in uninterrupted, productive activity.  He has discovered the final value in work.  But the long-forgotten heaven opens and the love of his youth comes to meet him.  Stripped of everything earthly, a divine being, she still loves him and shows him the way to salvation, presented under the aspect of the Eternal-Feminine—­exactly as in the Divine Comedy.  There must be a reason for the uniformity of feeling in the case of the two greatest subjective poets of Europe (Shakespeare was greater than either, but he was quite impersonal), for the logical possibility that Goethe imitated Dante, and borrowed his supreme values from him, cannot be maintained for a moment.  Their mutual characteristic is the longing for metaphysical love.  When these great lovers experienced for the first time the sensation of love, their hearts were thrown open to the universe, they had the first powerful experience of eternity, and they became poets.  The first love and the cosmic consciousness of genius were simultaneously present, they were one in their inmost soul. (With the philosopher it is a different matter, for to him the love of woman is not fraught with the same tremendous significance.) This experience of first love, awakening the consciousness of eternity, remained to them for all time interwoven with religion and metaphysics—­interwoven, that is to say, with all transcendent longing.  And though the aged Faust had believed it to be buried in the dark night of forgotten things, it was still alive in his inmost heart, and the dying man’s vision of the Divine took colour and shape from it.

The source of both great poems was the poet’s will to assimilate the world and recreate it, impregnated with his own soul; the secret motive powers were the mystic love of eternity and the love of woman which had outgrown this world and aspired to the next.  To Goethe, thirsting to give a concrete shape to his yearning, God and eternity were too intangible, too remote and incomprehensible—­but the woman he loved with religio-erotic intensity was familiar to him.  The Eternal-Feminine is thus not fraught with incomprehensibility, but is rather, and this necessarily, the final conclusion.  For this conclusion is a profession of metaphysical eroticism, that is to say, the Eternal-Feminine in contradistinction to the Transitory-Feminine.  Both Dante, the devout son of the Middle Ages, and Goethe, the champion of modern culture, demand, in virtue of the inherent right of their genius, the consummation of their mystic yearning for love in another life, and achieve the creation of the divine woman.  Precisely because Margaret was nothing but a little provincial, Goethe could sublimate her into a new being, for the greater the tension between reality and the vision of the soul, the greater is the task and the more gigantic the creative power which such a task may develop.  It has been said that, in this scene, Goethe revealed leanings towards Catholicism.