zig citizen, a physician and
botanist, he met a society of medical men, and he records how his
attention was directed to an entirely new field through listening to
their conversation. Now, apparently for the first time, he heard the
names of Haller, Buffon, and Linnaeus, the last of whom he, in later
years, named with Spinoza and Shakespeare as one of the chief moulding
forces of his life. Through the influence and example of other men he
intermittently practised etching, drawing, and engraving--all arts in
which he retained a lifelong interest. But among all the persons in
Leipzig who influenced him Goethe gave the first place to Friedrich
Oeser, director of the academy of drawing in the city. Oeser was about
fifty years of age, jovial in disposition, and an experienced man of
the world. Though as an artist he is now held in little regard, his
reputation was great in his own day,[34] and he had a reflected glory
in being the friend of Winckelmann, who was reputed to have profited
by his teaching in art. Under the inspiration of Oeser Goethe's
interest in the plastic arts in general, which had received its first
impulse at home, became a permanent preoccupation for the remainder of
his life. He took regular lessons in drawing from Oeser, made
acquaintance with all the collections, public and private, to be found
in Leipzig, and even made a secret visit to the galleries in Dresden,
where, he tells us, he gave his exclusive attention to the works of
the great Dutch masters. As was always his habit, Goethe generously
acknowledged his obligations to Oeser. "Who among all my teachers,
except yourself," he afterwards wrote on his return to Frankfort,
"ever thought me worthy of encouragement? They either heaped all blame
or all praise upon me, and nothing can be so destructive of talent....
You know what I was when I came to you, and what when I left you: the
difference is your work ... you have taught me to be modest without
self-depreciation, and to be proud without presumption."[35] And
elsewhere he declares that the great lesson he had learned from Oeser
was that the ideal of beauty is to be found in "simplicity and
repose." But the main interest of Goethe's intercourse with Oeser in
connection with his general development is that it strengthened an
illusion from which he did not succeed in freeing himself till near
his fortieth year--the illusion that nature had given him equally the
gifts of the painter and the poet. Many