Goethe's Key to Faust: Third Paper: The Second Part of Faust

As we reach the end of the tragedy of the First Part of Faust and look back, we seem to have come, with Mephistopheles, upon that midway height where we can see only with astonishment “ how Mammon in the mountain glows ; ” selfishness everywhere triumphant; the lovely sacrificed, the evil saved. The poet has told us it is the picture of life as mirrored in his own soul. To pause here is to feel ourselves in a witches’ revel, a Walpurgis-Night indeed. This incomplete view of the poem has led to the mistaken idea that Goethe himself is but a sublimated Mephistopheles, a demon of selfishness. The First Part is only half the picture. — the storm and stress period of his darkened youth, — the shadow, not the light. To judge Goethe by this alone is as if we should judge of a Rembrandt by only the darkened side of the picture.

“Youth,” says Goethe, “must always begin at the beginning, and thus repeat the story of Man.” The First Part of Faust is but the picture of the period of selfishness in the individual, which in the history of the race we call the dark ages. Goethe forestalls our condemnation. " I have continued the poetical confession which I had begun, that, by this self-tormenting penance, I might be worthy of an internal absolution.” But is this individual life the reflex of the All ? Can any soul mirror for us the universe? Can the tiny, darkened chamber of the eye hold all this immensity and wondrous beauty, Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau ?

“We find ourselves,” writes Goethe from the Rigi, that midway elevation of Alpine scenery, “ at the foot of the Mother of God. I will not deny that those representations of the higher and better qualities of human nature proceed from that source.” " Nay, without fresh impressions of the wonderful scenes I could never have conceived the subject of that terza rima passage which opens this Second Part of Faust. " These are the impressions which Swiss scenery made on his mind, whither he had rushed for refuge from his tormented and tormenting self.

Here around the tortured man, in whose torn heart still rankles the burning shaft of remorse, gather all the gentle influences of nature, which

sings Ariel, that lovely spirit of the mountain air,

“ Light and spirit are the highest imaginable primal energies.” “ I have ever seen God in Nature, and Nature in God, to such an extent that this conviction is the basis of my entire existence.” “If I am asked whether it is in my nature to pay devout homage to the person of Jesus, I say: Certainly. I bow before Him as the divine manifestation of the highest principle of morality.” “ If I am asked whether it is in my nature to revere the sun, I say again : Certainly ; for he is likewise a manifestation of the highest Being, and indeed the most powerful which we children of earth are permitted to behold. I adore in him the light and productive power of God, by which we all live and move and have our being.” “This is the point of view of a sort of primitive religion of pure nature and reason, which is of divine origin. The light of unclouded divine revelation,— it is far too pure and bright to be suitable to, and supportable by, poor weak man. But the Church steps in as a useful mediator to soften and to moderate, by which all are helped and many are benefited,” “ I was like one who had walked in the night, when this sense of the imminence of Deity shone upon and blinded me.” Like the dawn of that light which is its visible symbol and agency in the universe, it is so glorious, so huge and vast, one is blinded, and turns for shelter to that historical image of the Divine in Man, the Man-God of the earliest theologies, with which mankind would veil the too dreadful sublimity of the Source of Life itself. “ I was full,” he says, “ of this beautiful subject. I saw the lake in the quiet moonlight, illuminated mists in the depths of the mountains; then I saw it in the light of the loveliest morning sun, —a Rejoicing and a Life in wood and meadow,” Let us listen now to Faust.

FAUST (awakening).

In his Annals Goethe remarks that “the Swiss journey opened up to me manifold glimpses into the world. The visit to Weimar surrounded me with pleasant and beautiful relations, and, unrecognized, pressed me forward upon a new course of life. Meanwhile I acquired a bolder hold of the depths of humanity ; a passionate opposition to all misleading and confining theories arose within me.”

As we look along the torrent of the ages, whose image we are to trace in the coming scenes, we shall find that that other Divine Influence, which emancipated the personal Faust of the First Part from the thralldom of selfishness and the narrow confinement of pedantry, taking him out of his cell into life and the sense of that Beauty which is the Divine, is also at work in this wider arena, the history of the race. “ Look,” says the poet, “ this same Influence is here, too, the Redeemer of the race. Follow its history with me, and you shall see this manifestation of the Divine not only in the labor, the energy, of Nature, but in that redeeming Love as well, whose bright reflection floats above all the tumult of the ages, and which, manifest in, incarnate in, Woman, has forever led, and will forever lead, us upward from darkness and despair to the glory of the brighter day.”

