To Goethe the legendary literature of his nation had been familiar from his boyhood.  Very early in life, and several years before the publication of Maler Mueller’s spirited drama, his mind was powerfully impressed by the Faust-fable, and the greater part of the present fragmentary poem was already written and ready for print when Mueller’s first sketch, under the title, “Situations in the Life of Dr. Faustus,” appeared (1776).  As the entire poetry of Goethe was more or less autobiographical,—­that is, as all his poetical productions reflect, to a certain extent, his own personal sensations, trials, and experiences,—­he fused himself and his inner life into the mould of Faustus, with all his craving for knowledge, his passionate love of Nature, his unsatisfied longings and powerful temptations, adhering closely in all external action to the popular story, though of course in a symbolic spirit Goethe had, as he tells us himself, a happy faculty of delivering himself by poetical production, as well of all the partly imaginary, partly morbid cares and doubts which troubled his mind, as of the real and acute sufferings which tormented him, for a certain period, even to agony.  Love, doubt, sorrow, passion, remorse—­all found an egress from his soul into a poem, a novel, a parable, a dramatic character, or some other form of poetical expression.  He felt as if eased of a burden, after having thus given his feelings body and shape.  Thus his works became his history.  “Faust,” in its two parts, is the production of his lifetime.  Conceived in early youth, worked out in manhood, completed in old age, it became a vehicle for all the various commotions of his existence.  There is no other poem which contains such a diversity of thought and feeling, such a variety of sentences, pictures, scenes, and situations.  For enlarging on the poetical value of this incomparable work this is not the place.  Closely as Goethe has followed up the popular legend, it is emphatically and entirely his own production, because it contains his complete self.

Nearly a quarter of a century passed before this extraordinary poem was followed by its second part.  It is not difficult to trace in this continuation, published only after the death of the aged poet, the few scenes which may have been composed contemporarily with or soon after the first part; but that the whole is conceived and executed in a totally different spirit not even the most unconditional admirers of Goethe’s genius will deny.  There is no doubt that he regarded his “Faust” only as a beginning, and always contemplated a continuation.  The role of Dr. Faustus, the popular magician, was only half-played.  Its most brilliant part, his intercourse with the great of the earth and the heroes of the past, had not yet commenced.  But as, in the course of advancing life, the poet’s views and ideas changed, the mirror of his soul reflected an altered world to him; and as the second part of “Faust” is hardly less an image of himself than the first, it is not unnatural that it is as different from the latter as the Goethe the septuagenarian was from Goethe the youth.