We must think of Goethe at this time as often directing his attention gravely and anxiously to the progress of events in France, where the movement of thought by which he had been so profoundly influenced in youth had at last led to its logical issues in action. Some of the best of Goethe’s contemporaries in Germany hailed the French Revolution as the beginning of a new and glorious era for humanity. Their rejoicings were not shared by Goethe. He knew well, indeed, the sufferings of the oppressed population, not only of France, but of other countries, his own included; and he was eager that their condition should be improved by just and wise government. But he found it impossible to believe that the end could be attained by violence, and he had no doubt that the tendency of the Revolution would be to check for many a day every great and noble movement in art, literature, and science. He fully recognized, however, that the events he deplored were in the last resort due, not to self-seeking agitators, but to the abuses of a thoroughly corrupt society. Long afterwards he said to Eckermann that if he detested revolutionists, he detested not less strongly the people who made revolutions inevitable; and that this was his feeling from the beginning is distinctly indicated by several of his writings. “Gross-Cophta,” a prose play written in 1791, deals with the story of the diamond necklace, with which the impostor Cagliostro was intimately connected. The play is not artistically important, but it shows how dark a view Goethe took of some elements of the social life of France in the period immediately preceding the Revolution. In “Die Aufgeregten,” an unfinished prose play belonging to the same time, he represents the peasantry of a French estate as rising in revolt against the countess to whom they owe allegiance. The countess, being a woman of enlightened opinions, does not dispute that they have solid grievances, and readily meets them half way. The moral evidently is that if the French nobles as a class had possessed her elevation of character, the peril of violent change might without difficulty have been averted. In 1792 began the long series of revolutionary wars. The Duke of Weimar served as a general in the Prussian army, and at his request Goethe accompanied him during the campaign in Champagne. Here Goethe realized for the first time the terrible nature of the forces which the Revolution had let loose on the world. During the cannonade of Valmy, anxious to know what the “cannon-fever” was really like, he rode to a spot exposed to the enemy’s fire. On the evening of this memorable day, when the French gained their first success, Goethe wrote in his tent: “From this place, and to-day, begins a new epoch in the history of the world, and you may say that you were there.”