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What is noteworthy in the serious passages of Goethe's Frankfort
letters is the advance in maturity and self-knowledge which they
reveal when compared with those written from Leipzig. Penetrative
remarks on men and things, such as give its value to his later
correspondence, now begin to fall from his pen by the way. He
consciously takes the measure of his own powers, and forms clear
judgments on the literary and artistic tastes of the time. The poems
which he had written in Leipzig now seemed to him "trifling, cold,
dry, and superficial," and, as in Leipzig he had made a holocaust of
his boyish poems, so he made a second holocaust of those produced in
Leipzig. In a long letter addressed (February 13th, 1769) to
Friederike Oeser he thus expounds the artistic ideals at which he had
then arrived: "A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher, and he
who has laboriously thumbed the pages of many books regards with
contempt the simple, easy book of nature; and yet nothing is true
except what is simple--certainly a sorry recommendation for true
wisdom. Let him who goes the way of simplicity go it in quiet. Modesty
and circumspection are the essential characteristics of him who would
tread this path, and every step will bring its reward.
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