When Goethe wrote to Schiller announcing his intention of once more taking up his unfinished Faust, Schiller replied: 'My head grows dizzy when I think of it. The subject of Faust appears to supply such an infinity of material.... I find no circle large enough to contain it.' Goethe answered: 'I expect to make my work at this barbarous composition, this Fratze [i.e. caricature, as he often called it] less difficult than you imagine. I shall throw a sop to exorbitant demands rather than try to satisfy them. The whole will always remain a fragment'—a fragment, perhaps we may add, in the same sense as even the grandest Gothic building may be said to be only a part of the infinitely great ideal Gothic structure which will never be seen on earth, whereas in the Parthenon we have, or rather the Athenians in the days of Pericles had, something final and complete, something which will tolerate no addition.

If Schiller's head grew dizzy at the thought of a Faust-drama, I fear that one who has no Schiller head on his shoulders may prove a poor guide among the precipices and ravines of Goethe's life-poem, where the path is often very steep and slippery. But I will do my best; and perhaps I had better treat our subject as I proposed. At first I shall point out a little more distinctly some of the characteristics which distinguish Goethe's drama from the earlier versions of the story. Then I shall try to guide you steadily and rapidly through the action of the first Part, offering whatever comment may seem useful, and now and then perhaps asking you to step aside from the track in order to get a peep over some of the aforementioned precipices.

As we have already seen, one great difference between Goethe's Faust and many older versions of the story (including Marlowe's play, but excluding Lessing's fragment) is the fact that the sinner is saved.

Shortly before his death, in 1832, Goethe wrote to Wilhelm v. Humboldt: 'Sixty years ago, when as a young man I first conceived the idea of my Faust, the whole plan of it lay clearly before me.' From the first therefore Goethe had conceived the second Part as integral to his poem. He knew that, if he were to write a Faust at all, Faust must be saved.

We have already arrived at the edge of one of those precipices of which I spoke—Faust must be saved. But what did Goethe mean, or, to ask a fairer question, what do we ourselves mean, by being saved? No formula of words seems able to provide us with a satisfactory answer. We can indeed use metaphors drawn from the universe of Time and Space—we can speak of 'another world' and of a 'future life'—but as soon as we attempt to conceive such existence sub specie aeternitatis our imagination fails: to use the metaphor of Socrates, we are dazzled by the insupportable radiance of the eternal and infinite, and seek to rest our eyes by turning them toward shadows, reflexions, images: we accept the beautiful image—the enigma (as St. Paul calls it) or allegory—of a heaven in some far interspace of world and world.

As a poet, and especially as a dramatic poet, Goethe, if he treated the subject at all, was compelled to accept some imaginative conception of a future life, and he could scarcely accept any other but that which was in keeping with the old legend—that heaven of angels and saints and penitents which was the converse of the legendary hell and its fiends. Whether however he was justified by the principles of true dramatic art in his attempt to depict his imaginative conception and to place on the stage a representation of heaven may be doubted. Certainly the effect of Goethe's picture, especially when seen on the stage, is such that one cannot but wish some other solution might have been devised, and one feels as if one understood better than before why it was that Shakespeare's dramatic instinct allowed no such lifting of the veil. You remember the last words of the dying Hamlet: 'The rest is silence.'

Thus far therefore we have come: by Faust being saved it is meant that he escapes from the fiend and reaches heaven, reaches the 'higher spheres' of existence, as Goethe expresses it.

But the mere fact of his being saved does not form the essential difference between this drama and earlier versions of the story. The point of real importance is that he is not saved in a downward course by the intervention of some deus ex machina, some orthodox counter-charm. His course is not downward. His yearnings are not for bodily ease and sensual enjoyment but for truth—truth, not to be attained by speculation or scientific research but by action and feeling—by struggling onward through error and sin, and by gaining purification and strength from trial and suffering and resistance to evil; so that evil itself is a means to his salvation and Mephistopheles an instrument of good. Rising on the stepping-stones of his dead self he finds at last a certain measure of peace and is in the end reunited to her whose earthly happiness he had indeed ruined but whose love his heart has never forgotten. Indeed it is her love that is allowed to guide him ever aright and to draw him up to higher spheres.

When we once realize this we also realize how meaningless, or how indescribably less full of meaning, the poem would be without its second Part. And yet many, when they speak of Goethe's Faust, mean merely the first Part—or perhaps merely the little episode of Gretchen given in Gounod's opera.

I spoke of Goethe's gospel of self-salvation. Since doing so I have recalled to memory some words of his which may seem to refute me. In reference to the song of the angels at the end of the poem he wrote as follows: 'These verses contain the key of Faust's salvation: namely, in Faust himself an ever higher and purer aspiration, and from above eternal love coming to his help; and they are in harmony with our religious conceptions, according to which we cannot attain to heaven by our own strength unless it is helped by divine grace.'

