The name Mephistopheles has in it, I think, the priest’s shudder at the fumes of the laboratory. Duntzer1 finds that the original form of the word was ‘Mephostophiles,’ and conjectures that it was a bungling effort to put together three Greek words, to mean ‘not loving the light.’ In this he has the support of Bayard Taylor, who also thinks that it was so understood by Goethe. The transformation of it was probably amid the dreaded gases with which the primitive chemist surrounded himself. He who began by ‘not loving the light’ became the familiar of men seeking light, and lover of their mephitic gases. The ancient Romans had a mysterious divinity called Mephitis, whose grove and temple were in the EsquiliÆ, near a place it was thought fatal to enter. She is thought to have been invoked against the mephitic exhalations of the earth in the grove of Albunea. Sulphur springs also were of old regarded as ebullitions from hell, and both Schwarz and Roger Bacon particularly dealt in that kind of smell. Considering how largely Asmodeus, as ‘fine gentleman,’ entered into the composition of Mephistopheles, and how he flew from Nineveh to Egypt (Tobit) to avoid a bad smell, it seems the irony of mythology that he should turn up in Europe as a mephitic spirit.

Mephistopheles is the embodiment of all that has been said in preceding chapters of the ascetic’s horror of nature and the pride of life, and of the mediÆval priest’s curse on all learning he could not monopolise. The Faust myth is merely his shadow cast on the earth, the tracery of his terrible power as the Church would have the people dread it. The early Raven Book at Dresden has the title:—‘ † † † D. J. Fausti † † † Dreifacher HÖllen-Zwung und Magische (Geister-Commando) nebst den schwarzen Raaben. RomÆ ad Arcanum Pontificatus unter Papst Alexander VI. gedruckt. Anno (Christi) MDI.’ In proof of which claim there is a Preface purporting to be a proclamation signed by the said Pope and Cardinal Piccolomini concerning the secrets which the celebrated Dr. Faust had scattered throughout Germany, commanding ut ad Arcanum Pontificatus mandentur et sicut pupilla oculi in archivio Nostro serventur et custodiantur, atque extra Valvas Vaticanas non imprimantur neque inde transportentur. Si vero quiscunque temere contra agere ausus fuerit, Divinam maledictionem latÆ sententiÆ ipso facto servatis Nobis Solis reservandis se incursurum sciat. Ita mandamus et constituemus Virtute ApostolicÆ EcclesiÆ Jesu Christi sub poena Excommunicationis ut supra. Anno secundo Vicariatus Nostri. RomÆ Verbi incarnati Anno M.D.I.

This is an impudent forgery, but it is an invention which, more than anything actually issued from Rome, indicates the popular understanding that the contention of the Church was not against the validity of magic arts, but against their exercise by persons not authorised by itself. It was, indeed, a tradition not combated by the priests, that various ecclesiastics had possessed such powers, even Popes, as John XXII., Gregory VII., and Clement V. The first Sylvester was said to have a dragon at his command; John XXII. denounced his physicians and courtiers for necromancy; and the whispers connecting the Vatican with sorcery lasted long enough to attribute to the late Pius IX. a power of the evil eye. Such awful potencies the Church wished to be ascribed to itself alone. Faust is a legend invented to impress on the popular mind the fate of all who sought knowledge in unauthorised ways and for non-ecclesiastical ends.

In the Raven Book just mentioned, there are provisions for calling up spirits which, in their blending of christian with pagan formulas, oddly resemble the solemn proceedings sometimes affected by our spiritual mediums. The magician (Magister) had best be alone, but if others are present, their number must be odd; he should deliberate beforehand what business he wishes to transact with the spirits; he must observe God’s commandment; trust the Almighty’s help; continue his conjuration, though the spirits do not appear quickly, with unwavering faith; mark a circle on parchment with a dove’s blood; within this circle write in Latin the names of the four quarters of heaven; write around it the Hebrew letters of God’s name, and beneath it write Sadan; and standing in this circle he must repeat the ninety-first Psalm. In addition there are seals in red and black, various Hebrew, Greek, and Latin words, chiefly such as contain the letters Q, W, X, Y, Z,—e.g., Yschyros, Theos, Zebaoth, Adonay. The specimen (Fig. 22), which I copied from the book in Dresden, is there called ‘Sigillum Telschunhab.’ The ‘Black Raven’ is pictured in the book, and explained as the form in which the angel Raphael taught Tobias to summon spirits. It is said also that the Magician must in certain cases write with blood of a fish (Tobit again) or bat on ‘maiden-parchment,’—this being explained as the skin of a goat, but unpleasantly suggestive of a different origin.

