In these trivial exercises he was practising the craft
which is so consummately displayed in the original fragments of
_Faust_.
[Footnote 136: Ich bin wie immer der nachdenkliche Leichtsinn und die
warme Kaelte.--Goethe to Sophie von la Roche, September 1st, 1780.]
The first of these sallies--_Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern,
Ein Schoenbartspiel_--was written in March, 1773, and was sent as a
birthday gift to Merck--an appropriate recipient. Written in doggerel
verse, which Goethe took over from the shoemaker poet Hans Sachs, the
piece brings before us the motley crowd of persons who frequented the
fairs of the time, each vociferating the cheapness and excellence of
his own wares. The humour of the spectacle, however, is that the
_dramatis personae_ were individuals recognisable by contemporaries in
traits which now escape us. Goethe himself appears in the guise of a
doctor, Herder as a captain of the gipsies, and his bride, Caroline
Flachsland, as a milkmaid. The satire is directed equally against the
idiosyncrasies of individuals and against the follies of the time, the
sentimentalism which Goethe himself had not escaped, but of which he
saw the inanity, the petty jealousies of authors which had also come
within his personal experience.
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