ABSTRACT
For Goethe the French Revolution did not begin only in 1791 or 1789; with his hyper-sensitive organism he felt the earth tremors earlier than did others, and, for this reason and after his own fashion, he was also finished with it earlier. It is characteristic of him that he is not concerned with the political ideals, and still less with the catchwords, of the day; his starting point is people and events. Freedom, and its counterpart tyranny, have little significance for him, and he scarcely ever uses the words; when his companions of Sturm und Drang used to indulge in wild outbursts on these themes, he merely smiled ironically. The people, as a concept, is something he regards with complete indifference. In his wanderings he has gained a great respect for the ‘simple people’ that he has met, and in the course of his government activities he has learned to view with alarm the fact that the Court, of which after all he is a member, is in reality consuming the very ‘marrow’ of the country. Occasionally he talks for hours at a time with the bookbinder, whom he has engaged to bind the volumes of his correspondence. In this way, in direct contact with them and in individual cases, he can understand the people; but for the masses, the hoi polloi, he has no sympathy, and regards them as a menace.
