to be presented as temporarily wandering in the dark; as a man who had gone grievously wrong in passionate error, but was essentially “good” by virtue of his aspiring nature, and hence, in the Lord’s fulness of time, was to be led out into the light and saved.  The First Part, ending with the heart-rending death of Margaret in her prison-cell, and leaving Faust in an agony of remorse, was published in 1808.  Faust’s redemption, by enlarged experience of life and especially by his symbolic union with the Greek Queen of Beauty, was reserved for the Second Part.

[Illustration:  MONUMENT TO GOETHE (Berlin 1880) Sculptor, Fritz
 Schaper]

The other more notable works of this period are Hermann and Dorothea, a delightful poem in dactylic hexameters, picturing a bit of German still life against the sinister background of the French Revolution, and the Natural Daughter, which was planned to body forth, in the form of a dramatic trilogy in blank verse, certain phases of Goethe’s thinking about the upheaval in France.  In the former he appears once more as a poet of the plain people, with an eye and a heart for their ways and their outlook upon life.  Everybody likes Hermann and Dorothea.  On the other hand, the Natural Daughter is disappointing, and not merely because it is a fragment.  (Only the first part of the intended trilogy was written.) Goethe had now convinced himself that the function of art is to present the typical.  Accordingly the characters appear as types of humanity divested of all that is accidental or peculiar to the individual.  The most of them have not even a name.  The consequence is that, notwithstanding the splendid verse and the abounding wisdom of the speeches, the personages do not seem to be made of genuine human stuff.  As a great thinker’s comment on the Revolution the Natural Daughter is almost negligible.

The decade that followed the death of Schiller was for Germany a time of terrible trial, during which Goethe pursued the even tenor of his way as a poet and man of science.  He had little sympathy with the national uprising against Napoleon, whom he looked on as the invincible subduer of the hated Revolution.  From the point of view of our modern nationalism, which was just then entering on its world-transforming career, his conduct was unpatriotic.  But let him at least be rightly understood.  It was not that he lacked sympathy for the German people, but he misjudged and underestimated the new forces that were coming into play.  As the son of an earlier age he could only conceive a people’s welfare as the gift of a wise ruler.  He thought of politics as the affair of the great.  He hated war and all eruptive violence, being convinced that good would come, not by such means, but by enlightenment, self-control and attending to one’s work in one’s sphere.  To the historian Luden he said in 1813: