The years 1773-1775 were for Goethe a time of high emotional tension, from which he sought relief in rapid, desultory, and multifarious writing.  Exquisite songs, musical comedies of a sentimental tinge, humorous and satiric skits in dramatic form, prose tragedy of passionate error, and poetic tragedy of titanic revolt—­all these and more welled up from a sub-conscious spring of feeling, taking little counsel of the sober intellect.  Several minor productions were left unfinished and were afterwards published in fragmentary form.  Such is the case with Prometheus, a splendid fragment, in which we get a glimpse of the Titan battling, as the friend of man, against the ever-living gods.  Of the works completed and published at this time, aside from Goetz and Werther, the most notable were Clavigo and Stella, prose tragedies in which a fickle lover meets with condign punishment.  Another prose tragedy, Egmont, with its hero conceived as a “demonic” nature borne on to his doom by his own buoyancy of spirit, was nearly finished.  Most important of all, a considerable portion of Faust, which was to be its author’s great life-work, was “stormed out” during these early years at Frankfurt.

The legendary Faust is presented as a bad man who sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of power and pleasure, gets what he bargained for, and in the end goes to perdition.  Young Goethe conceived his hero differently:  not as a bad man on the way to hell, and not—­at first—­as a good man on the way to heaven.  He thought of him rather as a towering personality passionately athirst for transcendental knowledge and universal experience; as a man whose nature contained the very largest possibilities both for good and for evil.  It is probable that, when he began to write, Goethe did not intend to anticipate the judgment of God upon Faust’s career.  The essence of his dramatic plan was to carry his hero through a lifetime of varied experience, letting him sin and suffer grandly, and at last to give him something to do which would seem worth having lived for.  After the going down of the curtain, in all probability, he was to be left in the hands of the Eternal Pardoner.  Later in life, as we shall see, Goethe decided not only to save his hero, but to make his salvation a part of the dramatic action.

The close of the year 1775 brought a momentous change in Goethe’s life and prospects.  On the invitation of the young duke Karl August, who had met him and taken a liking to him, he went to visit the Weimar court, not expecting to stay more than a few weeks.  But the duke was so pleased with his gifted and now famous guest that he presently decided to keep him in Weimar, if possible, by making him a member of the Council of State.  Goethe was the more willing to remain, since he detested his law practise, and his income from authorship was pitifully small.  Moreover, he saw in the boyish, impulsive, sport-loving prince a sterling nature that