It is still a personality moving before us, — our old friend of the First Part; but the arena has widened ; the figures are now thrown upward, and sweep over the clouds of Time, like the gigantic shadows of man which travelers see looking off from the Brocken. Here it is the greater world, not a man, but Man, whose course we are to follow. In some sort, it is still, indeed, a reflex of Goethe’s own experience, but used as a symbol only, significant of the experience of the race, and of “the operation of those eternal laws in which we move and have our being.”

“ The rational world,” says Goethe in his Sayings, “ is to be regarded as a great, immortal individual that, unrestrained, effects the necessary, and makes itself master of the accidental.” “ Here, in the romantic, involved destiny of man, is the groundwork of the action; ” for here, as he told Eckermann, we are to see the “ whole of antiquity and half the history of the modern world.”

Not that we are to look for a consecutive history of the race, but only for such parts of that history so arranged as to be significant of this law of life, this harmony, this union with Deity, which he will bring home to men. “ We are to look for the symbols of human life.” “The great point,” Eckermann reports Goethe as saying, — “the great point with the poet is to express a manifold world; and he uses the story of a celebrated hero merely as a sort of thread on which he may string what he pleases; the only matter of importance is that the single masses be clear and significant.”

The difficulty has been that the commentary on Faust has paid more attention to the separate pearls of thought than to this thread, the law of life, that holds them together. The result is described by Goethe in the account given, by the Herald of the Masquerade, of the manner in which the multitude are treating the poet’s (the Boy Charioteer’s) gifts which he strews among them: —

Let us, then, try to keep in mind the connection with the whole. “ Remember the All.” Look out on that eternal conflict of Light and Darkness which was promised us in the earlier Prologue, and see how this Divine Influence has brought us to the light.

We first find ourselves in the Emperor’s court. The old fool is gone, drunk or dead, but Mephistopheles, the Demon of Selfishness, has crowded in, regardless of the halberds held crosswise before the door to bar his entrance. He at once places himself between the clergy and the nobles, on the steps of the throne. As the new fool and councilor, he proceeds to cozen the Emperor into the belief that he can get without giving an equivalent. All things are at the lowest ebb, because the Emperor has been amusing himself instead of governing.

This quatrain from Goethe’s Sayings in Rhyme might stand as the motto of the first act of the Second Part; indeed, it would not be inappropriate as the text of the drama. “ The land is without law and justice; the judge himself is on the side of the criminal; the most atrocious crimes are committed without check and with impunity. The army is without pay, without discipline, and roams about plundering in order to provide its own pay and help itself as it can. The state treasury is without money, and without hope of replenishment. In the Emperor’s own household things are no better. There is a scarcity both in kitchen and cellar. The steward, who cannot devise means how to get on from day to day, is already in the hands of usurious Jews, to whom everything is pawned, so that bread already eaten comes on the Emperor’s table. The councilor of state wishes to remonstrate with his majesty upon all these evils, and advises as to their remedy. But the gracious sovereign is very unwilling to lend his sublime ear to anything so disagreeable; he prefers amusing himself. Here, now,”says Goethe to Eckermann, “ is the true element for Mephisto.”

Need we look very far down the history of modern Europe to see this state of things reflected there ? As a youth, Goethe saw Marie Antoinette on her way through Strasburg to France, and was filled with forebodings for her subsequent fate, which he even then foresaw. In his Annals he says : “ The affair of the Queen’s necklace produced an indefinable impression upon me. From this abyss of immorality, which in the town, the court, and throughout the whole state opened before me, I saw rising the most terrible consequences, and could not free my imagination from the ghosts that haunted it.”

Looking out on the changing spectacle of the carnival at Rome, the thought comes to him, " Why, this is human life !" In this falling court of the play we see the Emperor turn his councilors aside to witness a similar festival, which the Herald tells us his master brought from Rome. So we will all “ pull down the fool’s cap over our ears,”

This is the masque of which Wilhelm Meister speaks, which is to represent the life of man, where all the characters in “ single, double, or even triple allegories ” present to us those elements which make up modern society, and so “ bring the occupations and undertakings of men upon the stage as to survey the natural and reciprocal influences of each class on the other.”

says the Boy Charioteer, who, Goethe tells us, is Poetry. The commentators have done excellent service in hunting down these characters as they appear, assisting the Herald, whose office is in part to name them. Especially interesting is the allusion, pointed out by Chancellor von Müller, in the gratitude of the Boy Charioteer to Plutus, who had confided the reins of his triumphal car to his keeping, for liberty to leave the cares of state, to go

We cannot pause to recall it in full; but it contains not only a most eloquent statement of the interdependence of wealth and art, but a splendid remembrancer of the relation of the poet and the Grand Duke, Karl August, — an ideal instance of that connection.