It is true that after death Faust's soul is saved from the demons and is carried up to heaven by God's angels, but Goethe's drama is mainly the drama of Faust's earthly life, and from the 'Prologue in Heaven,' where, as it seems, the Deity undertakes not to help him, but leaves him to fight the battle entirely in his own strength, until the last moment of his earthly existence there is no hint whatever, I think, of anything but self-salvation. On no occasion does he show the slightest sense of his own helplessness or of dependence on God's mercy. As for remorse, Goethe regarded it as a false emotion and as unworthy of a man. Although the perfect balance of his mind and his respect for much that he could not himself accept saved him from the almost brutal insouciance of such a form of expression he would probably have agreed with Walt Whitman, who tells us that animals should serve us as an example because 'they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.'

Let us however dismiss criticism and turn to what Goethe as poet has given us—perhaps the noblest picture that dramatic art can give: that of a man striving onward and upward in his own strength, confronting (as Goethe says in reference to Shakespeare's plays) the inexorable course of the universe with the might of human will. We might take as the Alpha and Omega of Faust these two lines from the poem:

and

the sense of which is that human nature must ever err as long as it strives, but that true manhood is incessant striving.

It is a noble picture—perhaps the noblest conceivable. You remember Browning's lines:

It will have already become evident what abstruse and insoluble questions present themselves—rise, as it were, like ghosts of many an ancient creed, on every side, as soon as we have crossed the threshold of this great Mausoleum of human thought and imagination. There is the spectre of the great Mystery of existence—of Life and Death and Eternity; and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and that of Evil itself—a phantom assuming at times such a visible and substantial shape and then dissolving into thin air as mere negation. And this Mephistopheles—are we to regard him as a self-existent genuine demon of a genuine Hell, or as our own mind's shadow? Is he something external, something that we can avoid, something that we can put to flight by resisting and get entirely free of—or has each one of us signed with the blood of his human nature a compact with some such spiritual power, with the demonic element within him, with that spirit of negation, of cynicism, of cold unideal utilitarian worldly-wisdom which mocks at faith and love and every high and tender impulse—that part of our nature which, when some poor girl is sinking in the abyss, prompts us to answer our heart's appeal with the sneer of Mephistopheles: 'She isn't the first!'? Surely we can well understand the scorn and contempt which Faust feels for this demon companion of his. 'What canst thou, poor devil, give me?' he exclaims—'Was the human spirit's aspiration Ever understood by such as thou!'

The real action of the play begins with the celebrated monologue of Faust. But this is preceded by a Dedication, by the Prelude in the theatre, and by the Prologue in Heaven, added at various periods of Goethe's life. The Prelude consists of a scene between a poet, a theatrical director and a 'comic person.' It is merely a clever skit in which Goethe has a hit at the public and those who supply it with so-called drama. It has no organic connexion with the play. The Prologue in Heaven begins with the songs of the three Archangels—sonorous verses of majestic harmony, like some grand overture by Bach or Handel. These verses are, I think, meant to intimate the great harmonious order and procession of the natural and moral universe, as Pythagoras intimated them by his 'Music of the Spheres'—those eternal laws against which man, that tiny microcosm, so vainly strives.

Mephistopheles now enters, as in the Book of Job Satan is described entering God's presence, and, just as it happens in the Bible, the Lord asks him if he knows Faust, and, as in the case of Job, it is God himself who not only allows but seems even to challenge the demon to try his powers, foretelling his failure although promising no help to Faust. 'It is left to thee,' says the Lord to Mephistopheles. 'Draw this aspiring spirit from his fountain-head and lead him downward on thy path, if thou canst gain a hold upon him, and stand ashamed when thou shalt have to confess that a good man amidst his dim impulses is well conscious of the right way.'

That which distinguishes this scene from the similar scene in Job is its irreverence. Indeed one might almost call it flippancy, and few would deny that at times this flippancy is painful to them. The only excuse that I can find for it is that, rightly or wrongly, Goethe meant us to be pained. I believe that here Mephistopheles represents especially that element in human nature which is perhaps the meanest and most disgusting of all, namely flippant and vulgar irreverence, and although we may not agree with John Wesley's definition of man as 'half brute, half devil,' most of us will probably allow that a certain part of our nature (that part which Mephistopheles seems to represent) is capable of an irreverence and a vulgarity of which the devil himself might almost be ashamed.

The monologue with which the action of the play begins strikes at once the new chord and gives us the leading motive—one so entirely different from that of the old legend—so indescribably nobler than that which is given in the opening monologue of Marlowe's play. But the old framework is still there. Faust renounces book-learning and betakes himself to magic.

Disgusted with the useless quest after that science which deals only with phenomena and their material causes, he turns to magic, as he does in the old legend; but it is here no diabolic medieval wizardry which shall enable him to summon the devil, for, as we shall see, Faust does not summon the devil; Mephistopheles comes to him uncalled. Goethe has merely used this motive of magic to intimate attainment of perfect knowledge of Nature through the might of genius—that revelation of the inner secrets of the universe which he himself, in what he calls the 'Titanic, heaven-storming' period of his life, believed to be attainable by human genius in communion with Nature.

'Nature and Genius' was the watchword of the followers of Rousseau and the apostles of the Sturm und Drang gospel—a return to and communion with Nature, such as Wordsworth preached and practised, and such as Byron also preached but did not practise. Only to the human spirit in full communion with the spirit of Nature, of which it is a part, are revealed her mysteries. All other means, as Faust tells us, are useless.

Faust turns from his dreary little world of books and charts and retorts and skeletons. He opens the window and gazes at the moon floating in her full glory through the heaven. His heart is filled with a yearning to be 'made one with Nature,' and in words which remind one of certain lines of Wordsworth he exclaims:

Then, turning from Nature, he casts once more a look around his dreary cell:

He takes up the book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature ascending and descending and reaching to each other golden vessels filled with the waters of life and wafting with their wings blessing and harmony through the universe.

And yet from this vision he turns away dissatisfied:

And from this cipher of the material universe, this vision of inconceivable immensity and infinite diversity, the human spirit which is not content with the dead bones of science and has entered into communion with Nature cannot but turn away dissatisfied—and even with despair. Let me try to illustrate this in a more matter-of-fact way.

The human mind discovers, let us say, that the earth is not the centre of the universe; that the sun is larger than the 'bottom of a cask,' as in the old legend Faust discovered it to be; that there are other worlds quite as large as ours; that this earth of ours is a good deal smaller than the sun and actually revolves round it; that even the sun itself is not the centre of the universe but one of many suns—one of the countless stars in that enormous starry wreath that surrounds us, and which we call the Milky Way. And we direct our telescopes to this Milky Way and find that what we took for nebula is for the most part an accumulation of countless millions of suns, each perhaps with its planets. Then, as we sweep the sky with our glass, we discover numberless little wreath-like spiral cloudlets, and find that they also are just such wreaths of countless millions of suns and solar systems, and that these seemingly tiny wreaths are revolving round some central body or system, which itself must revolve round some other, and that again round another ... until imagination fails. Is there, we ask, some final centre of all? some unmoved source of motion? Or is the material universe infinite?

Then we turn our gaze in another direction and we find in the tiniest grain of sand countless millions of molecules whose atoms (or electrons), it is said, are in perpetual motion, revolving like the stars. Are then (we ask) the stars themselves nothing but molecules? Is the whole material universe nothing but some grain of sand on the shore of the ocean of eternity?

We turn away dazzled, and we rest our eyes, as Socrates was wont to say, on images, on reflexions. We try to make the mystery intelligible, or at least to pacify the reason by throwing it some such sop as the theory that 'Size is only relative,' or that 'Space is only a mode of consciousness' and therefore nothing real in itself. Or we lull the mind to sleep with imaginative metaphors and speak (as Plato did) of the Central Fire of Hestia, the Hearth and Home of the Universe, or we call that mysterious unmoved centre of all motion the Throne of God. Thus we try to lay the spectre of infinite Space.

Or consider Time instead of Space. In a single second how many waves of light are supposed to enter the eye? About 500 billions I believe. And of these waves some 500 would not exceed the breadth of a hair. Now any being to whom these tiny waves were as slow as the ripples on a pond are to us would live our human life of three score years and ten in the hundredth part of his second, while a being on one of those great worlds of space revolving but once in long Æons around its centre would live—if his life were measured as ours—millions of our years. Here again, in our dazzlement, we have recourse to metaphor and theory: we lay the spectre of Time by explaining it away as merely a 'mode' and as therefore of no objective reality. In other words, dazed and outworn by the incomprehensible infinities of Time and Space we console ourselves with the theory that it is all a mere phenomenon, a projection of our own mind, and with Faust we exclaim

and in the words of a still greater master of magic than Faust himself we despairingly add that

From the cipher of the vast material universe, the Macrocosm, we turn away, as Faust did, with unsatisfied yearnings. Whither then shall we turn? Where shall we grasp Nature—not the empty vision, but the warm living form? It is in our own heart that we find a refuge from the infinities of Space and Time—in that human heart by which we live, in its tenderness, its joys, its fears. Here, and here alone, we find those ultimate facts of existence which need no explanation, and which we accept just as they are, without any questionings. Here we find an infinite universe—no less infinite than that of Space and Time—the universe of feeling.

From the cipher of the Macrocosm Faust turns to that of the Earth-spirit, the spirit of human life and feeling. He is filled with a sudden, passionate yearning to share in the joys and the sorrows and the aspirations and the strivings of humanity:

He calls upon this Earth-spirit, the Spirit of human life. He bends all the might of his human will to draw him down from his sphere. 'Come!' he exclaims. 'Thou must! Thou must!—e'en should it cost my life!' Enveloped in blinding flame the Spirit of life appears. At the apparition Faust cowers back terrified and turns his face away. But it is only for the moment. Stung by the contemptuous words of the phantom he answers: 'Shall I yield to thee, Spectre of flame? 'Tis I, 'tis Faust, thine equal!' The human Mind claims equality with the Spirit of earthly life. But the phantom exclaims: 'Thou art akin to the spirit that thou comprehendest—not to me!'—and disappears. Faust has yet to learn a lesson that the mind of man can never learn of itself, the real nature and meaning of human life. But he has beheld the vision of life, he has received the baptism of fire. Henceforth he is to fight his way through the storms of life and passion—to pass onward and upward and at last to rise to 'higher spheres'; and amidst the fierce and insidious assaults of flesh and devil we shall see that he looks for strength and guidance to this Spirit that appeared to him in the blinding vision of living empyreal flame.

Scarcely has the Earth-spirit vanished when, with a timid knock, there enters Faust's famulus, or assistant, Wagner. He has heard Faust's voice and from its excited tones has concluded that he is practising declamation—reciting perhaps a Greek play. The poor amiable dryasdust literary and scientific worm-grubber, whose maxim of life is Zwar weiss ich viel, doch mÖcht' ich Alles wissen (I know indeed a good deal, but I want to know Everything), wishes to profit from a lesson in elocution. A scene follows in which the contrast is graphically depicted between this half lovable, half contemptible scientific bookworm and Faust's Titanic heaven-storming aspirations after absolute truth. When he is once more left alone, longing to face the mystery of life but crushed by the contempt of the Earth-spirit, Faust is seized by despair. He shrinks from encountering life, with its delusive joys, its pitiless injustice and its arbitrary fate. He resolves to seek certainty—to solve the riddle of life by death. As he moves the cup of poison to his lips there comes floating through the air the chime of bells and, perhaps from some near chapel, the hymn of Easter morn:

He pauses. Memories of childhood sweep over him, and he yields to the sweet voices that call him back from the threshold of the unseen.

Thus Faust escapes the cowardly act of suicide and gains new strength through the awakening, for a time at least, of the consciousness, which had slumbered within him since the unreasoning days of childhood, that there is that beyond life which alone makes life worth having.

The next scene shows us Faust already in contact with human nature, as represented by holiday crowds flocking out of the town into the woods and adjacent villages at Eastertide. Those who know Germany well will feel the art with which Goethe at once transports us into the midst of a Germanic Feiertag in spring-time, with its bright sunlight, its throngs of townspeople streaming into the country—happy and merry without vulgar rowdyism; the smugly dressed apprentice and the servant-girl in her Sonntagsputz; the pert student and the demure BÜrgermÄdchen with her new Easter hat and her voluminous-waisted Frau Mama; the sedate school-master or shopkeeper, leading his toddling child; sour-faced officials; grey-locked and spectacled professors and 'town-fathers' discussing the world's news or some local grievance—all flocking countryward, with some Waldhaus or Forsthaus Restaurant as their ultimate goal. And those who know Frankfurt will recognize the scene at once: up there above Sachsenhausen, on the road to the pine-woods and the JÄgerhaus, from which one sees the whole city lying below one, with its great Dom and its medieval gates—the river Main gliding through its midst and glittering away westward toward the Rhine; and in the far background the Taunus range and the dark Feldberg.

Amidst this scene, externally still the more than middle-aged German professor (he must be fifty-seven or so) but with a heart full of newly wakened yearnings for human life with all its joys and passions, Faust wanders, trying to feel sympathy with all these multitudinous human beings, attracted perhaps here and there, but evidently for the most part repelled and discouraged. He has yet to learn that a love for and a knowledge of humanity, such as he finally reaches, must begin with love for and knowledge of one human heart.

As he and Wagner return toward the city Faust gives vent to his pent-up feelings—pours contempt on his own book-learning and wasted life and expresses his yearnings for Nature, and the longing of his spirit for wings to fly away into the infinite:

Whereat Wagner exclaims:

Poor dear Wagner, how well one seems to know thee, with thy purblind spectacled eyes peering into fusty books and parchments, or bending over thy crucibles and retorts! Truly a novel and interesting sight it would be to see thee assuming wings. In thy philosophy there is naught but dreams of elixirs of life or homunculi. Thy highest aspiration nowadays would be to find the mechanical equivalent of thought—to prove that Shakespeare's and Dante's imagination was due only to a slightly abnormal movement of brain-molecules—to find some method of measuring faith, hope and charity in foot-pounds and thine own genius in electric volts. Thou wouldst live and die, as other eminent scientists of these latter days have done, in the certain hope and faith of demonstrating irrefutably that this curious phenomenon which we call 'life' is nothing but the chemical action set up by the carbonic acid and ammonia of the protoplasm.

