Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 1.djvu/22

xii display it. He tells in his autobiography how he used to delight his old friend Von Olenschleger by graphically, and often through mimicry, depicting the characters and circumstances of the Middle Ages which the historian has related only as a matter of course. The French occupation of Frankfort, when Goethe was a boy of ten, had already turned his attention to the stage. A French theatre was established, and he, as the grandson of the mayor, had a free ticket, which he seems to have used without restraint. He scraped acquaintance with the actors, learned to speak excellent French, by playing with their children, and became familiar with the whole range of the French drama, classic and popular. It was characteristic of him to fall to imitating the French forms; he wrote a little piece for the stage, of which he afterward remembered only that the scene was rural, and that there was no lack in it of kings' daughters, princes, or gods. He took it to a youth connected with the theatre, and had to learn his first lesson in the classic dramatic liturgy. It was an instructive lesson, for it taught the boy to think for himself. He listened to what his friend Derones told him about the three unities of Aristotle, the regularity of the French drama, the harmony of the verse, the probability of the action, and then, after reinforcing it by reading Corneille's "Treatise on the Three Unities," and devouring the whole of Racine, Moliere, and a large part of Corneille, he came to the conclusion that the dramatic freedom of the English drama was far preferable to the artificial scheme of the French. It was not strange that one who as a child had begun by imitating Terence, who before he was eleven had got such an understanding of the three greatest dramatists of France, should become the manager of theatrical affairs for his sovereign, and should produce masterpieces that have held the stage for a century.

Goethe's simple apparatus and reliance on nature for his philosophical researches find their counterpart in his literary work. Only as a child he imitated; though, of course, his acting dramas had to be constructed on familiar lines, he