However, the public is very much more concerned to have matter than
form; and for this very reason it is deficient in any high degree of
culture. The public shows its preference in this respect in the most
laughable way when it comes to deal with poetry; for there it devotes
much trouble to the task of tracking out the actual events or personal
circumstances in the life of the poet which served as the occasion of
his various works; nay, these events and circumstances come in the end
to be of greater importance than the works themselves; and rather than
read Goethe himself, people prefer to read what has been written about
him, and to study the legend of Faust more industriously than the
drama of that name. And when Bürger declared that "people would write
learned disquisitions on the question, Who Leonora really was," we
find this literally fulfilled in Goethe's case; for we now possess a
great many learned disquisitions on Faust and the legend attaching to
him. Study of this kind is, and remains, devoted to the material of
the drama alone. To give such preference to the matter over the form,
is as though a man were to take a fine Etruscan vase, not to admire
its shape or coloring, but to make a chemical analysis of the clay and
paint of which it is composed.

The attempt to produce an effect by means of the material employed--an
attempt which panders to this evil tendency of the public--is most to
be condemned in branches of literature where any merit there may be
lies expressly in the form; I mean, in poetical work. For all that, it
is not rare to find bad dramatists trying to fill the house by means
of the matter about which they write. For example, authors of this
kind do not shrink from putting on the stage any man who is in any way
celebrated, no matter whether his life may have been entirely devoid
of dramatic incident; and sometimes, even, they do not wait until the
persons immediately connected with him are dead.