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.
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