In this book, poorly printed, and apparently on a private press, Mephistopheles is mentioned as one of the chief Princes of Hell. He is described as a youth, adept in all arts and services, who brings spirit-servants or familiars, and brings treasures from earth and sea with speed. In the Frankfort Faust Book (1587), Mephistopheles says, ‘I am a spirit, and a flying spirit, potently ruling under the heavens.’ In the oldest legends he appears as a dog, that, as we have seen, being the normal form of tutelary divinities, the symbol of the Scribe in Egypt, guard of Hades, and psychopomp of various mythologies. A dog appears following the family of Tobias. Manlius reports Melancthon as saying, ‘He (Faust) had a dog with him, which was the Devil.’ Johann Gast (‘Sermones Conviviales’) says he was present at a dinner at Basle given by Faust, and adds: ‘He had also a dog and a horse with him, both of which, I believe, were devils, for they were able to do everything. Some persons told me that the dog frequently took the shape of a servant, and brought him food.’ In the old legends this dog is named Praestigiar.2

As for the man Faust, he seems to have been personally the very figure which the Church required, and had the friar, in whose guise Mephistopheles appears, been his actual familiar, he could hardly have done more to bring learning into disgrace. Born at the latter part of the fifteenth century at Knittlingen, Wurtemberg, of poor parents, the bequest of an uncle enabled him to study medicine at Cracow University, and it seems plain that he devoted his learning and abilities to the work of deluding the public. That he made money by his ‘mediumship,’ one can only infer from the activity with which he went about Germany and advertised his ‘powers.’ It was at a time when high prices were paid for charms, philtres, mandrake mannikins; and the witchcraft excitement was not yet advanced enough to render dealing in such things perilous. It seems that the Catholic clergy made haste to use this impostor to point their moral against learning, and to identify him as first-fruit of the Reformation; while the Reformers, with equal zeal, hurled him back upon the papists as outcome of their idolatries. Melancthon calls him ‘an abominable beast, a sewer of many devils.’ The first mention of him is by Trithemius in a letter of August 20, 1507, who speaks of him as ‘a pretender to magic’ (‘Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus Junior’), whom he met at Gelnhaussen; and in another letter of the same year as at Kreuznach, Conrad Mudt, friend of Luther and Melancthon, mentions (Oct. 3, 1513) the visit to Erfurth of Georgius Faustus Hemitheus Hedebeyensis, ‘a braggart and a fool who affects magic,’ whom he had ‘heard talking in a tavern,’ and who had ‘raised theologians against him.’ In Vogel’s Annals of Leipzig (1714), kept in Auerbach’s Cellar, is recorded under date 1525 Dr. Johann Faust’s visit to the Cellar. He appears therefore to have already had aliases. The first clear account of him is in the ‘Index Sanitatis’ of Dr. Philip Begardi (1539), who says: ‘Since several years he has gone through all regions, provinces, and kingdoms, made his name known to everybody, and is highly renowned for his great skill, not alone in medicine, but also in chiromancy, necromancy, physiognomy, visions in crystal, and the like other arts. And also not only renowned, but written down and known as an experienced master. Himself admitted, nor denied that it was so, and that his name was Faustus, and called himself philosophum philosophorum. But how many have complained to me that they were deceived by him—verily a great number! But what matter?—hin ist hin.’