As they walk and talk there appears a black dog ranging to and fro through a field, as if on the track of game. Ever nearer and nearer he circles, and in his wake, as it appears to Faust, trails a flickering phosphorescent gleam. But Wagner ridicules the idea as an optical delusion. He sees nothing but an ordinary black poodle. 'Call him,' he says, 'and he'll come fawning on you, or sit up and do his tricks, or jump into the water after sticks.' The poodle follows them—and makes himself at home by the stove in Faust's study.

Faust has thus, after his first contact with the outer world of humanity, returned once more to his cell—to the little world of his own thoughts and feelings. He finds himself once more amidst his piled-up books, his crucibles and retorts, his bones and skulls. He lights his lamp and feels the old familiar glow of intellectual satisfaction. But the poodle is there. Faust has brought home with him something that will now haunt him to the last moment of his life. There has been awakened in his nature the germ of that acorn (to use Goethe's metaphor with regard to Hamlet) that will soon strike root and shatter the vase in which it is planted.

At present he is almost unconscious of this new presence. He is buried in thought, and his thoughts lead him toward the question of Revelation. He is drawn to take up a Bible and turns, with a mind full of metaphysical curiosity, to the passage 'In the beginning was the ?????—the Word.' More than once there comes from the poodle a growl of disapprobation. Faust threatens to turn him out, and proceeds with his biblical criticism.... 'In the beginning was the ?????.' How shall he translate ?????? It cannot mean merely a 'word.' ... A word must have meaning, thought—and thought is nothing without act.... So this 'Word,' this 'Logos,' must be translated as Act or Deed.

These speculations are interrupted by horrible growlings, barks, and howlings. As Faust looks towards the poodle he sees it rapidly swelling up into a monstrous form—huger than an elephant or hippopotamus, with fiery eyes and enormous tusks in its gaping mouth. He tries to exorcise the phantom with 'Solomon's key' and other magic formulÆ, and at length, when he threatens it with the mystic formula of the Trinity, it dissolves into mist, and out of the mist steps forth Mephistopheles, dressed as a 'travelling scholar'—an itinerant professor, or quack doctor.

I find that some commentators accuse Goethe of dramatic inconsistency and of interrupting the sequence of the action, because he makes Faust for a time return to his old speculations, and because Mephistopheles does not at once appear in the shape with which we are so familiar—with his 'red gold-trimmed dress and mantle of stiff silk and the cock-feathers in his hat,' the type of the dissolute man-about-town of the period. To me it seems very natural that, dispirited by his first contact with the outer world—unable to feel any real sympathy with the rollicking and sleek self-sufficiency of that holiday crowd, Faust should turn again to reflexion and speculation, and that when he is in this depressed and metaphysical mood the demonic element in his nature should first present itself—and that too in the disguise of an itinerant professor. For is it not the case that to many of us the devil has come first just at such a time and in just such disguise?

Questioned as to his name and personality, Mephisto defines himself (he too being in a metaphysical mood) as 'the spirit of negation,' and as 'a part of that power which always wills evil and always works good'—'a part of that darkness which alone existed before the creation of light'—and he expresses the hope that, as light is dependent for its existence on the material world, both it and the world will ere long return to chaos and darkness. I have already touched upon this question of Evil as merely negative—merely a part of the whole—and will not detain you further over it.

Mephistopheles now wishes to take his leave, promising to visit Faust again. 'Visit me as you like,' says Faust, 'and now—there is the window! there's the door! or the chimney is at your service.' But the devil must go out by the same way as he has entered, and on the threshold to keep out evil spirits Faust has painted a mystic pentagram, a figure with five points, the outer angle of which, being inaccurately drawn, had left a gap through which Mephisto had slipped in; but being once in, as in a mouse-trap, he cannot get out again.

As Faust now seems inclined to keep him prisoner, Mephistopheles summons spirits, who sing Faust to sleep. Then he calls a rat to gnaw a gap in the pentagram, and escapes.

When, in the next scene, Mephistopheles again appears, Faust is in a very different state of mind, and Mephistopheles is also in a different shape. He is decked out with silken mantle and with cock-feathers in his hat, ready for any devilry. Faust is in the depths of morbid despair and bitterness at the thought of life:

He vows he would rather die. 'And yet,' sarcastically remarks Mephisto, 'some one a night or two ago did not drink a certain brown liquid.' Stung by the sarcasm, Faust breaks out into curses against life, against love and hope, and faith ... and 'cursed be patience most of all!'

Here is the devil's opportunity. 'Life is yours yet, and all its pleasures. Of what's beyond you nothing know. Give up all this morbid thinking, these dreams and self-delusions! Be a man! Enjoy life! Plunge into pleasures of the senses! I will be your guide and show you the life worth living!'

