And though the aged Faust had
believed it to be buried in the dark night of forgotten things, it was
still alive in his inmost heart, and the dying man's vision of the
Divine took colour and shape from it.
The source of both great poems was the poet's will to assimilate the
world and recreate it, impregnated with his own soul; the secret motive
powers were the mystic love of eternity and the love of woman which had
outgrown this world and aspired to the next. To Goethe, thirsting to
give a concrete shape to his yearning, God and eternity were too
intangible, too remote and incomprehensible--but the woman he loved with
religio-erotic intensity was familiar to him. The Eternal-Feminine is
thus not fraught with incomprehensibility, but is rather, and this
necessarily, the final conclusion. For this conclusion is a profession
of metaphysical eroticism, that is to say, the _Eternal-Feminine_ in
contradistinction to the _Transitory-Feminine_. Both Dante, the devout
son of the Middle Ages, and Goethe, the champion of modern culture,
demand, in virtue of the inherent right of their genius, the
consummation of their mystic yearning for love in another life, and
achieve the creation of the divine woman.
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