[44] The play is not without
humour, and the different characters are vivaciously presented, but
the blindest admirers of the master may well regret, as they mostly
have regretted, that such a work should have come from his hands. The
most charitable construction we can put on the graceless production is
that Goethe, out of his abnormal impressionability, for the time being
deliberately assumed the tone of cynical indifference with which he
had become familiar in his intercourse with his friend Behrisch.
[Footnote 43: The exact time and place of its composition is
uncertain, but Goethe's own testimony seems to indicate that it was
mainly written in Leipzig, in 1769. It was first published in 1787,
with some modifications, which affect only the form.]
[Footnote 44: With a fatuity into which he occasionally fell, Goethe
in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ remarks that his two plays are an
illustration of that most Christian text, "Let him who is without sin
among you cast the first stone."]
In direct connection with the shorter poems which Goethe wrote in
Leipzig, there is a passage in his Autobiography which has perhaps
been more frequently quoted than any other, and which, according as we
interpret it, must materially influence our judgment at once on his
character and his genius.
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