Chapter XII

Not the interpretation, but the stimulus to the experience of the soul, was the important result that came to me from my work upon the fairy-tales. This stimulus later influenced my mental life even in the shaping of the mystery dramas which I afterward wrote. As to that part of my work which related directly to Goethe, I could gain but little from these fairy-tales. For it seemed to me that Goethe in their composition had grown beyond himself in his world-conception, as if impelled by a half-conscious life of the soul. In this way there came about for me a serious difficulty. I could set forth my interpretation of Goethe for Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur only in the style in which I had commenced this; but this in itself did not suffice me at all. For I said to myself that, while Goethe was writing the “fairy-tales,” he had, as it were, looked across the boundary and had seen into the spiritual world. But nevertheless what he wrote about natural processes gave no attention to this glimpse. Therefore he could not be interpreted on the basis of this insight.