_, both betrayed by
false lovers, Goethe tells us that we may find a penitent confession
of his own conduct towards Friederike. But assuredly it was not with
the primary intention of making this confession that either play was
written. Both plays, in truth, are evidence of what is borne out in
the long series of his imaginative productions from _Goetz_ to the
Second Part of Faust: their conception, their informing spirit, their
essential tissue come immediately from Goethe's own intellectual and
emotional experience. Objective dramatic treatment of persons or
events was incompatible with that passionate interest in the problems
of nature and human life by which he was possessed at every stage of
his development.

CHAPTER XI

GOETHE AND SPINOZA--_DER EWIGE JUDE_

1773-4

If we are to accept Goethe's own statement, during the years
1773-4--the distracted period, that is to say, which followed his
experiences at Wetzlar, and of which _Werther_ and _Clavigo_ are the
characteristic products--he came under the influence of a thinker who
transformed his conceptions, equally of the conduct of life and of
man's relations to the universe--the Jewish thinker, Benedict Spinoza.
The passage in which he expresses his debt to Spinoza is one of the
best known in all his writings, and is, moreover, a _locus classicus_
in the histories of speculative philosophy. "After looking around me
in vain for a means of disciplining my peculiar nature, I at last
chanced upon the _Ethica_ of this man. To say exactly how much I
gained from that work was due to Spinoza or to my own reading of him
would be impossible; enough that I found in him a sedative for my
passions and that he appeared to me to open up a large and free
outlook on the material and moral world. But what specially attached
me to him was the boundless disinterestedness which shone forth from
every sentence. That marvellous saying, 'Whoso truly loves God must
not desire God to love him in return,' with all the premises on which
it rests and the consequences that flow from it, permeated my whole
thinking. To be disinterested in everything, and most of all in love
and friendship, was my highest desire, my maxim, my constant practice;
so that that bold saying of mine at a later date, 'If I love Thee,
what is that to Thee?' came directly from my heart."[171]

[Footnote 171: Saying of Philine in _Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre_, bk.
iv. ch. ix.]

What is surprising is that of