As we have already said, the charm and the very essence of his creative act is memory. Like every other element of man's psychological makeup, memory is a live and slippery business. Even in the sphere of scholarship, particularly in history, this brings us face to face with a great number of most interesting problems. Everybody knows that the evidence of an eyewitness, a life history, or any other kind of document are misleading and inclined to be subjective. In this field, .scholarship demands that a comparison should be made with other eyewitness accounts and, from time to time we are afflicted by the diabolically sceptical assumption that, even by comparing evidence and even on the basis of documentary material, it is still not possible to reconstruct what really happened, but only to give an approximate portrayal of it.
Literary reminiscences are something quite different.
They can afford to brush aside the scholarly sediment of the memorial genre and to associate themselves with that wide stratum of writing which Goethe so felicitously defined as Dichtung und Wahrheit. The title of this, the greatest book of organised reminiscences which, thanks to Goethe, humanity possesses, has been the subject of some argument. It has been maintained that the word Dichtung in the title meant all that part of the book in which the author was writing about his work, whereas Wahrheit covered that devoted to a straightforward account of events. But this is not altogether so. Goethe does not deny that in his memoirs his creative life has been given a specific interpretation or that he is not always accurate in his handling of facts because, very often, the inner logic and the meaning behind his reminiscences were more important to him than the effort to reconstruct the exact truth through the misty patches of memory.