These latter words may mean that Faust had just died. He must have died about that time, and with little notice. The rapidity with which a mythology began to grow around him is worthy of more attention than the subject has received. In 1543 the protestant theologian Johann Gast has (‘Sermones Convivialium’) stories of his diabolical dog and horse, and of the Devil’s taking him off, when his body turns itself five times face downward. In 1587 Philip Camerarius speaks of him as ‘a well-known magician who lived in the time of our fathers.’ April 18, 1587, two students of the University of TÜbingen were imprisoned for writing a Comedy of Dr. Faustus: though it was not permitted to make light of the story, it was thought a very proper one to utilise for pious purposes, and in the autumn of the same year (1587) the original form of the legend was published by Spiess in Frankfort. It describes Faust as summoning the Devil at night, in a forest near Wittenberg. The evil spirit visits him on three occasions in his study, where on the third he gives his name as ‘Mephostophiles,’ and the compact to serve him for twenty-four years for his soul is signed. When Faust pierces his hand, the blood flows into the form of the words O homo fuge! Mephistopheles first serves him as a monk, and brings him fine garments, wine, and food. Many of the luxuries are brought from the mansions of prelates, which shows the protestant bias of the book; which is also shown in the objection the Devil makes to Faust’s marrying, because marriage is pleasing to God. Mephistopheles changes himself to a winged horse, on which Faust is borne through many countries, arriving at last at Rome. Faust passes three days, invisible, in the Vatican, which supplies the author with another opportunity to display papal luxury, as well as the impotence of the Pope and his cardinals to exorcise the evil powers which take their food and goblets when they are about to feast. On his further aerial voyages Faust gets a glimpse of the garden of Eden; lives in state in the Sultan’s palace in the form of Mohammed; and at length becomes a favourite in the Court of Charles V. at Innsbruck. Here he evokes Alexander the Great and his wife. In roaming about Germany, Faust diverts himself by swallowing a load of hay and horses, cutting off heads and replacing them, making flowers bloom at Christmas, drawing wine from a table, and calling Helen of Troy to appear to some students. Helen becomes his mistress; by her he has a son, Justus Faustus; but these disappear simultaneously with the dreadful end of Dr. Faustus, who after a midnight storm is found only in the fragments with which his room is strewn.

Several of these legends are modifications of those current before Faust’s time. The book had such an immense success that new volumes and versions on the same subject appeared not only in Germany but in other parts of Europe,—a rhymed version in England, 1588; a translation from the German in France, 1589; a Dutch translation, 1592; Christopher Marlowe’s drama in 1604.

In Marlowe’s ‘Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,’ the mass of legends of occult arts that had crystallised around a man thoroughly representative of them was treated with the dignity due to a subject amid whose moral and historic grandeur Faust is no longer the petty personality he really was. He is precisely the character which the Church had been creating for a thousand years, only suddenly changed from other-worldly to worldly desires and aims. What he seeks is what all the energy of civilisation seeks.

For this he is willing to pay his soul, which Theology has so long declared to be the price of mastering the world.

The ‘Good Angel’ warns him:

So, dying away amid the thunders of the Reformation, were heard the echoes of the early christian voices which exulted in the eternal tortures of the Greek poets and philosophers: the anathemas on Roger Bacon, Socinus, Galileo; the outcries with which every great invention has been met. We need only retouch the above extracts here and there to make Faust’s aspirations those of a saint. Let the gold be sought in New Jerusalem, the pearl in its gates, the fruits in paradise, the philosophy that of Athanasius, and no amount of selfish hunger and thirst for them would grieve any ‘Good Angel’ he had ever heard of.

The ‘Good Angel’ has not yet gained his wings who will tell him that all he seeks is included in the task of humanity, but warn him that the method by which he would gain it is just that by which he has been instructed to seek gold and jasper of the New Jerusalem,—not by fulfilling the conditions of them, but as the object of some favouritism. Every human being who ever sought to obtain benefit by prayers or praises that might win the good graces of a supposed bestower of benefits, instead of by working for them, is but the Faust of his side—be it supernal or infernal. Hocus-pocus and invocation, blood-compacts and sacraments,—they are all the same in origin; they are all mean attempts to obtain advantages beyond other people without serving up to them or deserving them. To Beelzebub Faust will ‘build an altar and a church;’ but he had probably never entered a church or knelt before an altar with any less selfishness.

