to a certain degree compromised
himself.[197] In his own account of his relations to Lili he does not
disguise the fact that her mother and the friends of the family hardly
concealed their feeling that the Goethes were not of their order. In
seeking further intercourse with the Schoenemanns he was thus putting
himself in a delicate position, and the fact that he deliberately
chose to do so is proof that his first sight of Lili must have touched
his inflammable heart.

[Footnote 197: In a letter written to Johanna Fahlmer from Weimar
(April 10th, 1776) Goethe vehemently expresses his dislike of the
Schoenemann kin. "I have long hated them," he says; "from the bottom of
my heart.... I pity the poor creature [Lili] that she was born into
such a race."]

During the month of January Goethe became a frequent visitor at the
Schoenemanns, and there began those relations with Lili which,
according to his own later testimony, were to give a new direction to
his life, as being the immediate cause of his leaving Frankfort and
settling in Weimar. If we are to accept his own averment two years
before his death, Lili was the first whom he had really loved, all his
other affairs of the heart being "inclinations of no importance."[198]
So he spoke in the retrospect under the influence of an immediate
emotion, but his own contemporary testimony proves that his love for
Lili was at least not unmingled bliss. Make what reserves we may for
the artificial working up of sentiment which was the fashion of the
time, that testimony presents us with the picture of a lover who has
not only to contend with obstacles which circumstances put in his way,
but with the haunting conviction that his passion was leading him
astray and that its gratification involved the surrender of his
deepest self. As in the case of others of his love passages, his
relations with Lili evoked a series of literary productions of which
they are the inspiration and the commentary, and which exhibit new
developments of his genius. We have lyrics addressed to her which,
though differently inspired from those addressed to Friederike, take
their place with the choicest he has written; we have plays more or
less directly bearing on the situation in which he found himself; and,
finally, we have his letters to various correspondents in which every
phase of his passion is recorded at the moment.

[Footnote 198: Eckermann, March 5th, 1830. What has been said of
Chateaubriand, wh