This book was first suggested to me in 1909, and was virtually completed seven or eight years ago; but the manuscript was mislaid among some old papers, and when it was recovered the European War was at its height. Never again, it then seemed, could I regard my work with the same disinterested temper in which it was begun, for what was recovered was no longer a manuscript but a ghost, no longer a book but a strange spirit returned from an all too irrecoverable past. When I re-read these words from the lips of one who had spent his life “with spirits god-like mild,” and related them to our new and altered world, I understood once more how man forever fashions history to his own meaning, and how it has no life except such as is given to it by his creative mind. Every word I now read assumed a new and heightened significance, a more intimate relation with life; and every word was a call to sympathy and understanding,--the word of a man who had withheld all hate from enemy France, had praised England and its literature, had analyzed the defects of his own countrymen, and had made constant denial of the compatibility of poetry and partisanship. How could I approach work of this kind in the spirit of the fiery national partisan, not to mention that of the mere dryasdust scholar, when every word Goethe uttered shed light and meaning on the warm life about me, and every accent of his voice taught a high forebearance? So when on sick-leave from my regiment at the very end of 1917, to while away the tediousness of convalescence, I played once more with the work begun in the old days when I was still able to live in “the wise man’s only country, Life”; and before I sailed for France, leaving behind me the manuscript as it here stands, I determined that if it were ever published, I should add nothing in the form of preface, introduction, or critical apparatus, but allow Goethe to speak for himself to such hearts as could hear and understand him. Some readers may find a key to that understanding if they begin with the famous passage on “Poetry and Patriotism” on page 251. No adequate estimate of Goethe’s critical work has yet been achieved; and the sensible but unilluminating chapter on this subject in the late Calvin Thomas’s _Goethe_ is not much more disappointing than the more extended studies in German of Oskar Walzel and Wilhelm Bode. For a complete estimate of Goethe as a critic we should have to ransack all his essays and reviews, his novels and poems, his autobiography and his journals, his letters and conversations, for in all of them he has scattered judgments on books and thoughts on the theory of art. It would almost seem as if his reputation as a critic rests more securely on these casual utterances than on his formal essays and studies. There more than elsewhere Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold recognized “the supreme critic”; there above all we find that mellow wisdom which we have come to associate with Goethe’s name.