A strong Nemesis follows Self to see that its bounds are not overpassed without retribution. Its satisfactions must be weighed in the balance with its renunciations. And the inflexible law applies to intellect and self-culture as much as to any other power of man. Mephistopheles is ‘the kernel of the brute;’ he is the intellect with mere canine hunger for knowledge because of the power it brings. Or, falling on another part of human nature, it is pride making itself abject for ostentation; or it is passion selling love for lust. Re-enter Mephistopheles with Devils, who give crowns and rich apparel to Faustus, dance, and then depart. To the man who has received his intellectual and moral liberty only to so spend it, Lucifer may well say, in Marlowe’s words—

Perhaps he might even better have suggested to Faust that his soul was not of sufficient significance to warrant much anxiety.

Something was gained when it was brought before the people in popular dramas of Faust how little the Devil cared for the cross which had so long been regarded as the all-sufficient weapon against him.3 Faust and Mephistopheles flourish in the Vatican despite all the crosses raised to exorcise them. The confession of the cross which once meant martyrdom of the confessor had now come to mean martyrdom of the denier. Protestantism put its faith in Theology, Creeds, and Orthodoxy. But Calderon de la Barca blended the legend of Faust with the legendary temptation of St. Cyprian, and in ‘El Magico Prodigioso’ we have, in impressive contrast, the powerlessness of the evil powers over the heart of a pure woman, and its easy entrance into a mind fully furnished with the soundest sentiments of theology. St. Cyprian had been a worshipper of pagan deities4 before his conversion, and even after this he had once saved himself while other christians were suffering martyrdom. It is possible that out of this may have grown the legend of his having called his earlier deities—theoretically changed to devils—to his aid; a trace of the legend being that magical ‘Book of Cyprianus’ mentioned in another chapter. In his tract ‘De Gratia Dei’ Cyprian says concerning his spiritual condition before conversion, ‘I lay in darkness, and floating on the world’s boisterous sea, with no resting-place for my feet, ignorant of my proper life, and estranged from truth and light.’ Here is a metaphorical ‘vasty deep’ from which the centuries could hardly fail to conjure up spirits, one of them being the devil of Calderon’s drama, who from a wrecked ship walks Christ-like over the boisterous sea to find Cyprian on the sea-shore. The drama opens with a scene which recalls the most perilous of St. Anthony’s temptations. According to Athanasius, the Devil having utterly failed to conquer Anthony’s virtue by charming images, came to him in his proper black and ugly shape, and, candidly confessing that he was the Devil, said he had been vanquished by the saint’s extraordinary sanctity. Anthony prevailed against the spirit of pride thus awakened; but Calderon’s Cyprian, though he does not similarly recognise the Devil, becomes complacent at the dialectical victory which the tempter concedes him. Cyprian having argued the existence and supremacy of God, the Devil says, ‘How can I impugn so clear a consequence?’ ‘Do you regret my victory?’ ‘Who but regrets a check in rivalry of wit?’ He leaves, and Cyprian says, ‘I never met a more learned person.’ The Devil is equally satisfied, knowing, no doubt, that gods worked out by the wits alone remain in their abode of abstraction and do not interfere with the world of sense. Calderon is artful enough to throw the trial of Cyprian back into his pagan period, but the mirror is no less true in reflecting for those who had eyes to see in it the weakness of theology.

‘Enter the Devil as a fine gentleman,’ is the first sign of the temptation in Calderon’s drama—it is Asmodeus5 again, and the ‘pride of life’ he first brings is the conceit of a clever theological victory. So sufficient is the doorway so made for all other pride to enter, that next time the devil needs no disguise, but has only to offer him a painless victory over nature and the world, including Justina, the object of his passion.

Justina knows less about the philosophical god of Cyprian, and more of the might of a chaste heart. To the Devil she says—

The Devil is compelled to say at last—

He is only able to bring a counterfeit of Justina to her lover.

Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Cyprian’s devil is unable to perform his exact engagements, and consequently does not win in the game. He enables Cyprian to move mountains and conquer beasts, until he boasts that he can excel his infernal teacher, but the Devil cannot bring Justina. She has told Cyprian that she will love him in death. Cyprian and she together abjure their paganism at Antioch, and meet in a cell just before their martyrdom. Over their bodies lying dead on the scaffold the Devil appears as a winged serpent, and says he is compelled to announce that they have both ascended to heaven. He descends into the earth.

What the story of Faust and Mephistopheles had become in the popular mind of Germany, when Goethe was raising it to be an immortal type of the conditions under which genius and art can alone fulfil their task, is well shown in the sensational tragedy written by his contemporary, the playwright Klinger. The following extract from Klinger’s ‘Faust’ is not without a certain impressiveness.

‘Night covered the earth with its raven wing. Faust stood before the awful spectacle of the body of his son suspended upon the gallows. Madness parched his brain, and he exclaimed in the wild tones of dispair:

‘Satan, let me but bury this unfortunate being, and then you may take this life of mine, and I will descend into your infernal abode, where I shall no more behold men in the flesh. I have learned to know them, and I am disgusted with them, with their destiny, with the world, and with life. My good action has drawn down unutterable woe upon my head; I hope that my evil ones may have been productive of good. Thus should it be in the mad confusion of earth. Take me hence; I wish to become an inhabitant of thy dreary abode; I am tired of light, compared with which the darkness in the infernal regions must be the brightness of mid-day.’

But Satan replied: ‘Hold! not so fast—Faust; once I told thee that thou alone shouldst be the arbiter of thy life, that thou alone shouldst have power to break the hour-glass of thy existence; thou hast done so, and the hour of my vengeance has come, the hour for which I have sighed so long. Here now do I tear from thee thy mighty wizard-wand, and chain thee within the narrow bounds which I draw around thee. Here shalt thou stand and listen to me, and tremble; I will draw forth the terrors of the dark past, and kill thee with slow despair.

‘Thus will I exult over thee, and rejoice in my victory. Fool! thou hast said that thou hast learned to know man! Where? How and when? Hast thou ever considered his nature? Hast thou ever examined it, and separated from it its foreign elements? Hast thou distinguished between that which is offspring of the pure impulses of his heart, and that which flows from an imagination corrupted by art? Hast thou compared the wants and the vices of his nature with those which he owes to society and prevailing corruption? Hast thou observed him in his natural state, where each of his undisguised expressions mirrors forth his inmost soul? No—thou hast looked upon the mask that society wears, and hast mistaken it for the true lineaments of man; thou hast only become acquainted with men who have consecrated their condition, wealth, power, and talents to the service of corruption; who have sacrificed their pure nature to your Idol—Illusion. Thou didst at one time presume to show me the moral worth of man! and how didst thou set about it! By leading me upon the broad highways of vice, by bringing me to the courts of the mighty wholesale butchers of men, to that of the coward tyrant of France, of the Usurper in England! Why did we pass by the mansions of the good and the just? Was it for me, Satan, to whom thou hast chosen to become a mentor, to point them out to thee? No; thou wert led to the places thou didst haunt by the fame of princes, by thy pride, by thy longing after dissipation. And what hast thou seen there? The soul-seared tyrants of mankind, with their satellites, wicked women and mercenary priests, who make religion a tool by which to gain the object of their base passions.

‘Hast thou ever deigned to cast a glance at the oppressed, who, sighing under his burden, consoles himself with the hope of an hereafter? Hast thou ever sought for the dwelling of the virtuous friend of humanity, for that of the noble sage, for that of the active and upright father of a family?

‘But how would that have been possible? How couldst thou, the most corrupt of thy race, have discovered the pure one, since thou hadst not even the capacity to suspect his existence?

