Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in Frankfort, his father being a wealthy lawyer. Through his eighty-three years of life he never knew a moment’s inconvenience or waste of time from poverty. He was sent to the university, but was not interested in the study of law, which his father tried to force upon him; he studied the things he cared for, and incidentally gave himself to a life of pleasure, so that he came home at the age of nineteen with a severe hemorrhage. It was the period of “Storm and Stress” in German literature; Rousseau and his wicked “Romanticism” had crossed the Rhine, and here was all the youth of Germany revolting against writing poetry in French; they insisted upon dealing with German heroes and experiencing unrestrained German emotions. Goethe was reading Shakespeare; and, spurning the classical forms, he wrote a drama about Goetz von Berlichingen, a medieval German knight who was big and bold and turbulent. This made Goethe a hero of the new insurgency. Also he wrote a story entitled “The Sorrows of Werther,” about a young man who yearned agonizingly for the wife of his friend, and finally committed suicide. Goethe himself did not commit suicide, but lived to regret these youthful extravagances. He fell in love more than once in these tumultuous days, his experience being exactly the opposite to that of Beethoven; it was the poet who was aristocratic and prudent, and it was the girl who suffered. Goethe had a fear of marriage, because it would interfere with his genius; but it is worth noting that the course he adopted brought him a great deal of unhappiness and waste of time. At the age of twenty-six his destiny was decided by a meeting with the young Duke of Weimar. The duke was twenty, and conceived an intense admiration for the poet, and besought him to come and live at his court. To tempt him, and to keep him there, he gave him a beautiful home, together with some acres of land for a garden, and made him a state councilor with a salary, and before long gave him a title, enabling him to put the magic word “von” before his name. Thus Goethe became a court writer and a court man. You may call him the greatest of court writers and the most dignified of court men; nevertheless, there is a whole universe of difference between such a life, and that of an outsider and rebel like Beethoven. The only trace of his youthful revolt which Goethe kept was in matters having to do with himself. He saved part of his time for his work, he took to traveling to get away from court functions, and in his later years, secure in his fame and power, he withdrew into his own home, and the court had to come to him. Thus he maintained the dignity of the intellectual man; but in his art ideals he became a strong conservative; and as for political and social ideals, he solved the problem by having nothing to do with them.