ed, instructed and inspired for
something great. But never imagine that all is vanity, if it is not
abstract thought and idea.

"Next they come and ask what idea I meant to embody in my 'Faust'? As if
I knew that myself, and could inform them. _From Heaven through the
world to hell_ would, indeed, be something; but that is no idea, only a
course of action. And further, that the devil loses the wager, and that
a man, continually struggling from difficult errors towards something
better, should be redeemed, is truly a more effective, and to many a
good, enlightening thought; but it is no idea lying at the basis of the
whole, and of each individual scene. It would have been a fine thing,
indeed, if I had strung so rich and diversified a life as I have brought
to view in 'Faust' upon the slender thread of one single, pervading
idea.

"It was altogether out of my province, as a poet, to strive to embody
anything abstract. I received in my mind impressions of an animated,
charming, hundredfold kind, just as a lively imagination presented them;
and as a poet I had nothing more to do than artistically to elaborate
these impressions, and so to present them that others might receive like
impressions. But I am somewhat of the opinion that the more
incommensurable, and the more incomprehensible to the understanding a
poetic production is, so much the better it is."

_June_ 20, 1831. At Goethe's, after dinner, the conversation fell upon
the use and misuse of terms. Said he, "The French use the word
'composition' inappropriately. The expression is degrading as applied to
genuine productions of art and poetry. It is a thoroughly contemptible
word, of which we should seek to get rid as soon as possible.

"How can one say, Mozart has _composed_ 'Don Juan'! Composition! As if
it were a piece of cake or biscuit, which had been mixed together with
eggs, flour, and sugar! It is a spiritual creation, in which the details
as well as the whole are pervaded by _one_ spirit. Consequently, the
producer did not follow his own experimental impulse, but acted under
that of his demoniac genius."

_June_ 27, 1831. We conversed about Victor Hugo. "He has a fine talent,"
said Goethe. "But he is altogether ensnared in the unhappy romantic
tendency of his time, by which he is constrained to represent, side by
side with the beautiful, the most hateful and intolerable. I have
recently read his 'Notre Dame de Paris,' and needed no little patience
to en