, there
were external promptings to his choice of the subject which is the
main theme of the fragments in question. The religious world of
Germany at this period was distracted by the controversies of warring
theologians. There were the rationalists, who would bring all
religion, natural and revealed, to the bar of human reason; there were
the dogmatists, who thought religion could never rest on a secure
foundation except it were embodied in an array of definite formulas;
and, lastly, there were the pietists, or mystics, for whom religion
was a matter of pious feeling independent of all dogma. In the
spectacle of these Christians reprobating each others' creeds Goethe
saw a theme for a moral satire which, fragment as it is, takes its
place with the most powerful efforts of his genius.

[Footnote 173: By Felix Mendelssohn.]

[Footnote 174: See above, p. 65.]

Yet, as originally conceived, _Der Ewige Jude_ was apparently to have
been worked out along other lines. What this original conception was,
Goethe tells in some detail in his Autobiography; and, as it is there
expounded, we see the scope of a poem which, if the power apparent in
the existing fragments had gone to the making of it, would have taken
its place with _Faust_ among the great imaginative works of human
genius. The theme of the poem was to be the Wandering Jew, with whose
legend Goethe was familiar from chap-books he had read in childhood.
The poem was to open with an account of the circumstances in which the
curse of Cain was incurred by Ahasuerus, the name assigned in the
legend to the Wandering Jew. Ahasuerus was to be represented as a
shoemaker of the type of Hans Sachs--a kind of Jewish Socrates who
freely plied his wit in putting searching questions to the casual
passers-by. Recognised as an original, persons of all ranks and
opinions, even the Sadducees and Pharisees, would stop by the way and
engage in talk with him. He was to be specially interested in Jesus,
with whom he was to hold frequent conversations, but whose idealism
his matter-of-fact nature was incapable of understanding. When, in the
teeth of his protestations, Jesus pursued his mission and was finally
condemned to death, Ahasuerus would only have hard words for his
folly. Judas was then to be represented as entering the workshop and
explaining that his act of treachery had been intended to force Jesus
to become the national deliverer and declare himself king, but Judas
receives no