German public; he saw that he must wait for the growth of the taste by
which he was to be understood and enjoyed. Matters were hardly made
better by his taking Christiane Vulpius into his house as his unwedded
wife. This step, which shocked Weimar society--except the duke and
Herder--had the effect of ending his unwholesome relation to Frau von
Stein, who was getting old and peevish. The character of Christiane
has often been pictured too harshly. She was certainly not her
husband's intellectual peer--he would have looked long for a wife of
that grade--and she became a little too fond of wine. On the other
hand, she was affectionate, devoted, true, and by no means lacking in
mental gifts. She and Goethe were happy together and faithful to
each other.

For several years after his return from Italy Goethe wrote nothing
that is of much importance in the history of his literary life. He
devoted himself largely to scientific studies in plant and animal
morphology and the theory of color. His discovery of the
intermaxillary bone in the human skull, and his theory that the
lateral organs of a plant are but successive phases of the leaf, have
given him an assured if modest place in the history of the development
hypothesis. On the other hand, his long and laborious effort to refute
Newton's theory of the composition of white light is now generally
regarded as a misdirection of energy. In his _Roman Elegies_ (1790) he
struck a note of pagan sensuality. The pensive distichs, telling of
the wanton doings of Amor amid the grandeur that was Rome, were a
little shocking in their frank portraiture of the emancipated flesh.
The outbreak of violence in France seemed to him nothing but madness
and folly, since he did not see the real Revolution, but only the
Paris Terror.