In an ecstasy of embitterment and despair, though fully conscious that such a life can never bring him satisfaction and happiness, Faust exclaims: 'What wilt thou, poor devil, give me? Was the human spirit, in its aspirations, ever understood by such as thou?... And yet—hast thou the food that never satiates—hast thou red gold—hast thou love, passionate faithless love—hast thou the fruits that rot before one plucks them—hast thou the fruits of that tree of sensual pleasure which daily puts forth new blossoms—then done! I accept.' 'But if,' he adds (and, alas, I must give merely the sense of these noble verses—for all translation is so unutterably flat)—'if I ever lay myself on the bed of idle self-content, if ever thou canst fool me with these phantoms of the senses, if ever I say to the passing moment, Stay; thou art so fair!—then let my life be ended. This wager I offer thee.' 'Topp!' ('Done!') exclaims Mephistopheles; and, as you know, the compact is signed by Faust with his own blood.

You will observe that here there is no mention, as in the old legend, of any term of years—the compact is for life. Of what may come after this life Faust makes no mention in his wager. He expressly says that all he cares about, all he can know, is this life, and that he will hear nothing about any future life. This may be agnosticism or whatever else we like to call it, but it is not formally selling one's soul, with or without one's body, for a future life and for all eternity.

Moreover Faust has not summoned the devil. The devil has come to him—is indeed a part of him. He does not league himself with a hell-fiend for the sake of worldly power or fame or sensual enjoyment, of which he speaks with contempt. He only offers to come forward into the battle of life and of passions to test the nobler powers and the deeper beliefs and the yet dim aspirations of his better nature against the powers of evil, against what he calls the 'cold devil's-fist' of negation and cynicism and disbelief, against the brute within the man.

Footsteps are now heard approaching. It is one of Faust's scholars. Faust 'has no heart to meet him'—and no wonder. He goes; and Mephistopheles, throwing around him Faust's professorial mantle and placing the professorial cap upon his head, awaits the scholar. The scene which ensues, in which Mephisto gives the young aspirant for knowledge his diabolic advice and his diabolic views on Science, Logic, Metaphysics, Medicine and even Theology—would offer ample material for a very long course of lectures; but as it is one which is not closely connected with the main action of the play it will have to be omitted. The scholar retires—his poor young head whirling round like a mill-wheel with the advice he has received and carrying away his album, in which the devil has inscribed his favourite text 'Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.' Then Faust re-enters, Mephistopheles spreads out his silken cape, and on it the two fly away through the air on their adventures—first through the small and then the greater world—first the world of personal feelings and passions, then the greater world (is it really greater?) of art and politics and Humanity.

Faust had said, as you remember,

This is the leading motive of all that follows. With ever-deepening disgust and contempt Faust, in his quest for truth through the jungles and quagmires of human passions, follows his guide. If ever Faust seems to catch sight of any far-off vision of eternal truth and beauty—as he does at times in his love for Gretchen, and again in his passion for ideal beauty in Helen, and once again in that devotion to the cause of Humanity which finally allows him to express a satisfaction in life, and thus causes his life to end—if ever Faust shows any sign of real interest or satisfaction, it is just then that Mephistopheles displays most clearly his utter inability to understand the 'human spirit in its aspirations'; and it is then that he shows most plainly his own diabolic nature, pouring out his cynical contempt and gnashing his teeth at what he deems Faust's irrational disgust for all those bestialities that seem to him (Mephistopheles) the sweetest joys of existence.

His very first attempt is a dead failure. He has carried Faust off through the air to Leipzig, and here he brings him into what to the Mephisto-nature doubtless seems highly desirable and entertaining company—to the 'sing-song' (as I believe it is called in England) of tippling brawling students. The scene is Auerbach's Cellar, a well-known Leipzig 'Kneipe'—a kind of Wine taproom or Bodega. Among these brawling comic-songsters Mephistopheles is in his element, and he treats them to a comic ditty:

and so on. We need not linger over the repulsive scene—so graphically described.

Finally Mephistopheles bores holes in the table and draws wine from them.

The students come to handicuffs over it; they spill the wine, and it turns into flame.

Amidst their drunken uproar Faust and Mephistopheles disappear.

During the whole of this scene Faust speaks no single word, except a curt but polite greeting on entering the Cellar and an appeal to Mephistopheles to take him away from this 'scene of swinish bestiality.' How different from the part that Faust plays in the old story where he himself, not Mephistopheles, joins in the revelry and buffoonery!

Auerbach's Cellar existed till lately, though the house above it had been rebuilt. It was the original 'Keller' that is mentioned in the old legend. In it were to be seen two old pictures (with the date 1525). One represented Faust sitting at table with students; in the other he is flying off through the door astride on a wine cask.