Mr. Birds, in his note on the sunrise, terza rima, refers to the correspondence between that passage and the account in Plato’s Phædrus of the Good shining like the sun ; but no allusion has been made to the closer correspondence between the rest of Plato’s figure, the chariot of the soul with its winged steeds, which will soar with the chariot aloft or drag it downward, and this chariot bearing Faust, the Soul of Man, with its dragon coursers, winged, yet bestial. Under the poet’s guidance they come soaring aloft on shining pinions ; but when he leaves these dragon energies of our nature to the sole care of Wealth and Greed, we notice their only occupation is to guard the treasure chest. Great ingenuity has been expended upon these dragons. Is it necessary to go far away for their significance ?

The central figure of this masque, however, is “ the great god Pan.” We see him and his rough and uncouth horde from mountain and wood rudely breaking into this courtly circle, and even the Herald’s staff, “ that pledge of order still,” is powerless to keep him out. Here we may find Goethe’s view of this great god, this Demos; and it is the essence of the entire scene. He constantly expressed his abhorrence of violent upheavals of all sorts, and the high value he placed upon the restraints imposed upon our dragon nature by what we call the barriers of society. This has led to the mistaken idea that he was an aristocrat of aristocrats. It is, indeed, the courtly Herald’s task to keep up these barriers, and preserve the graces and amenities of life, here so charmingly incarnated for us in the figures of the masque.

But the courtly Herald’s staff, though it

cannot keep Wealth and Art out of the charmed circle, nor the Able Man. Goethe laughs at the notion that he upheld aristocratic pretensions to unlimited power. “ Revolutionary outbreaks of the lower classes,” he says, " are always the consequence of injustice of the higher classes.” He goes on to tell Eckermann how far he has really been from being an aristocrat. “ But sometimes people do not like to look at me as I really am, and turn their glances from anything that shows me in my true light. Schiller, on the contrary, who was much more of an aristocrat than I am, but who considered what he said more than I, had the wonderful fortune to be looked on as a friend of the people. I give up that name to him, and console myself with the thought that others have fared no better. It is true that at the time I could be no friend to the French Revolution, for its horrors were too near me, and its beneficial results were not then to be discovered. Neither could I be indifferent to the fact that the Germans were endeavoring to bring about artificially such scenes here as were in France the consequence of a great necessity. But I was as little a friend of arbitrary rule. I am a friend to the people, and have devoted my life to their improvement. I am no friend of Louis XV., nor to established order, as I have been called, except where it is clearly best for the present. What is best for 1830 may not be for 1850.”

In considering the Walpurgis-Night of the First Part, we have seen that Goethe thought society, — the society, that is, of the courts and towns, — with all its graceful veneer of courtly polish, hopelessly degenerate and corrupt, and that it stood in immediate danger and need of dissolution, if not recruited from the healthful simple life of the country districts. It has often been pointed out that individual characters of this masquerade recall Goethe’s delight in the manly Swiss mountaineers, the miners and foresters ; and at its opening is at once introduced the contrast between the fine folk, who are busy amusing themselves, and the sturdy wood-cutters. “ How would our fine folk live if we did not sweat ? ” The laborer is the foundation of society, by no means to be despised. Later, when the poet has left the charge of the chariot of Wealth to Plutus and Greed (Mephistopheles), the great disruption of that courtly circle occurs. The bestial nature of Mephistopheles shows itself in his relations with the women.

Even the Herald feels at last obliged to interfere : —

recalling the incident of Cardinal Rohan’s trial in the intrigue of the queen’s necklace.

“ No,” Faust replies, “ he will work his own destruction presently.”

What is this “Tumult and Song” at the door ? “ Obliged,” says the Herald, —

“ Obliged I ope this circle’s narrow bound; ”
and in from woods and fields comes a
rough horde, with

SAVAGE SONG.

TUMULT AND SONG.

All these wild, untamed natures, that Goethe so admired,—the reapers, the hardy mountaineers, the giant woodsmen, the miners who bring the gold to light, — break into this select but decaying circle ; and with them comes the true Emperor, the great god Pan. Who is this great natural deity, who under a rough exterior conceals the real sovereign ?

We notice, when he too would participate in the golden wealth, the ornaments which Mephistopheles produces from his chest, and adorn himself, that the rough exterior burns off, and beneath the false beard of tarry twigs is the smooth chin of the real Emperor.

We may perhaps best describe this Pan by that well-known line of Tom Taylor’s in Mr. Punch’s Lament for Lincoln, who tells us to see in

Here is the Vox Dei which will roar through the forest like tempestuous thunder ; the god from the woods, who represents the All, the whole of humanity, not a favored class alone.

Let us bring our treasure to him ; he will use it for the general benefit.

This is very different from paying taxes to support the creatures of a shameless debauchee like Louis XV. And now that whole court, which had accepted Mephistopheles, the Demon of Lust and Greed, as their chief adviser, nearest to the throne, goes up in a mass of inextinguishable flame. In this tremendous conflagration the courtiers see the entire destruction of their idea of the Emperor.

