the antics of
the spirit.

But it is in the last and longest segment of the poem that its real
power and interest are to be found. Its theme is the second coming of
Christ and his experiences in lands professing his religion. In a
scene, compared with which the Prologue in Heaven of Faust is
decorous, God the Father ironically suggests that the Son would find
scope for his friendly feeling to the human kind if he were to pay a
visit to the earth. Alighting on the mountain where Satan had tempted
him, the Son, filled with tender yearning for the race for whom he had
died, has already anxious forebodings of woe on earth. In a soliloquy,
which we may take as the expression of Goethe's own deepest feelings,
as it is the expression of his finest poetic gift, he gives utterance
to his boundless love for man, and his compassion for a world where
truth and error, happiness and misery, are inextricably linked.
Continuing his descent, he first visits the Catholic countries where
he finds that in the multitude of crosses Christ and the Cross are
forgotten. Passing into a land where Protestantism is the professed
religion, he sees a similar state of things. He meets by the way a
country parson who has a fat wife and many children, and "does not
disturb himself about God in Heaven." Next he requests to be conducted
to the Oberpfarrer of the neighbourhood, in whom he might expect to
find "a man of God," and the fragment ends with an account of his
interview with the Oberpfarrer's cook, Hogarthian in its broad humour,
but disquieting even to the reader who may hold with Jean Paul that
the test of one's faith is the capacity to laugh at its object.

Goethe forbade the publication of _Der Ewige Jude_, and we can
understand his reason for the prohibition.[175] To many persons for
whose religious feelings he had a genuine respect--to his mother among
others--the poem would have been a cause of offence of which Goethe
was not the man to be guilty. Moreover, a continuous work in such a
vein was alien to Goethe's own genius. As we have them, the fragments
are but another specimen of that "godlike insolence" which, in his
later years, he found in his satires on Herder, Wieland, and others.

[Footnote 175: It was first published in 1836, four years after his
death.]

CHAPTER XII

GOETHE IN SOCIETY

1774

The publication of _Goetz von Berlichingen_ in the spring of 1773, we
have seen, had made Goethe known to the literary wor