Goethe has recorded just as minutely the origin of his _Sorrows of Werther_. He traces the book back to his love for Charlotte Buff, the betrothed of a friend of his. He resolved to give free play to the idiosyncrasies of his inner nature. He describes how he had day dreams and how he held mental dialogues with different people. He then was led to record these fancies on paper. The substances of his novel "were first talked over with several individuals in such imaginary dialogues, and only later in the process of composition itself were made to appear as if directed to one single friend and sympathiser." He became weary of life, and had suicidal thoughts. He then heard of the suicide of his friend Jerusalem, who had been in love with a married woman. Goethe saw that he was really in the same position as his friend; his loved one belonged to another. "On the instant," Goethe goes on, "the plan of Werther was formed, and the whole drew together, and became a solid mass. I was naturally led to breathe into the work I had in hand all the warmth which makes no distinction between the imaginary and the actual." He wrote the book in four weeks. "I had written the little volume, almost unconsciously like a somnambulist." As a result he freed himself from his suffering. The artist stepped in and cured the man. Goethe illustrates the theory that artistic creation acts as a self-cure of a developing neurosis. "By this composition," Goethe wrote, "more than by any other, I had freed myself from that stormy element in which ... I had been so violently tossed to and fro. I felt as if I had made a general confession and was once more free and happy, and justified in beginning a new life." The public thought that the book was solely the history of young Jerusalem's tragic love affair, and did not altogether understand that the cry was Goethe's own. His mental dialogues and the longings of his inner spirit found expression in this novel. His sufferings were undecipherable by the public, he tells us, because he worked in obscurity. He also gave the attributes of several women to Lotte, and hence several ladies claimed to have been the original models. Thus we see how two great love stories were created almost unconsciously by the authors. Day dreams and actual love; the longing for reality, for lack of which imaginary situations were created; and the putting down in the form of letters and dialogues the ideas and emotions that burst forth, all led to the shaping of the literary product. III Psychoanalysis sheds some light on the nature of genius, and especially literary genius. But it does not define it within hard and fast lines.