Goethe lived to see the regeneration of that society, which he characterized as a witches’ revel, by such a conflagration. Imperial pomp and pride went down before his eyes in fiery ruin ; but the real Emperor, the true commander, authority, sovereign power, came in with the rough herd from the woods and mines. He too called the Herald’s staff into play, and bade him

Notice the force and suggestiveness of the adjective “ hollow ’’ applied to the conventions of society ; and how the amenities of life, “ the Graces,” return with the restoration of the social fabric, — a new edifice cleansed and purified.

In the next scene we have further experience of the operation of Mephistopheles, the desire to get without an equivalent, to get without giving, in the flood of paper money which seems to make all rich, and cure the ills of the state. Here, too, is that fine passage, passed over in silence by the commentators, concerning the permanency of majesty among the waves, put into the mouth of Mephistopheles, who likes to fool people by telling them truths which are not applicable to their case. Authority, sovereign power, which has withstood the fire, indeed, need not fear that the waves of time or popular tumult will prevail against it; but the new court fool, this insane desire to get happiness for its own sake, applies that truth to the tottering majesty, which his paper-money scheme has momentarily bolstered up into a semblance of power, as unreal as the promises to pay based upon hidden gold which can never be found.

We now come to that “ dark gallery ” where Mephistopheles gives Faust a glittering key, and sends him off into the void to search for the Mothers, and obtain of them the shades of Paris and Helena, the ideals of beauty. We have seen, in reviewing his promises for the First Part, one suggestion of the poet in this dark passage, namely, that the key, which we are to find in the lines themselves and in the poet’s life, will bring the real beauty of the drama before us. He calls Eckermann’s attention to the fact that Faust constantly falls out of his part; and this is the sort of aside which the poet, in his double or triple allegories, often speaks directly to the auditor. Let us now regard it in its relation to the whole. Goethe, preparing to read the scene to Eckermann, observes : “ Now they have got money at the imperial court they want to be amused. The Emperor wishes to see Paris and Helen, and through magical art they are to appear in person.” (Another suggestion of the relation of Wealth and Art.) “Since, however, Mephistopheles has nothing to do with Greek antiquity, this task is assigned to Faust.” “ There are only two true religions,” says Goethe in his Sayings: “ one of the Holy, that in and round us dwells quite formless ; the other, that which we recognize and adore in the most beautiful Form. All that lies between is idolatry.” Notice now that Faust is in search of the most beautiful form ; but in a spirit very different from the religious spirit, the spirit which produced the Greek drama. Mr. Lawton points out that “ the great productions of Greek dramatic art were almost, if not quite, religious services.” “ It is,” he says, “ a significant fact that the prize given was always a tripod, — that is, a distinctly religious object, — which the recipient was permitted and expected to dedicate to the god around whose altar the choruses of the great dramas were sung.” This was the spirit in which the great dramas were produced. This was the real thing. The Romans, when they were in somewhat the condition of the falling French monarchy, undertook to amuse themselves, as the French of the ancien régime undertook, for the same purpose, to reproduce those immortal works of the Spirit, by observing the outward laws of the three unities. Goethe tells us he was himself infected with this notion in his youth, till he lived through that delusion. What was actually accomplished was the production of a mere shadow, not the substance of the Greek dramas ; as unreal as the tawdry imitation of the Greek temple and altar which the scene painter furnishes for modern performances. The spirit of beauty is no longer there ; only a wraith which simulates it for a moment, but disappears at once under the searchlight of critical inquiry. This light Mephistopheles can lend us, for he is par excellence the critic the doubter, the denier, the Spirit of Contradiction. But we must search for ideal beauty in a different spirit, — a devout love full of awe and reverence, of which we find no trace in that successful Philistinism which seeks to accomplish everything by what we Americans call “smartness;” by the glitter of critical cleverness instead of consecration, —

“ The Spirit of Contradiction which is innate in all men,” said Hegel, “ shows itself great as a distinction between the false and true.” “ Let us only hope,” interposed Goethe, “that these intellectual arts and dexterities are not frequently misused and employed to make the false true and the true false.” Yet he said to Eckermann : “ Doubt incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment. The Mahometans practiced the minds of their youths by giving them the task of detecting and expressing the opposite of every proposition: from which great adroitness is sure to arise. Our youngtalents are left to themselves. Something may be learned from the dead, but it is rather the copying of details than a penetration into the deep thoughts and methods of the Master. . . . Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind.”

