The second part of Faust has been a battlefield of controversy since its publication, and demands fuller attention.  Its fate may be compared with that of the latest works of Beethoven.  For a long time it was regarded as impossible to understand, and as not worth understanding, the production of a great artist whose faculties had been impaired by age.  By degrees it has, by careful labor, become intelligible to us, and the conviction is growing that it is the deepest and most important work of the author’s life.

He had much to darken his latter days.  His wife had died in 1816.  He felt her loss bitterly.  The Duchess Amalia had died eight years before.  He had now to undergo bitterer experiences when he was less able to bear them.  Frau von Stein, with whom he had renewed his friendship, if not his love, died in January, 1827; and in June, 1828, he lost the companion of his youth, the Grand Duke Karl August, who died suddenly, away from Weimar.

We must pass to the closing scenes.  On Thursday, March 15, 1832, he spent his last cheerful and happy day.  He awoke the next morning with a chill.  From this he gradually recovered, and on Monday was so much better that he designed to begin his regular work on the next day.  But in the middle of the night he woke with a deathly coldness, which extended from his hands over his body, and which took many hours to subdue.  It then appeared that the lungs were attacked, and that there was no hope of his recovery.  Goethe did not anticipate death.  He sat fully clothed in his arm chair, made attempts to reach his study, spoke confidently of his recovery, and of the walks he would take in the fine April days.  His daughter-in-law Ottilie tended him faithfully.  On the morning of the 22d his strength gradually left him.  He sat slumbering in his arm chair, holding Ottilie’s hand.  Her name was constantly on his lips.  His mind occasionally wandered, at one time to his beloved Schiller, at another to a fair female head with black curls, some passion of his youth.  His last words were an order to his servant to open the second shutter to let in more light.  After this he traced with his forefinger letters in the air.  At half-past eleven in the day he drew himself, without any sign of pain, into the left corner of his arm chair, and went so peacefully to sleep that it was long before the watchers knew that his spirit was really gone.  He is buried in the grand-ducal vault, where the bones of Schiller are also laid.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY TRUTH AND FICTION RELATING TO MY LIFE

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

As a preface to the present work, which, perhaps, more than another, requires one, I adduce the letter of a friend, by which so serious an undertaking was occasioned.