had come true, and he purposed to show in detail how everything had
happened; that is, how his literary personality had evolved amid the
environing conditions. He conceived himself as a phenomenon to be
explained. That he called his memoir _Poetry and Truth_ was perhaps an
error of judgment, since the title has been widely misunderstood. For
Goethe poetry was not the antithesis of truth, but a higher species of
truth--the actuality as seen by the selecting, combining, and
harmonizing imagination. In themselves, he would have said, the facts
of a man's life are meaningless, chaotic, discordant: it is the poet's
office to put them into the crucible of his spirit and give them forth
as a significant and harmonious whole. The "poetry" of Goethe's
autobiography--by far the best of autobiographies in the German
language--must not be taken to imply concealment, perversion,
substitution, or anything of that gross kind.

[Illustration: GOETHE'S MONUMENT IN ROME. (SCULPTOR, EBERLEIN)
Presented to the City of Rome by the German Emperor (From Seidel's
_Der Kaiser and die Kunst_)]

It lies in the very style of the book and is a part of its author's
method of self-revelation. That he devotes so much space to the
seemingly transient and unimportant love-affairs of his youth is only
his way of recognizing that the poet-soul is born of love and
nourished by love. He felt that these fleeting amorosities were a part
of the natural history of his inner being.

And even in the serene afternoon of his life lovely woman often
disturbed his soul, just as in the days of his youth. But the poetic
expression of his feeling gradually became less simple and direct: he
liked to embroider it with musing reflections and exotic fancies