together, with blank sheets of a different color between, indicating the gaps yet to be filled; and he rejoiced from month to month as the unwritten gave place to the written color. During 1829 and 1830 the First Act was completed, and the whole of the Second Act, including the Classical Walpurgis-Night, was written; so that, at the beginning of 1831, there only remained the Fourth Act and the opening scenes of the Fifth. This was the most laborious part of the task, and has left upon it palpable traces of labor; but by the end of July the work was done, and on his eighty-second birthday, August 28, 1831, Goethe sealed up the complete manuscript of the Second Part, to be opened and published after his death. “From this time on,” he said to Eckermann, “I look upon my life as a perfect gift, and it is really indifferent what I may further do, or whether I shall do anything.” Seven months afterwards, he was dead.
Faust is, in the most comprehensive sense, a drama of the Life of Man. The course of its moral and intellectual plot, as first designed by the author, is now and then delayed by the material added to it during the different phases of his own development, but was never changed. This plot is chiefly unfolded to the reader through the medium of two elements, which, from first to last, are combined in it, yet may easily be separated. The difficulties in the way of its comprehension have been caused by the introduction of a third, accidental, and unnecessary element, which is so interwoven with the others (especially in the Second Part), that the reader is often led away from the true path before he is aware of it.
The first of the elements, and the one which gives individual coloring and reality to the characters, Goethe drew from his own experience. All the earlier scenes, he declares, were subjectively written: Mephistopheles and Faust were the opposite poles of his own nature. His own ambition, disappointment, love, unrest, are all reflected throughout the First Part; and the poise of his riper nature, his æsthetic passion and his religious feeling, in the opening of the First Act, the Helena, and the Fifth Act of the Second Part. The second element, drawn from his objective study