To this creative mind, then, to the mother element, Mephistopheles sends Faust in search of beauty, to amuse the court, not as a religious act; though the very mention of the Mothers fills Faust’s soul with awe. He gives him this golden Key, with which, Goethe says, the Mahometans equip their youth, this critical spirit, — notice, critical, not creative; in short, the spirit which ruled in the ancien régime. This, will lead our young talent to adroitness, make him clever. With this he can get up a very good imitation of beauty. Arm yourself with this smart golden Key, but eliminate the personal bias. Mephistopheles says : —

FAUST.

MEPHISTOPHELES.

The translations of this passage, by the way, illustrate the danger of omitting any portion of Goethe’s words. Only Sir Theodore Martin preserves intact, the suggestive part of Faust’s speech : " Hold it from your body.”

Mephistopheles is up to his old trick of telling the truth, or part of the truth, and so fooling his hearer. It is true enough that

“Into gods these incense clouds will change.” But that result is not to be arrived at by stealing the tripod and donning the priestly robe alone, the outward forms of the three unities. It is not, as Milton says, “ to be raised from . . . the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters ; but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance, and sends out the fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases.”

says Faust, as he goes out into immensity in search of the Mothers.

We find in the Memoirs this passage : “The Système de la Nature appeared to us so dark, so Cimmerian, so deathlike, that we found it a trouble to endure its presence, and shuddered at it as at a spectre.” Faust returns with the outward trappings of the altar, the tripod and the robe, to a brilliantly lighted and adorned hall, Mr. Boyesen, recallingwhat Goethe has written of the influence of Herder upon him, says : “ He led him out of a splendidly upholstered and artificially lighted hall into the great calm presence of Nature herself.” In the Memoirs we see how Herder drew Goethe away from his love for Ovid, as the product of just such a period of Philistine cleverness as existed in the French monarchy. “ Here ” (in Ovid) " was neither Greece nor Italy, god nor demigod ; everything was rather an imitation of what had already existed.” “ And here,”Goethe adds, “the significant puppet-show fable of Faust resounded and vibrated, many-toned, within me.”

In the next scene we find ourselves in " an upholstered hall, dimly lighted. " “ But how hollow and empty did we feel in this melancholy, atheistical half night ” (of French literature of the ancien régime). “ The French way of life we found too defined and genteel, their poetry cold and their criticism annihilating.” Notice especially this phrase, — their " annihilating” criticism. We shall see its destructive effect shortly, when Faust turns his critical key on the characters on the stage.

As Faust touches the tripod with this key, which the Spirit of Contradiction has furnished him, the phantoms of Paris and Helena, the ideals of beauty, appear from the clouds of smoke. “The tragedy termed classic makes phantoms, " says Victor Hugo. Even this pallid imitation of Beauty enraptures Faust, as the Græco-French drama and the GræcoRoman gods and demigods of Ovid did Goethe, until Herder, with his Mephistophelian irony, pointed out to him their spurious imitativeness. Then we have that passage which has exhausted the ingenuity of the commentators. Faust, in his delight at the vision of beauty which the key of Mephistopheles has evoked, would rush to seize Helena and carry her off by force, but turns his key on Paris, and the whole scene is exploded. Its unreality becomes at once as apparent as the unreality of the imitated gods and demigods of the Metamorphosis became under Herder’s critical examination of Ovid. Mephistopheles tells him: —

and the Astrologer says : —

Beauty is not to be acquired by any such tour de force, nor to be made by one’s unaided effort.

Yet further dreadful results follow the inciting of this critical spirit, the unguarded use of this dangerous key. Faust, the Soul of Man, paralyzed and falling to earth, is seized by Mephistopheles, the spirits go up in smoke, and the Demon of Selfishness is left alone amid Darkness and Tumult.

Is this so difficult of comprehension ? We have seen the allusion to both the Roman Empire and the French monarchy, and the causes of their decadence, when the critical faculty was specially sharpened and freely used on all existing institutions. Then came that upheaval of society which, in the earlier period, swept all civilization and all love of the beautiful into a few pedantic cells. The Demon of Darkness and Self-Seeking reigned supreme, till all art and all literature went down in one common night of the dark ages, and Europe became a mere den of lawless robbers, every clan and every man for himself. Selfishness remained alone in the tumultuous dark.

The Soul of Man lay dormant, as in a trance ; the whole world seemed to have turned into a gigantic witches’ revel of lust and robbery. Only from some pedantic, monkish cells streamed one little ray of light into the darkness, the remembrance of that classic learning of which the world still heard as in a dream. Science was but the foolery of the astrologer, or the whimsical endeavor of the alchemist to fuse contraries that were not made to go together, or concoct a manikin by crystallization.

