It would be easy to make Goethe less attractive, by mentioning that the court lady who became his mistress for the next ten years had a husband somewhere in the background. But that would not be fair, because it was the custom of the time, and nobody in court saw anything wrong with adultery. But when Goethe, somewhere around the age of forty, fell very much in love with a daughter of the people and made her his mistress, court circles were shocked; they were still more shocked, when, after she had borne him a son, he brought her to his home; they were speechless, when in the end he married her. She justified their worst expectations by turning into a drunkard; and that was hard for a very dignified and reserved man of letters. Goethe traveled to Italy, and fell in love with the classical ideal of art, and wrote an imitation Greek play. Coming back to Weimar, he took up court duties, including the organizing of a fire brigade and going to war. The French revolution had come, and King Louis of France was a prisoner, together with his beautiful Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, who had asked why the people did not eat cake if they could not get bread. The sovereigns of Europe hastened to rescue this brilliant wit, and to overthrow the monster of revolution. Goethe’s duke went along, with Goethe in his train. The poet showed his attitude toward the whole matter by writing a musical comedy while at the training camp, and gathering botanical specimens during the fighting. This attitude he explained by saying that he had to shut his eyes to the events of his time, because otherwise he would have been driven mad. And I admit that it was painful to see the movement for freedom run wild in the Terror, and to see it betrayed by Napoleon, and to see the French people lured into a war of conquest, so that Voltaire’s “l’Infame” was able to pose as a champion of national freedom, and thus to rivet its power upon the peoples once again. But why did these things happen? It was because men of genius and intellect had been indifferent to the misery of the French people, their degradation and enslavement. It was because when the people did rise and throw off their tyrants, there were so few voices to explain the meaning of this event, and to defend the revolution’s right to be. When Goethe went out with his duke, and lent the sanction of his name to the counter revolution, it was he who was making inevitable the Terror, it was he who was delivering the revolution to Napoleon. Bloodshed and misery overwhelmed Europe for twenty-five years; and Goethe, by withdrawing to his study and occupying himself with poetry and scientific research, encouraged the worst weakness of German philosophy and letters--the tendency to lull itself with high-sounding, abstract words, while the real life of the nation goes to the devil.