he 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