hours of the best years of his
life were to be spent in laboriously practising an art in which he was
doomed to mediocrity; and it must remain a riddle that one, who like
Goethe was so curiously studious of his own self-development, should
so long and so blindly have misunderstood his own gifts.[36]

[Footnote 33: "Das Beduerfnis meiner Natur zwingt mich zu einer
vermannigfaltigten Thaetigkeit," he wrote of himself in his
thirty-second year.]

[Footnote 34: When, in his thirty-sixth year, Goethe renewed his
acquaintance with Oeser, he wrote of him to Frau von Stein: "C'est
comme si cet homme ne devroit pas mourir, tant ses talents paroissent
toujours aller en s'augmentant."]

[Footnote 35: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 179.]

[Footnote 36: In later years he consoled himself with the reflection
that the time he had spent on the technicalities of art was not wholly
lost, as he had thus acquired powers of observation which were
valuable to him both as a poet and as a man of science.]

It may partly explain his addiction to art that the poetical
productions which he had brought from Frankfort, and which had been
applauded by the circle of his friends there, did not meet with the
approval of the critics in Leipzig. We have seen how sharply Frau
Boehme commented on their shortcomings, but he was specially
disheartened by the severe criticism passed on one of his poems by
Clodius, the professor of literature. "I am cured of the folly of
thinking myself a poet,"[37] he wrote to his sister about a year after
his arrival in Leipzig. Some six months later he writes to her in a
more hopeful spirit: "Since I am wholly without pride, I may trust my
inner conviction, which tells me that I possess some of the qualities
required in a poet, and that by diligence I may even become one."[38]
In his Autobiography and elsewhere Goethe has spoken at length of the
disadvantages under which youthful geniuses laboured at the period
when he began his literary career.[39] As Germany then existed, there
was no national feeling to inspire great themes, no standard of taste,
and no worthy models for imitation. There was, indeed, no lack of
literature on all subjects; Kant speaks sarcastically of "the deluge
of books with which our part of the world is inundated every year."
But the fatal defects of the poetry then produced was triviality and
the "wateriness" of its style. Yet it was during the years that Goethe
spent in Leipzig that there appeared