An Age of Expectation

You know that I only mention personal matters when there is an objective reason to do so. Now, when I turn my thoughts to the evolution of humanity, I must sometimes mention a weak attempt that I made as a very young man. This writing was the second thing of mine to be printed. At that time I tried, childishly of course, for I was only 23 or 24 years old, to realize that progress from what Shakespearean figures are to what Goethe's Faust is. Through Shakespeare something was created that had to be created in his age, in which human beings could only be portrayed as archetypes, in such a way that the way they are portrayed directly reveals an unfolding of their inner soul forces. The progress in Goethe's “Faust” lies in the fact that Goethe did not present the individual figures as individual types - like Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and so on in Shakespeare - but presented Faust as the human being of our age. Faust can only be placed in a poem once; what Shakespeare had to give could be placed before people in many human types. One must consider the diversity of human spiritual life in evolution in such a way that in each age precisely what must happen as the characteristic of this age is expressed.