evil who has stolen the first kiss from a young innocent girl
and thereby breathed the flame of desire into her veins; for he has
worked evil in the world of the spirit and that means much more and is
a much greater triumph for hell than to work evil in the world of
bodies. But it is the fourth devil to whom Satan gives the prize. He
has not done anything as yet. He has only a plan, but a plan which, if
carried out, would put the deeds of all the other devils into the
shade--the plan "to snatch from God his favorite." This favorite of
God is Faust, "a solitary, brooding youth, renouncing all passion
except the passion for truth, entirely living in truth, entirely
absorbed in it." To snatch him from God--that would be a victory, over
which the whole realm of night would rejoice. Satan is enchanted; the
war against truth is his element. Yes, Faust must be seduced, he must
be destroyed. And he shall be destroyed through his very aspiration.
"Didst thou not say, he has desire for knowledge? That is enough for
perdition!" His striving for truth is to lead him into darkness. Under
such exclamations the devils break up, to set about their work of
seduction; but, as they are breaking up, there is heard from above a
divine voice: "Ye shall not conquer."

It cannot be denied that Goethe's earliest Faust conception, the
so-called _Ur-Faust_ of 1773 and '74, lacks the wide sweep of thought
that characterizes these fragments of Lessing's drama. His Faust of
the Storm and Stress period is essentially a Romanticist. He is a
dreamer, craving for a sight of the divine, longing to fathom the
inner working of nature, drunk with the mysteries of the universe. But
he is also an unruly individualist, a reckless despiser of accepted
morality; and it is hard to see how his relation with Gretchen, which
forms by far the largest part of the _Ur-Faust_, can lead to anything
but a tragic catastrophe. Only Goethe's second Faust conception, which
sets in with the end of the nineties of the eighteenth century, opens
up a clear view of the heights of life.

Goethe was now in the full maturity of his powers, a man widely
separated from the impetuous youth of the seventies whose Promethean
emotions had burst forth with volcanic passion. He had meanwhile
become a statesman and a philosopher. He had come to know in the court
of Weimar a model of paternal government, conservative yet liberally
inclined, and friendly to all higher culture. He had found in