Goethe himself has told us how, as he proceeded in the writing of the play, his interest in his hero gradually flagged.

In depicting the charms of Adelheid, he says, he fell in love with her himself, and his interest in her fate gradually overmastered him.

In truth, it is in scenes where Gottfried is not the principal actor that any originality in the play is to be found, for in these scenes Goethe was drawing from his own experience and recording emotions that had distracted himself.

In the unstable Weislingen he represents a weakness of his own nature of which he was himself well aware.

"You are a chameleon," Adelheid tells Weislingen; and, as we have seen, Goethe so described himself.