‘Proudly didst thou pass by the cottages of the pure and humble, who live unacquainted with even the names of your artificial vices, who earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, and who rejoice at their last hour that they are permitted to exchange the mortal for the immortal. It is true, hadst thou entered their abode, thou mightst not have found thy foolish ideal of an heroic, extravagant virtue, which is only the fanciful creation of your vices and your pride; but thou wouldst have seen the man of a retiring modesty and noble resignation, who in his obscurity excels in virtue and true grandeur of soul your boasted heroes of field and cabinet. Thou sayest that thou knowest man! Dost thou know thyself? Nay, deeper yet will I enter into the secret places of thy heart, and fan with fierce blast the flames which thou hast kindled there for thee.

‘Had I a thousand human tongues, and as many years to speak to thee, they would be all insufficient to develop the consequences of thy deeds and thy recklessness. The germ of wretchedness which thou hast sown will continue its growth through centuries yet to come; and future generations will curse thee as the author of their misery.

‘Behold, then, daring and reckless man, the importance of actions that appear circumscribed to your mole vision! Who of you can say, Time will obliterate the trace of my existence! Thou who knowest not what beginning, what middle, and end are, hast dared to seize with a bold hand the chain of fate, and hast attempted to gnaw its links, notwithstanding that they were forged for eternity!

‘But now will I withdraw the veil from before thy eyes, and then—cast the spectre despair into thy soul.’

‘Faust pressed his hands upon his face; the worm that never dieth gnawed already on his heart.’

The essence and sum of every devil are in the Mephistopheles of Goethe. He is culture.

He represents the intelligence which has learned the difference between ideas and words, knows that two and two make four, and also how convenient may be the dexterity that can neatly write them out five.

He knows, too, that the existing moment alone is of any advantage; that theory is grey and life ever green; that he only gathers real fruit who confides in himself. He is thus the perfectly evolved intellect of man, fully in possession of all its implements, these polished till they shine in all grace, subtlety, adequacy. Nature shows no symbol of such power more complete than the gemmed serpent with its exquisite adaptations,—freed from cumbersome prosaic feet, equal to the winged by its flexible spine, every tooth artistic.

From an ancient prison was this Ariel liberated by his Prospero, whose wand was the Reformation, a spirit finely touched to fine issues. But his wings cannot fly beyond the atmosphere. The ancient heaven has faded before the clearer eye, but the starry ideals have come nearer. The old hells have burnt out, but the animalism of man couches all the more freely on his path, having broken every chain of fear. Man still walks between the good and evil, on the hair-drawn bridge of his moral nature. His faculties seem adapted with equal precision to either side of his life, upper or under,—to Wisdom or Cunning, Self-respect or Self-conceit, Prudence or Selfishness, Lust or Love.

Such is the seeming situation, but is it the reality? Goethe’s ‘Faust’ is the one clear answer which this question has received.

In one sense Mephistopheles may be called a German devil. The Christian soul of Germany was from the first a changeling. The ancient Nature-worship of that race might have had its normal development in the sciences, and alone with this intellectual evolution there must have been formed a related religion able to preserve social order through the honour of man. But the native soul of Germany was cut out by the sword and replaced with a mongrel Hebrew-Latin soul. The metaphorical terrors of tropical countries,—the deadly worms, the burning and suffocating blasts and stenches, with which the mind of those dwelling near them could familiarise itself when met with in their scriptures, acquired exaggerated horrors when left to be pictured by the terrorised imagination of races ignorant of their origin. It is a long distance from Potsdam and Hyde Park to Zahara. Christianity therefore blighted nature in the north by apparitions more fearful than the southern world ever knew, and long after the pious there could sing and dance, puritanical glooms hung over the Christians of higher latitudes. When the progress of German culture began the work of dissipating these idle terrors, the severity of the reaction was proportioned to the intensity of the delusions. The long-famished faculties rushed almost madly into their beautiful world, but without the old reverence which had once knelt before its phenomena. That may remain with a few, but the cynicism of the noisiest will be reflected even upon the faces of the best. Goethe first had his attention drawn to Spinoza by a portrait of him on a tract, in which his really noble countenance was represented with a diabolical aspect. The orthodox had made it, but they could only have done so by the careers of Faust, Paracelsus, and their tribe. These too helped to conventionalise Voltaire into a Mephistopheles.8

Goethe was probably the first European man to carry out this scepticism to its full results. He was the first who recognised that the moral edifice based upon monastic theories must follow them; and he had in his own life already questioned the right of the so-called morality to its supreme if not tyrannous authority over man. Hereditary conscience, passing through this fierce crucible, lay levigable before Goethe, to be swept away into dust-hole or moulded into the image of reason. There remained around the animal nature of a free man only a thread which seemed as fine as that which held the monster Fenris. It was made only of the sentiment of love and that of honour. But as Fenris found the soft invisible thread stronger than chains, Faust proved the tremendous sanctions that surround the finer instincts of man.

