d
sold himself to the devil, and, as a common spectacle in Germany, he
must have seen the puppet-show in which the story of Faust was
dramatised for the people. According to his own statement, it was in
1769 that the conception of a poem, based on the Faust legend, first
suggested itself to him, but it was during the years 1774 and 1775
that most of the scenes of the _Urfaust_ were written. Both by himself
and others there are references during these years to his work on
_Faust_, and as late as the middle of September, 1775, he tells the
Countess Stolberg that, while at Offenbach with Lili, he had composed
another scene.

What attracted Goethe to the legend of Faust was that it presented a
framework into which he could dramatically work his own life's
experience, equally in the world of thought and feeling. The story
that depicted a passionate searcher for truth, rebelling against the
limits imposed by the place assigned to man in the nature of things,
who at all costs dared to burst these limits in order to enjoy life in
all its fulness--this story had a suggestiveness that appealed to
Goethe's profoundest consciousness. "I also," he says in his
Autobiography, "had wandered at large through all the fields of
knowledge, and its futility had early enough been shown to me. In life
also I had experimented in all manner of ways, and always returned
more dissatisfied and distracted than ever." Of this correspondence
which Goethe recognised between the legendary Faust and his own being,
the final proof is that on the basis of the legend he eventually
constructed the work in which he embodied all that life had taught him
of the conditions under which it has to be lived.

When Goethe first put his hand to the _Urfaust_, he had no definite
conception of an artistic whole in which the suggestions of the legend
should be focussed in view of a determinate end. As we have it, the
_Urfaust_ consists of twenty-two scenes--those that relate the
Gretchen tragedy alone having any necessary connection with each
other. All the successive parts, including the Gretchen tragedy,
suggest improvisation under a compelling immediate impulse with no
reference to what had gone before or what might come after. Apart from
its poetic value, therefore, the _Urfaust_ is the concentrated
expression of what had most intensely engaged Goethe's mind and heart
previous to the period when it was produced.

In the _Urfaust_ we have neither the Prologue in