relates how
Madanasundari, whose husband and brother-in-law had beheaded themselves
in honor of Durga, is commanded by the goddess to restore the corpses to
life by joining to each its own head, and how by mistake she
interchanges these heads.

The two stories were fused into one and so we get the legend in the form
in which Sonnerat presents it. Goethe followed this form closely without
inventing anything. He did, however, put into the poem an ethical
content and a noble idea. Both the Indic ballads are a fervent plea for
the innate nobility of humanity.

* * * * *

Here the influence of India on Goethe's work ends. The progress of
Sanskrit studies could not fail to excite the interest of the poet whose
boast was his cosmopolitanism,[97] but they did not incite him to
production. For India's mythology, its religion and its abstrusest of
philosophies he felt nothing but aversion. Especially hateful to him
were the mythological monstrosities:

Und so will ich, ein fuer allemal,
Keine Bestien in dem Goettersaal!
Die leidigen Elephantenruessel,
Das umgeschlungene Schlangengenuessel,
Tief Urschildkroet' im Weltensumpf,
Viel Koenigskoepf' auf einem Rumpf,
Die muessen uns zur Verzweiflung bringen,
Wird sie nicht reiner Ost verschlingen.[98]

Goethe classed Indic antiquities with those of Egypt and China, and his
attitude towards the question of their value is distinctly expressed in
one of his prose proverbs: "Chinesische, Indische, Aegyptische
Altertuemer sind immer nur Curiositaeten: es ist sehr wohl gethan, sich
und die Welt damit bekannt zu machen; zu sittlicher und aesthetischer
Bildung aber werden sie uns wenig fruchten."[99]

After all, Goethe's Orient did not extend beyond the Indus. It was
confined mainly to Persia and Arabia, with an occasional excursion into
Turkey.

To this Orient he turned at the time of Germany's deepest political
degradation, when the best part of its soil was overrun by a foreign
invader, and when the whole nation nerved itself for the life and death
struggle that was to break its chains. The aged poet shrank from the
tumult and strife about him and took refuge in the East. The opening
lines of the first Divan poem express the motive of this poetical
_Hegire_.

The history of the composition of the _Divan_ is too well known to
require repetition. It is given with great detail in the editions
prepared by von Loeper and