A weird scene now ensues: the Witches' Kitchen.

Faust had asked how it was possible for him, the thought-worn grey-haired professor, to care for, or take part in, what Mephistopheles looked upon as 'life.' Mephistopheles therefore takes him to a witch, from whom he is to receive a magic draught that will 'strip off some thirty years from his body,' so that he becomes a young, man of, say, about twenty-seven. This scene in the Witches' Kitchen is sometimes said to represent allegorically a long course of dissipation through which Mephistopheles takes Faust, and which of course could not be represented otherwise without extending the action of the play beyond all reasonable limits. It is true that, after the draught Faust's character seems considerably changed for the worse. He develops a recklessness and a licentiousness which scandalize even Mephistopheles himself, who tells him that he is 'almost as bad as a Frenchman.'

Whether we should understand it thus, or not, I do not feel quite sure, but anyhow we have in future—to the end of the first Part—to take into account the fact that, although loathing all such swinish sensuality as that of tippling students, and hating all forms of mean selfishness and cunning and hypocrisy, Faust is (as so often is the case with otherwise noble and lovable men) open to assault at that point where, as nowhere else, the sensuous and ideal in our human nature seem to touch and coalesce.

When they enter the Witch is not at home. In the midst of the kitchen is a large cauldron, and at its side, skimming it and seeing that it does not run over is a Meerkatze—a kind of female ape. The Meerkater, or male ape, squats by the fire, warming himself, and near by are several young apes. Mephistopheles is enraptured at the sight of the 'tender pretty beasts,' but Faust finds them more disgusting than anything he has ever seen.

The apes perform all kinds of antics and chatter a weird medley of half sense, half nonsense, in which one can dimly discern satirical allusions to various forms of the literary, political, and religious cant of Goethe's generation.

The animals enthrone Mephistopheles in a chair, give him a feather brush for a sceptre, and offer him a broken crown, which he is to glue together with 'sweat and blood.' It is like some horrid nightmare. We feel as if we were going mad; and so does Faust himself. But suddenly he catches sight of a magic mirror, in which he sees a form of ravishing beauty—not that of Gretchen or Helen, but some form of ideal loveliness. He stands there entranced.

But at this moment the cauldron boils over. A great flame shoots up the chimney. With a scream the witch comes clattering down, and launches curses at the intruders—not recognising the devil in his costume as modern rouÉ. He abuses her roundly and tells her that his horns, tail and cloven hoof are gone out of fashion, modern culture having tabooed them; and he forbids her to address him as Satan. That name is not up-to-date: he is now 'der Herr Baron.'

With a hocus-pocus of incantations she brews the magic draught, which Faust drinks. He is then hurried away by Mephistopheles back into the world of humanity.

We have now come to the story of Margarete or Gretchen, which by many, perhaps by most, is looked upon as constituting the main subject of Goethe's Faust. It is doubtless the part which attracts one, which appeals to one's heart, more than any other, and it forms by itself a pathetic little tragedy. The story itself is merely the old sad story of passion, weakness and misery, which has been told thousands of times in all ages and all languages.

It would be worse than useless to endeavour by any dissecting process to discover how by some act of creative power Goethe has inspired this little story with such wondrous vitality that there is probably in all literature scarcely any character that lives for us, that seems so real, as Gretchen. Possibly to feel this one needs a knowledge of the original poem and an acquaintance not only with that Germany which is generally known to the English visitor, but also with just that class of which Gretchen is typical, and with just those little ways and those forms of expression which are peculiar to that class and to the part of Germany to which Gretchen belonged. Every single word that she utters is so absolutely true to nature that we seem to hear the voice of some real living Gretchen, and can hardly believe that she merely exists in our imagination. This may perhaps be asserted of other poetic creations; but I confess that I know no other, not even in Shakespeare, that produces on me quite the same kind of illusion. Homer's Nausicaa, the Antigone and Electra of Sophocles, Rosalind, Miranda, Imogen, Portia, Cordelia—all these live for me, but not quite as Gretchen. Their presence I feel as something living, but a little visionary. Gretchen I can see, and hear and almost touch. I need not recount at length her story, for it is too well known. I need only recall to you memories of certain facts and scenes: that first meeting in the street; the mysterious presents from the unknown lover; the meeting in the neighbour's garden and Gretchen's innocent prattlings about her home life; Faust's growing passion, and the vain battlings of his higher nature; the insidious promptings and cynical ridicule of his demonic companion; the song of Gretchen at her spinning-wheel; her loving anxiety as to Faust's religious opinions, and his celebrated confession of faith; the sleeping draught by which Gretchen causes the death of her mother; her shame, remorse and despair; Gretchen kneeling with her gift of tear-sprent flowers before the Virgin's image; the return of her brother, the young soldier, Valentin, and his death—stabbed by her lover (or rather by Mephisto) at night beneath her window, and cursing her as he dies; the scene in the Cathedral; the pealing organ and the solemn tones of the Dies Irae mingling with the terrible words of the accusing spirit, till Gretchen sinks fainting to the ground.