Again in ” Faust’s narrow Gothic cell, high-vaulted :" here is Faust (in whom we are now to see the Soul of Man) in the background, stretched out on an antique bed, insensible; asleep, as the Soul of Man indeed seemed to be through all those old dark ages. Mephistopheles, the incarnation of Selfishness, alone is awake and stirring. He tells us it is the same state of things we saw in the individual life of the First Part, only

In the barrel yet sticks that drop of red blood which was lured out of his victim. Mephistopheles will again assume the professor’s old robe. As this “lord of frogs and lice ” puts it on, all sorts of crickets, crotchets, beetle-browed creatures, moths, and other destructives flyout to greet their “ Old Patron.”

“ Haste you, my darlings, to hide away.”

“ In this old parchment, in the dusty, broken old vessels, n the hollow eyes of yonder death’s-head, in such a waste of mouldy life,”

How fearfully the bell resounds, when this mischievous critic pulls at it ! He is fond of giving out homœopathic doses of that valuable article, truth, when he can fool men into misuse of it through misunderstanding ; “ truth that “ like a bell-tone rings throughout the world.” At the sound of the bell the whole of this edifice of pedantry and ecclesiasticism trembles and cracks, the door flies open, and

“ I know you,” says the amused Devil to the boy who answers the bell. “We’ll call you Nicodemus. You are like Nicodemus the Pharisee, you pupil of this spirit of pedantry, our old friend Wagner.” And the mediæval mummy answers : —

“ Let us pray.” he says at once. He has evidently heard talk of the Inquisition, or some such conservator of the true faith. Do you ask of Doctor Wagner? “ Who knows him not?” says the merry Devil. “He

But how do we know that all this refers to that ancient time Goethe, to make this clearer, tells us that “ Mephistopheles rolls his armchair nearer the proscenium, to remark here to the audience : —

Then we are taken into the laboratory, where we find Doctor Wagner, like the old monkish alchemists, busily trying to make a man by crystallization ; by shutting the spirit up into a glass bottle, carefully corked from the life-giving air. This is “ Homunculus,” that hermetically sealed spirit in the vial, on the elucidation of whose significance such stores of learning have been expended. But says this “mischievous rogue” (Mephistopheles), in whom Goethe has told us we are to recognize his own mocking spirit: —

What does this manikin do for Faust, that Spirit of Man, dreaming there in the lethargy of the dark ages ? From the narrow cell where Homunculus sits confined a ray of light penetrates Faust’s darkened mind, and he learns from this manikin that classic story of Leda and the Swan, the conception of Helena the Beautiful. On his way hence, Mephistopheles “has seen such men before.” Goethe’s own life has been so extended that he has been able to experience in his own person all that the race has undergone. We find him in his Memoirs telling of the way in which the pedantic course of his early instruction had cribbed, cabined, and confined his own spirit; but, he says, it also gave him some imperfect knowledge of Greek ideals. Then the awakening of desire led him to a sense of beauty in woman. This emancipated and set his spirit free, till he experienced life, and, wandering on in its glorious brightness, was carried from that lower form of sensuous enjoyment of existence up to Arcadia, that home land of the Beautiful, where Euphorion, Modern Poetry, child of ancient classicism and mediæval romance, was born.

Looking back through the history of the race, do we not find the same experience which Goethe found mirrored in his breast, and has pictured here ? What crystallized specimens of humanity, of monkish pedantry, it produced!—that gigantic incarnation of Selfishness in the scholar’s robe; paralyzing the Soul of Man, holding the keys of St. Peter, usurping the foremost place in the world, but always, under this shell of pedantry, preserving that spark of the celestial flame, the knowledge of the classics, the conception of the Beautiful. Through this Classical Walpurgis-Night of self-seeking and allied ugliness we shall follow Faust, now awakening, as they set him down on Grecian soil, to the quest of the Beautiful. In the history of art, also, we shall see the same endeavor clarifying from the cruder forms of the sphinxes and sirens, half bestial, half divine, till that bright luminary, Queen of the Night, Das Mutterbild, the Loveliness of Woman, beams upon us with her gentle reflected light. All this is indicated in the figures of this wonderful second act, where we may also trace in its varied forms the development not only of man and art, but of science and theology as well. All at last are

and we reach that festival of Ocean, from whose foam the Helena, the Beautiful herself, arose,

The manikin in his crystal case shatters its envelope against “ the loveliest lady’s seashell throne,” and spreads himself in phosphorescent beauty over all the dancing waves.

