be presented as temporarily wandering in the dark; as
a man who had gone grievously wrong in passionate error, but was
essentially "good" by virtue of his aspiring nature, and hence, in the
Lord's fulness of time, was to be led out into the light and saved.
The First Part, ending with the heart-rending death of Margaret in her
prison-cell, and leaving Faust in an agony of remorse, was published
in 1808. Faust's redemption, by enlarged experience of life and
especially by his symbolic union with the Greek Queen of Beauty, was
reserved for the Second Part.

[Illustration: MONUMENT TO GOETHE (Berlin 1880) Sculptor, Fritz
Schaper]

The other more notable works of this period are _Hermann and
Dorothea_, a delightful poem in dactylic hexameters, picturing a bit
of German still life against the sinister background of the French
Revolution, and the _Natural Daughter_, which was planned to body
forth, in the form of a dramatic trilogy in blank verse, certain
phases of Goethe's thinking about the upheaval in France. In the
former he appears once more as a poet of the plain people, with an eye
and a heart for their ways and their outlook upon life. Everybody
likes _Hermann and Dorothea_. On the other hand, the _Natural
Daughter_ is disappointing, and not merely because it is a fragment.
(Only the first part of the intended trilogy was written.) Goethe had
now convinced himself that the function of art is to present the
typical. Accordingly the characters appear as types of humanity
divested of all that is accidental or peculiar to the individual. The
most of them have not even a name. The consequence is that,
notwithstanding the splendid verse and the abounding wisdom of the
speeches, the personages do not seem to be made of genuine human
stuff. As a great thinker's comment on the Revolution the _Natural
Daughter_ is almost negligible.

The decade that followed the death of Schiller was for Germany a time
of terrible trial, during which Goethe pursued the even tenor of his
way as a poet and man of science. He had little sympathy with the
national uprising against Napoleon, whom he looked on as the
invincible subduer of the hated Revolution. From the point of view of
our modern nationalism, which was just then entering on its
world-transforming career, his conduct was unpatriotic. But let him at
least be rightly understood. It was not that he lacked sympathy for
the German people, but he misjudged and underestimated the new f