Many hours of the best years of his life were to be spent in laboriously practising an art in which he was doomed to mediocrity; and it must remain a riddle that one, who like Goethe was so curiously studious of his own self-development, should so long and so blindly have misunderstood his own gifts.[36] [Footnote 33: "Das Beduerfnis meiner Natur zwingt mich zu einer vermannigfaltigten Thaetigkeit," he wrote of himself in his thirty-second year.] [Footnote 34: When, in his thirty-sixth year, Goethe renewed his acquaintance with Oeser, he wrote of him to Frau von Stein: "C'est comme si cet homme ne devroit pas mourir, tant ses talents paroissent toujours aller en s'augmentant."] [Footnote 35: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i.

179.] [Footnote 36: In later years he consoled himself with the reflection that the time he had spent on the technicalities of art was not wholly lost, as he had thus acquired powers of observation which were valuable to him both as a poet and as a man of science.] It may partly explain his addiction to art that the poetical productions which he had brought from Frankfort, and which had been applauded by the circle of his friends there, did not meet with the approval of the critics in Leipzig.

We have seen how sharply Frau Boehme commented on their shortcomings, but he was specially disheartened by the severe criticism passed on one of his poems by Clodius, the professor of literature.

"I am cured of the folly of thinking myself a poet,"[37] he wrote to his sister about a year after his arrival in Leipzig.

Some six months later he writes to her in a more hopeful spirit: "Since I am wholly without pride, I may trust my inner conviction, which tells me that I possess some of the qualities required in a poet, and that by diligence I may even become one."[38] In his Autobiography and elsewhere Goethe has spoken at length of the disadvantages under which youthful geniuses laboured at the period when he began his literary career.[39] As Germany then existed, there was no national feeling to inspire great themes, no standard of taste, and no worthy models for imitation.