ll we have a considerable number of his own
letters addressed to his sister and different friends, all of which,
it may be said, appear to give genuine expression to the promptings of
the moment. The materials for forming our judgment, therefore, are
even superabundant, but in their very multiplicity lies our
difficulty. The narrative in the Autobiography doubtless gives a
correct general outline of his life in Leipzig and of its main results
for his general development, but its cool, detached tone leaves a
totally inadequate impression of the froward youth, torn to
distraction by conflicting passions and conflicting ideals. With the
contemporary testimonies our difficulties are of another kind. The
testimonies of his friends regarding his personal traits are often
contradictory, and equally so are his own self-revelations. On one and
the same day he writes a letter which exhibits him as the helpless
victim of his emotions, and another which shows him quite at his ease
and master of himself. And he himself has warned us against taking his
wild words too seriously. In a letter to his sister (September 27th,
1766), he expressly says: "As for my melancholy, it is not so deep as
I have pictured it; there are occasionally poetical licences in my
descriptions which exaggerate the facts."[16]

[Footnote 16: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i., 68-9.]

Fortunately or unfortunately, the town of Leipzig, which his father
had chosen for his first free contact with life, was of all German
towns the one where he could see life in its greatest variety. "In
accursed Leipzig," he wrote after his three years' experience of its
distractions, "one burns out as quickly as a bad torch." Even the
external appearance of the town was such as to suggest another world
from that of Frankfort. In Frankfort the past overshadowed the
present; while Leipzig, Goethe himself wrote, recording his first
impressions of the place, "evoked no memories of bygone times." And if
the exterior of the town suggested a new world, its social and
intellectual atmosphere intensified the impression. "Leipzig is the
place for me," says Frosch in the Auerbach Cellar Scene in _Faust_;
"it is a little Paris, and gives its folks a finish."[17] The
prevailing tone of Leipzig society was, in point of fact, deliberately
imitated from the pattern set to Europe by the Court of France. In
contrast to the old-fashioned formality of Frankfort, the Leipziger
aimed at a graceful _insouciance