music makes the reader feel as if in a holy temple.  And above all witcheries of detail there is one capital witchery, belonging to Greek statues more than to other works of human cunning—­the perfect unity of impression produced by the whole, so that nothing in it seems made, but all to grow; nothing is superfluous, but all is in organic dependence; nothing is there for detached effect, but the whole is effect.  The poem fills the mind; beautiful as the separate passages are, admirers seldom think of passages, they think of the wondrous whole.”

But may we not deepen and spiritualize our conception of the drama and say that in Iphigenia, Goethe created a new dramatic genus, the soul-drama—­the first psychological drama of modern literature, the result of ethical and artistic development through two milleniums?  Surely a Greek dramatist of the first rank, come to life again in Goethe’s age and entering into the heritage of this development, would have modernized both subject and form in the same way.

Most intimate is the relation of Iphigenia to Goethe’s inner life, and this relation best illumines the spiritual import of the drama.  Like his Torquato Tasso, it springs entirely from conditions and experiences of the early Weimar years and those just preceding.  It was conceived and the first prose version written early in 1779; it received its final metrical form December, 1786—­in Rome indeed, but it owed to Italy only a higher artistic finish.

In his autobiography Goethe has revealed to us that his works are fragments of a great confession.  Moods of his pre-Weimar storm and stress vibrate in his Iphigenia—­feverish unrest, defiance of conventionality, Titanic trust in his individual genius, self-reproach, and remorse for guilt toward those he loved,—­Friederike and Lili.  Thus feeling his inner conflicts to be like the sufferings of Orestes, he wrote in a letter, August, 1775, shortly after returning to Frankfurt from his first Swiss journey:  “Perhaps the invisible scourge of the Eumenides will soon drive me out again from my fatherland.”

In November, 1775, Goethe went to Weimar, and there he found redemption from his unrest and dejection in the friendship of Frau von Stein.  Her beneficent influence effected his new-birth into calm self-control and harmony of spirit.  On August 7, 1779, Goethe wrote in his diary:  “May the idea of purity, extending even to the morsel I take into my mouth, become ever more luminous in me!” If Orestes is Goethe, Iphigenia is Frau von Stein; and in the personal sense the theme of the drama is the restoration of the poet to spiritual purity by the influence of noble womanhood.

But there is a larger, universally human sense.  Such healing of Orestes is typically human; noble womanhood best realizes the ideal of the truly human (Humanitaet).  In a way that transcends understanding, one pure, strong human personality may by its influence restore moral vigor and bring peace and hope to other souls rent by remorse and sunk in despair.  This Goethe himself expressed as the central thought of this drama in the lines: