Their intercourse was not an unmixed pleasure for either. Herder's
mordant humour and spirit of contradiction were a daily trial to
Goethe's temper, and he describes his feelings of alternating
attraction and repulsion as a wholly new experience in his life.
Herder, who had known Diderot and D'Alembert and Lessing, appears,
indeed, to have treated Goethe as an undisciplined boy, spoilt by
flattery, with no serious purpose in life, inconsequent and
irresponsible.[76] Nor does he seem to have been specially impressed
by any promise in the youth who was so completely to eclipse him in
the eyes of the world. In his letters from Strassburg he does not even
mention Goethe's name; and, when he subsequently referred to him, it
was in terms he might have applied to any clever and confident youth.
"Goethe," he wrote, "is at bottom a good fellow, only somewhat
superficial and sparrow-like,[77] faults with which I constantly taxed
him." If Herder's moods frequently jarred on Goethe, it is evident
that the experience was mutual. The physical and mental restlessness,
which is suggested by the epithet "sparrow-like," and which was noted
by others as characteristic of Goethe at this period, could not fail
to irritate one like Herder, naturally grave, sobered by hard
experience, and then suffering from a painful and serious ailment.
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