To the horror of Fritz
Jacobi, Lessing, to whom he read it in manuscript in 1780, declared
that its conception of the [Greek: hen kai pan] was his own;[145] and
when, in 1785, Jacobi published the poem without Goethe's knowledge, a
controversy arose in which Lessing was charged with atheism and
pantheism, and which, as Goethe records, cost the life of one of the
combatants, Moses Mendelssohn.[146] Be it said that in his old age
Goethe himself came to regard the sentiments of the soliloquy as
_sansculottisch_, and in the time of reaction of the Holy Alliance
forbade the publication of the fragment as likely to be received as an
evangel by the revolutionary youth of Germany.[147]

[Footnote 144: Viktor Hehn pointed out that the drama and the ode are
inspired by different motives, and that it was in forgetfulness that
Goethe associated them.--_Ueber Goethe's Gedichte_, p. 160.
Bielschowsky (_Goethe, Sein Leben und Seine Werke_, i. 510) suggests
that the ode may have been intended as the opening of Act ii.]

[Footnote 145: Sir Frederick Pollock dates "modern Spinozism" from
this incident.--_Spinoza: His Life and Opinions_ (London, 1880), p.
390.]

[Footnote 146: While writing a defence of his friend Lessing against
the charge of atheism, Mendelssohn's mental agitation was such that it
was believed to have occasioned his death.]

[Footnote 147: Turgenieff relates that on translating passages from
_Satyros_ and _Prometheus_ to Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and
Daudet, all three were profoundly impressed by the range and power
displayed in them.]

To the same period as _Prometheus_ belongs another fragment, inspired
by an equally grandiose conception, which, like so many others with
Goethe, was never to be realised. The theme of the projected drama was
to be the career of Mahomet, and in his Autobiography Goethe has
indicated the leading ideas it was to embody. Contrary to the
prevailing opinion, which had received brilliant expression in
Voltaire's play on the same subject, Mahomet was to be represented not
as an impostor but as a prophet sincerely convinced of the truth of
his message, and inflamed with a disinterested desire to give his
countrymen a purer religion--a vi