“What is chiefly needed for Tasso,” replied Goethe, “is that one should be no longer a child, and should have been in good society.  A young man of good family, with sufficient mind and delicacy, and also with enough outward culture, such as will be produced by intercourse with accomplished men of the higher class, will not find’ Tasso difficult.”

The conversation turning upon Egmont, he said, “I wrote Egmont in 1775—­fifty years ago.  I adhered closely to history, and strove to be as accurate as possible.  Ten years afterwards, when I was in Rome, I read in the newspapers that the revolutionary scenes in the Nether lands there described were exactly repeated.  I saw from this that the world remains ever the same, and that my picture must have some life in it.”

Amid this and similar conversation, the hour for the theatre had come.  We arose, and Goethe dismissed us in a friendly manner.

As we went homeward, I asked Mr. H. how he was pleased with Goethe.  “I have never,” said he, “seen a man who, with all his attractive gentleness, had so much native dignity.  However he may condescend, he is always the great man.”

Professor Riemer was announced, Rehbein took leave, and Riemer sat down with us.  The conversation still turned on the motives of the Servian love-poems.  Riemer was acquainted with the topic, and made the remark that, according to the table of contents given above, not only could poems be made, but that the same motives had been already used by the Germans, without any knowledge that they had been treated in Servia.  He mentioned some poems of his own, and I mentioned some poems by Goethe, which had occurred to me during the reading.

“The world,” said Goethe, “remains always the same; situations are repeated; one people lives, loves, and feels like another; why should not one poet write like another?  The situations of life are alike; why, then, should those of poems be unlike?”

“This very similarity in life and sensation,” said Riemer, “makes us all able to appreciate the poetry of other nations.  If this were not the case, we should never know what foreign poems were about.”

“I am, therefore,” said I, “always surprised at the learned, who seem to suppose that poetizing proceeds not from life to the poem, but from the book to the poem.  They are always saying, ’He got this here; he got that there.’  If, for instance, they find passages in Shakespeare which are also to be found in the ancients, they say he must have taken them from the ancients.  Thus there is a situation in Shakespeare, where, on the sight of a beautiful girl, the parents are congratulated who call her daughter, and the youth who will lead her home as his bride.  And because the same thing occurs in Homer, Shakespeare, forsooth, has taken it from Homer.  How odd!  As if one had to go so far for such things, and did not have them before one’s eyes, feel them and utter them every day.”  “Ah, yes,” said Goethe, “it is very ridiculous.”