There is no sound reason for supposing that when Goethe first thought of making the Faust legend the subject of a drama he conceived the work as a whole, including the Second Part. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that the dominant idea of the Second Part was a later development.[2] The Frankfort “Faust” contains not a line or a suggestion which indicates that he intended the work to end otherwise than as a tragedy. The whole scheme of the drama implies that the conclusion is to be tragical. Long before the First Part was completed, however, the conception had taken another form. It was one of Goethe’s vital characteristics that his mind often reverted, by an inward necessity, to the consideration of the vast problems with which, at the earliest dawn of independent thought, man finds himself confronted. He was especially fascinated by the terrible problem of evil. What is its real nature? Is it an essential element of the universe, and will it therefore abide for ever? Or is it an appearance merely, a negation, which the human spirit may by some means shake off, and so recover its true freedom? Goethe wrestled with these questions long and earnestly, and at last he felt himself able to answer them decisively. No one who knows anything of Goethe will suppose that he was a thinker of a light, optimistic temper. He realized as few can realize--for few have his capacity for piercing intuition--how deep are the roots of evil in man’s nature, and how profound the sources of his misery. It is worthy of note that there is not one of Goethe’s works in which he tries to present a flawless male character. Schiller loved to roam in an imaginative world where men have no impulses except such as are high, pure, and heroic. Goethe, on the contrary, held fast by reality. Both in his dramas and his romances most of his leading male figures have some radical defect that either leads, or might conceivably lead, to disaster. Even in “Goetz,” the hero of which, if not perfect, is thoroughly sound and good, he gives us Weislingen, whose weakness brings him to a tragic doom. Kindred weaknesses appear in the heroes of “Werther,” “Clavigo,” “Stella,” “Tasso,” “Wilhelm Meister.” This is not an accident, it is an essential element of Goethe’s art, and it in part explains why his work is so much more potent than Schiller’s. For, after all, however pleasant it may be to dream of characters who float in an ideal realm far above us, it is by characters in whom we find ourselves reflected that we are most closely touched and most deeply moved. Some of Goethe’s feminine characters are conceived in a different spirit. We cannot imagine his Iphigenie, for instance, diverging from the straight path. But he also presented Adelheid; and Lotte and Gretchen, warmly as he loved them, are not prevented from making experience of evil--the former by hovering on its verge, the latter by plunging into the abyss.