According to his own
account, he owed a double debt to Herder--a determining influence on
his character, and an equally determining influence on his
intellectual development. Till he met Herder he had been treated as a
youthful genius, as a "conquering lord," whose eccentricities were
only a proof of his originality. Very different was the measure he
received from Herder, who showed no mercy for "whatever of
self-complacency, egotism, vanity, pride and presumption was latent or
active" in him. Herder, he says elsewhere, "exercised such a
blighting influence on me that I began to doubt my own powers."
Whether or not Goethe learned from Herder the lesson of modesty
regarding his own gifts, it is the truth that of all the sons of
genius none has been freer than Goethe was in his maturer years from
every form of vanity and self-consciousness.
It is on his intellectual debt to Herder, however, that Goethe dwells
most emphatically in his account of their personal intercourse. Daily
and even hourly, he says, Herder's conversation was a summons to new
points of view. Poetry was the subject in which both had a common
interest, and from Herder Goethe learned to regard poetry "in another
sense" from that in which he had hitherto regarded it.
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