The "Elective Affinities" has been strangely misinterpreted as having an immoral tendency, as encouraging conjugal infidelity, and approving "free love." That any one who has read the work with attention to the end could so misjudge it seems incredible. Precisely the reverse of this, its aim is to enforce the sanctity of the nuptial bond by showing the tragic consequences resulting from its violation, though only in thought and feeling.... Here, a word concerning one merit of Goethe which seems to me not to have been sufficiently appreciated by even his admirers,--his loving skill in the delineation of female character; the commanding place he assigns to woman in his writings; his full recognition of the importance of feminine influence in human destiny. The prophetic utterance, which forms the conclusion of "Faust,"--"The ever womanly draws us on,"--is the summing up of Goethe's own experience of life. Few men had ever such wide opportunities of acquaintance with women. If, on the one hand, his loves had revealed to him the passional side of feminine nature, he had enjoyed, on the other, the friendship of some of the purest and noblest of womankind. Conspicuous among these are Fräulein von Klettenberg and the Duchess Luise, whom no one, says Lewes, ever speaks of but in terms of veneration. No poet but Shakspeare, and scarcely Shakspeare, has set before the world so rich a gallery of female portraits. They range from the lowest to the highest,--from the wanton to the saint; they are drawn in firm lines, and limned in imperishable colors, ... each bearing the stamp of her own individuality, and each confessing a master's hand. These may be considered as representing different phases of the poet's experience,--different _stadia_ in his view of life. "The ever womanly draws us on." So Goethe, of all men most susceptible of feminine influence, was led by it from weakness to strength, from dissipation to concentration, from doubt to clearness, from tumult to repose, from the earthly to the heavenly. "FAUST." Goethe appears to have derived his knowledge of the Faust legend partly from the work of Widmann, published in 1599,[10] partly from another more modern in its form, which appeared in 1728, and partly from the puppet plays exhibited in Frankfort and other cities of Germany, of which that legend was then a favorite theme. He was not the only writer of that day who made use of it. Some thirty of his contemporaries had produced their "Fausts" during the interval which elapsed between the inception and publication of his great work. Oblivion overtook them all, with the exception of Lessing's, of which a few fragments are left; the manuscript of the complete work was unaccountably lost on its way to the publisher, between Dresden and Leipsic. [Footnote 10: The earlier work of Spiess (1588) was translated into English and furnished Marlowe with the subject-matter of his "Dr. Faustus."]