Benjamin’s essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ (1924–5) provides an exemplary piece of such criticism, whilst developing the concept further by situating it more explicitly within the context of history. Here, criticism is charged with the task of revealing what Benjamin calls the “truth content of a work of art”, which is intimately bound up with its “material content” at the beginning of the work’s history (SW 1, 297). In contrast to mere commentary—which proceeds no further than a consideration of these now historically anachronistic features of its material content—the aim of criticism is the destruction of this outer layer in order for the work’s inner truth content to be grasped. The fundamental philological error of commentary is merely to situate the work in relation to the “lived experience [Erlebnis]” of its author’s biographical life (exemplified in Friedrich Gundolf’s 1916 biography of Goethe), instead of the broader medium of historical reception through which it has passed down to the contemporary critic. Benjamin’s Romantic theory of immanent criticism insists that the work must contain its own inner criterion, such that the critic proceeds from the work itself and not from the life of the author (SW 1, 321). Beginning, therefore, with the odd and striking features of Goethe’s work that come to preoccupy later critics, Benjamin examines how these are derived from techniques borrowed from the distinct form of the novella. This novella-like construction grants the Elective Affinities its strange, fable-like quality, which differentiates it from the naturalism of a typical novel. It is this mythical layer, as the real material content of the work, which expresses the presence of a pantheistic and “daemonic” attitude toward nature in Goethe’s work.