What attracted Goethe to the legend of Faust was that it presented a
framework into which he could dramatically work his own life's
experience, equally in the world of thought and feeling. The story
that depicted a passionate searcher for truth, rebelling against the
limits imposed by the place assigned to man in the nature of things,
who at all costs dared to burst these limits in order to enjoy life in
all its fulness--this story had a suggestiveness that appealed to
Goethe's profoundest consciousness. "I also," he says in his
Autobiography, "had wandered at large through all the fields of
knowledge, and its futility had early enough been shown to me. In life
also I had experimented in all manner of ways, and always returned
more dissatisfied and distracted than ever." Of this correspondence
which Goethe recognised between the legendary Faust and his own being,
the final proof is that on the basis of the legend he eventually
constructed the work in which he embodied all that life had taught him
of the conditions under which it has to be lived.
When Goethe first put his hand to the _Urfaust_, he had no definite
conception of an artistic whole in which the suggestions of the legend
should be focussed in view of a determinate end.
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