and could easily advance further proof of their similarity, but I
will keep within the limits of the last scene which contains the
totality of metaphysico-erotic yearning, and I contend that it is very
remarkable that a lifetime after the composition of Margaret, Faust (and
with him Goethe) very old, very wise, and a little cold, having had
love-affairs with demi-goddesses, and having finally renounced the love
of woman, found his mission and his happiness 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