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. I do not pretend to deny
it offhand, but I must insist on these leanings being understood in the
sense of my premises. Goethe took from tradition those elements which
were able to materialise his spiritual life and gave them a new
interpretation. We are justified in believing that he accepted nothing
but what was conformable to his nature; the Madonna represented his
profoundest feeling and, like Dante (I attribute the greatest importance
to this), he created a new deity, moulded in the shape of his first
love, and placed it by the side of the universal Queen of Heaven, the
Madonna of the Catholic Church, transformed by love.

The emotional life of both poets agrees fundamentally. They differ not
so much in feeling as in thought and in faith. Dante possessed
unshakable faith in the reality of his visions; eternal love in the
shape of Beatrice was awaiting him; his vision was pure, eternal truth.
The vision of Goethe, on the other hand, was poetic longing, tragical,
because the vision of the transcendent came to the modern poet only in
rare hours. Where Dante possessed, Goethe must seek, strive and err.

The deifying love of woman is, as we have seen, the extreme development
of the second stage, in which sexual impulse and spiritual love are
strictly separated, in which man despises and fights his natural
instinct, or abandons himself to it--which is the same in
principle--while his soul, worshipping love, soars heavenward. This
dualism of feeling corresponds to the persistent