Reality broke in harshly enough upon this poet. Sixteen years after his military foray into France, the tables were turned, and Napoleon’s cannon-balls came tumbling through the beautiful gardens at Weimar. Here were French troopers, flushed with the victory of Jena, pillaging the town, robbing the poet of both his wine and his money, and threatening to kill him in his bed. Two years later came the peace negotiations, and the poet lent his presence to balls and fetes, and was summoned to an audience with the master of Europe. He was then fifty-nine years old, a world genius, and Napoleon was thirty-nine years old, a world conqueror; the older man went, and permitted himself to be inspected by the younger. Goethe had a handsome presence, and Napoleon was pleased. “You are a man!” he exclaimed. “How old are you?” he demanded; and then: “You are very well preserved”--as if this were a Grecian scholar being purchased as a slave by a Roman proconsul! “You have written tragedies?” demanded Napoleon; and a courtier hastened to mention that the poet had written several--also he had translated Voltaire’s tragedy, “Mahomet.” “It is not a good piece,” said Napoleon, and went on to disapprove of dramas in which fate played a part, “What are they talking about with their fate? La politique est la fatalité.” Here was an utterance that Goethe might well have applied through all the rest of his life. I could take it as a motto for this book. “Politics is fate!” Hardly could one pack more wisdom into five words of French or three of English! But Goethe chose to keep his salary and position in the court, and to overlook the power of organized society over the individual soul. When the time came for the German people to revolt against Napoleon he had no word of encouragement--quite the contrary, he pronounced it folly. Nor had he any word of protest against the cruelties of the Holy Alliance. Yet, see the inconsistency! His greatest work is “Faust,” a study of the problem of duty and happiness. Faust tries pleasure, he tries learning for learning’s sake, and it brings him nothing. In the end he accepts useful service as the only ideal, and the draining of swamps and cultivating of land as a moral occupation. But what is the use of such work, if statesmen are permitted to make war, and to destroy in a few hours all that generations have built up? You may believe in aristocratic politics or in democratic politics; but how can you believe in the possibility of human happiness without wisdom in statesmen?