We cannot follow all the details of the Night. Its keynote is given in that speech with which the scene opens, — the eternally repeated conflict of Light and Darkness. Erichtho, the Thessalian woman famous for her knowledge of poisonous herbs and their antidotes, whom Pompey consulted before the battle of Pharsalia, describes the conflict. A “ mighty instance,” type of " Power which finds itself opposed to greater power ; ” that is, of aristocracy opposed to democracy. That “ mighty instance,” where the gay young aristocrats charged the serried ranks of democracy, shouting, " Hercules invictus ! ” (Power is unconquerable), only to be met and overthrown by the exultant cry of triumphant democracy, “ Venus victrix ! ” Love has been indeed the conqueror, and in her lovely light “ the war-fires burn but bluely.”

It is Goethe who speaks to us beneath the mask of Erichtho: wise in poison and its antidote ; slandered, as was Erichtho, by contemporary poets, who living calumniated him as “ the friend of established order, the upholder of aristocracy.” Well may he “ prudently retire from the living,” conceal his thought under an antique mask, and so await the judgment of posterity.

Through " the Classical WalpurgisNight,” then, our travelers are to wander in their varied search : Faust, the Soul of Man, seeks Helena the Beautiful; Homunculus, the spirit striving to free itself from the bonds which pedantry has imposed upon it, seeks to be a man, as the individual Faust of the First Part (the reflex of Goethe’s life) and as the old monks must have looked from their cells with longing for some human life. Mephistopheles, true to his character of negation, finds his ideal, the ideal of Ugliness, in the darksome cavern of the triune Sisters of Darkness, the Phorkyads. He joins himself, as an integral part, to that baleful trinity, and, putting out one eye, makes the likeness so complete that he will

In the next act, he alone appears as the representative of the antique sisterhood who guards the palace of art, and keeps alive the spark of flame glimmering on the deserted hearth. Under these antique masks, however, we are to see the modern world.

The first figures that come before our eyes are the Sphinxes, solemn, mysterious, boasting of their great antiquity and immutability through all the upheavals around them, — the Sphinxes, winged, but with lion hides and cruel claws, and yet forever holding aloft over the convulsions of time the image of that Eternal-Womanly whose exquisite beauty we saw glassed in the Witch’s mirror of the First Part. What is this figure ? It is the lion with the angel face, whom we are to question as to the great enigma of life. Mephistopheles, in the First Part, made the priest remark that the Church had eaten up whole countries. In the fourth act of this part of the drama the Archbishop insists on having the lion’s share of the spoils, and in the first act says that

who

This goes far to explain the other figure which travelers find with them in the night of the dark ages, the unexplained griffins. Mephistopheles sits at once between them, as we notice he pushed in between the clergy and the nobles, in the first act of this part; and we find that these griffins are gripers of all they can lay their hands on, and even now threaten the poor ants who have by hard toil amassed the hard-won gold, as the robber barons descended from their fastnesses on the merchants’ caravans, or later oppressed the people with unjust taxes. In Wilhelm Meister, too, Goethe compares the industrial masses of mankind to tribes of ants.

In the next act we hear of this robber horde, who, with these strange, fabulous beasts on their shields, have pressed forward out of Cimmerian night, and built up fastnesses from which they harry land and people as they please.

If we followed the story of this eternally renewed conflict, we should see these ants often harried, and sometimes revenging themselves; and amid all upheavals the Sphinx ever unmoved, or but elevated by the conflict. It is this winged animal, this solemn, mysterious Sphinx, with her woman’s head and breast, which attracts the desire of Mephistopheles, who directs Faust to the means of his healing; as it was the Witch in the First Part who led him to see in every woman a Helena, and so freed his spirit from its pedantic cell, and brought him out into life to grow into manhood, to live as a man with mankind. Could the history of the mediæval Church and nobility be more vividly portrayed ? Is not the whole story stamped indelibly upon our consciousness in these two figures which suggest it all ?

The Sphinx refers Faust’s question to Chiron the Centaur, half man, half horse, who will give him tidings of the lost Helena. Faust, listening to the Grecian waters, lapping around his feet as he first enters them, hears nymphs singing, and sees directly before him that conception of the Beautiful, the vision of Leda and the Swan. Then the nymphs take up the song : —

FAUST.

Here, at last, in this wild night, is the

knightly rider, who will, through the worship of “ Frauenschönheit,” beauty in woman, lead the Soul of Man to see

“ Beauty, that in itself is blest.”

He will bear him to Manto, wise priestess of Apollo’s temple, — temple alike of Light and Spirit; not now radiant in the sunlight, but mildly beaming in that reflected glory whose human image we are shortly to see.

CHIRON (to Faust).

MANTO.

CHIRON.

MANTO (awaking).

CHIRON (to Faust).

Faust is on the right track. Again he will seek the beautiful in the vasty deep; but now he enters on the quest in that spirit of reverent devotion, the gateway through which alone the beautiful may he really won. Notice, as he disappears from our view through the temple portals, that it is the knightly rider who has taught him reverence for womanhood, the chivalric devotion which takes us on to the festival of chivalry, that festival of the sea, which sets even the cabined spirit of Homunculus afloat on the lovely waves of life, to make all things more lovely, and grow eventually himself, through the influence of woman, to that full stature of a man for which he longs.

