the society of the actors, and it
was only by the consideration that his son's knowledge of French was
thus improved that the practical father was reconciled to the
delinquency. The direct results of his intercourse with the French
soldiery on Goethe's development were at once abiding and of high
importance. It extended his knowledge of men and the world, and, more
specifically, it gave him that interest in French culture and that
insight into the French mind which he possessed in a degree beyond any
of his contemporaries.

But the most notable experience of these early years under his
father's roof still remains to be mentioned. When he was in his
fourteenth year, Goethe fell in love--the first of the many similar
experiences which were to form the successive crises of his future
life. There can be little doubt that in his narrative of this his
first love there is to the full as much "poetry" as "truth"; but there
also can be as little doubt that all the circumstances attending it
made his first love a turning-point in his life. It is a peculiarity
of all Goethe's love adventures that between him and the successive
objects of his affections there was always some bar which made a
regular union impossible or undesirable. So it was in the case of the
girl whom he calls Gretchen, and of whom we know nothing except what
he chose to tell us. He made her acquaintance through his association
with a set of youths of questionable character whom we are surprised
to find as the chosen companions of the son of an Imperial Councillor.
Of all Goethe's loves this was the one that was accompanied by the
least pleasant complications and the most painful of disillusions.
Through his intercourse with Gretchen's intimates he was led to
recommend one of them for a municipal post in Frankfort--a post which
he did not hold long before he was found guilty of embezzlement and
defalcation. The discovery was disastrous to Goethe's relations with
Gretchen, and the disaster involved an experience of conflicting
emotions which produced a crisis in his inner life. He had been rudely
awakened to mistrust of mankind, and it was an awakening which, as he
has himself emphasised, influenced all his thinking and feeling for
many years to come. He had lived in a dream of phantasy and passion,
and he learned to the shock of his whole nature that the object of his
dreams had never at any moment regarded him otherwise than as an
interesting boy whose talents