And where is Faust? He has fled. The avengers of blood are on his track. His selfish passion has been the cause of death to Gretchen's mother and brother and has brought ruin on her—to end in madness, infanticide and the block.

I have often wondered whether the limitations of art might not allow the possibility of some drama on the same lines as Faust in which he might be saved by the purity and nobility of womanhood, as in the story of Cyprian and Justina, instead of, as here, using the ruin of a poor girl as a stepping-stone in his career of self-salvation. Or, what if he had felt such horror and remorse at her fate that he had broken his compact and freed himself from the demon? It will be said, perhaps, that this would have been undramatic and that such a view is merely sentimental and subversive of all true art. But, once more, what if he had bravely stood by Gretchen, or had even shared her fate when she refused to be saved by him?

Anyhow, Goethe did not choose any of these methods; and if he had done so we should have had no second Part of Faust—nor indeed our next scene, the Walpurgisnacht.

Pursued not only by the avengers of blood but by the avenging furies of his own conscience, Faust has plunged into a reckless life and experiences those after-dreams of intellectual and Æsthetic extravagance which so often follow such riotous living. This period—that of sensual riot and Æsthetic dalliance—Goethe has, I think, symbolized by two wild and curious scenes, the Walpurgisnacht and Oberon's Wedding, a kind of 'after-dream' of the Walpurgisnacht.

The connexion of these scenes with the main action of the play has puzzled many critics, especially the curious Intermezzo which follows the Walpurgisnacht, the 'Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania,' a kind of dream-vision, or rather nightmare, in which besides the fairies of Shakespeare's fairyland, besides will-o'-the-wisps and weather-cocks and shooting stars, numerous authors, philosophers and artists and other characters appear, including Goethe himself as the 'Welt-kind.' This scene was not originally written for Faust, but Goethe inserted it (I imagine) as an allegorical picture of over-indulgence in Æstheticism and intellectualism (the 'opiate of the brain,' as Tennyson calls it)—a vice into which one is apt to be seduced by the hope of deadening pain of heart. Although not written for the play, this Intermezzo cannot be said to be superfluous, for the subject of Faust is one that admits of almost any imaginative conception that is descriptive of the experiences of human nature in its quest of truth.

But let us return to the Walpurgisnacht. On the 1st of May a great festival was held by the ancient Druids, who on the preceding night used to perform on the mountains their terrible sacrifices, setting ablaze huge wickerwork figures filled with human beings. Hence in later times the superstition arose that on this night witches ghouls and fiends held their revels on the Brocken, or Blocksberg, in the Harz mountains. The name of Saint Walpurga (an English nun, who came to Germany in the eighth century) became associated with this Witches' Sabbath, as the 1st of May was sacred to her. To this midnight orgy of the Walpurgisnacht Mephistopheles takes Faust.... They are lighted on their toilsome ascent of the Blocksberg by a will-o'-the-wisp. A vast multitude of witches and goblins are flocking to the summit; the midnight air resounds with their shrieks and jabberings; weird lights flash from every quarter, revealing thronging swarms of ghoulish shapes and dancing Hexen. The trees themselves are dancing. The mountains nod. The crags jut forth long snouts which snort and blow. Amid the crush and confusion Faust has to cling fast to his guide. Once the two get parted, and Mephistopheles is in anxiety lest he should lose Faust entirely, the idea being, I suppose, that sometimes a human being outruns the devil himself in the orgies of sensuality. At last they reach the dancers. Mephistopheles is here in his element and joins in the dances with eagerness, bandying jokes with the old hags and flirting with the younger witches. Nor does Faust seem at all disinclined to follow suit. He however desists dismayed when, as he is dancing with a witch of seductive loveliness, a red mouse jumps out of her mouth.

At length, when Mephisto, who finds it getting too hot even for him, comes again to Faust, he discovers him silently gazing at a weird sight—one that might well have sobered him. 'Look!' says Faust:

Mephistopheles answers:

But Faust will not be convinced. It is Gretchen—his 'poor good Gretchen' as he calls her. And what is that red bleeding gash around her neck? What terrible thought does it suggest!

'Quite right!' answers Mephistopheles with a ghastly joke—

He hurries Faust away. But soon these terrible presentiments are realized. Faust learns—how we are not told—that Gretchen is in prison, and condemned to death on the scaffold; for in her madness—yes, surely in madness—she has drowned her own child.

Instead of attempting to describe what follows, I shall offer a literal prose translation of some parts of the concluding scene, asking you to supply by your imagination, as best you may, the power and harmony of Goethe's wonderful verse.

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