Emancipated from grey theory, Faust rushes hungrily at the golden fruit of life. The starved passions will have their satisfaction, at whatever cost to poor Gretchen. The fruit turns to ashes on his lips. The pleasure is not that of the thinking man, but of the accomplished poodle he has taken for his guide. To no moment in that intrigue can the suffrage of his whole nature say, ‘Stay, thou art fair!’ That is the pact—it is the distinctive keynote of Goethe’s ‘Faust.’

The pomp and power of the court, luxury and wealth, equally fail to make the scholar at peace with himself. They are symbolised in the paper money by which Mephistopheles replenished the imperial exchequer. The only allusion to the printing-press, whose inventor Fust had been somewhat associated with Faust, is to show its power turned to the work of distributing irredeemable promises.

At length one demand made by Faust makes Mephistopheles tremble. As a mere court amusement he would have him raise Helen of Troy. Reluctant that Faust should look upon the type of man’s harmonious development, yet bound to obey, Mephistopheles sends him to the Mothers,—the healthy primal instincts and ideals of man which expressed themselves in the fair forms of art. Corrupted by superstition of their own worshippers, cursed by christianity, they ‘have a Hades of their own,’ as Mephistopheles says, and he is unwilling to interfere with them. The image appears, and the sense of Beauty is awakened in Faust. But he is still a christian as to his method: his idea is that heaven must be taken by storm, by chance, wish, prayer, any means except patient fulfilment of the conditions by which it may be reached. Helen is flower of the history and culture of Greece; and so lightly Faust would pluck and wear it!

Helen having vanished as he tried to clasp her, Faust has learned his second lesson. When he next meets Helen it is not to seek intellectual beauty as, in Gretchen’s case, he had sought the sensuous and sensual. He has fallen under a charm higher than that of either Church or Mephistopheles; the divorce of ages between flesh and spirit, the master-crime of superstition, from which all devils sprang, was over for him from the moment that he sees the soul embodied and body ensouled in the art-ideal of Greece.

The redemption of Faust through Art is the gospel of the nineteenth century. This is her vesture which Helen leaves him when she vanishes, and which bears him as a cloud to the land he is to make beautiful. The purest Art—Greek Art—is an expression of Humanity: it can as little be turned to satisfy a self-culture unhumanised as to consist with a superstition which insults nature. When Faust can meet with Helen, and part without any more clutching, he is not hurled back to his Gothic study and mocking devil any more: he is borne away until he reaches the land where his thought and work are needed. Blindness falls on him—or what Theology deems such: for it is metaphorical—it means that he has descended from clouds to the world, and the actual earth has eclipsed a possible immortality.

The eye for a fictitious world lost, leaves the vision for reality clearer. In every hard chaotic object Faust can now detect a slumbering beauty. The swamps and pools of the unrestrained sea, the oppressed people, the barrenness and the flood, they are all paths to Helen—a nobler Helen than Greece knew. When he has changed one scene of Chaos into Order, and sees a free people tilling the happy earth, then, indeed, he has realised the travail of his manhood, and is satisfied. To a moment which Mephistopheles never brought him, he cries ‘Stay, thou art fair!’

Mephistopheles now, as becomes a creation of the Theology of obtaining what is not earned, calls up infernal troops to seize Faust’s soul, but the angels pelt them with roses. The roses sting them worse than flames. The roses which Faust has evoked from briars are his defence: they are symbols of man completing his nature by a self-culture which finds its satisfaction in making some outward desert rejoice and blossom like the rose.