The serpent-charmers have charge of her chariot now, and, in spite of winged lion or eagle, cross or crescent, will

Homunculus rushes forward in ecstasy, and, shattering his case on the glittering seashell throne, is at last freed from his imprisonment, as the individual Faust of the First Part was, through the influence of woman acting on that slime of the Sea of Life, desire. So Luther escaped from his monkish cell, and in the light of love glorified the world. Homunculus does not at once become a man, but starts life for himself as that phosphorescent proteus animalcula, as the earlier scientists called it, —slime of the sea, where, modern science tells us, all life began.

In this lovely radiance of “ the lesser light of heaven,” we find ourselves carried on to that Protean beginning of life. “ the simple,” the “ Originally Productive ; ” and, had we space at our disposal, we might trace yet further glimpses and gleams of the Divine in the myriad stars which the poet, following the Manager’s advice in the Prologue of the First Part, has “ squandered” here “at random.” For this advance toward life, toward the Originally Productive, has been, as Homunculus observes, " Threefold, a spirit-stride, worth noting’ well.”But we, perforce, overlook a myriad of suggestions of the development of science, art, and theology from the lower, more sensual, to higher, purer, simpler forms. To attempt to follow them all might lead us, like Mephistopheles, astray amid the primal rocks and roots of things. Suffice it, then, to notice, for the present, that we have been with this greater Faust of the world-life through the same experience which emancipated his younger brother, the individual of the First Part; that is, through sensuality and selfishness, out of the confinement of pedantry, into the purer daylight of love. Mark well that, in the history both of the individual and of the race, it was the influence of Woman, this " Mutterbild ” of the Eternal-Womanly, this Image of Love, that so led us to the Originally Productive, — to Life itself ; till, in that " threefold spiritstride,”humanity, art, and science were alike set free.

We are now on the verge of Arcadia, that worship of ideal beauty to which this reverence for woman has led us; when Art, born again in the golden period of the Renaissance, seemed to be bringing back to the world the real Helena, the beauty which was Greece, and life became Arcadian indeed. As the act opens, we see Helena returning to her husband’s palace, the long-deserted palace of Wealth and Art, not quite herself, it is true, giddy yet from the angry billows which have raged around her bark. There she finds that cousin of Homunculus, our disguised friend Phorkyas (Mephistopheles), who, like Homunculus, has guarded the spark of sacred fire still feebly glimmering on the hearth. But even here, where, in the house of Wealth, Art should be most at home, she is not secure. Phorkyas wraps the queen and her attendant nymphs and dryads of the chorus in concealing mists, till they find themselves at last safe in that " inner castle court, surrounded with rich, fantastic edifices of the Middle Ages,” encircled by the chivalric pomp which characterized the period, and led to the desire for yet more beautiful developments.

With this brilliant retinue comes Faust, “in the knightly court costume of the Middle Ages.”In his speech with Helena we see the elements of romantic poetry, the songs of those troubadours (who appeared as the sailor-lads saved by the help of women from the breakers of war, in the previous act), blending with the antique forms, the Grecian metres used by Helena and the chorus that have accompanied her. As this union becomes complete, the fortress stern changes into Arcadian bowers. Notice where Arcadia lies ; there is a world of suggestion in the line

“ Arcadia, in Sparta’s neighborhood.” Phorkyas, acting merely as informant, tells us that from this union the lovely boy Euphorion, whom Goethe said was Modern Poetry, is born. " Keep your toes on the ground, little man,” cry the anxious parents; " don’t attempt too ambitious flights of fancy.” He contents himself at first with chasing after the rather unsubstantial Greek nymphs and dryads of his mother’s train; but then throws off all wise restraint in a vain attempt to soar through the blue empyrean. The " cannon fever,” which has plunged the world in darkness, infects him, till he falls like a meteor, and sinks from sight beneath the earth. In the lament which the chorus sing, we recognize the familiar outline of Lord Byron’s career ; taken, Goethe tells Eckermann, because both in its unsuccessful aspiration and end it was a perfect symbol of this bright being whose career we are pursuing. Helena, too, follows her offspring to the shades, exclaiming : —

Presently we shall see them enwrap Faust as with a cloud, which will bear him “ far, far from here;" even to that high mountain of Science, which was once regarded as the bottom of hell, as Mephistopheles takes pains to inform Faust, when he arrives from afar in his seven-league boots. As this cloudy car dissolves, we notice that it assumes all noble women-forms, as Juno, Leda, Helena, our earliest love, that beauty of the soul, and so

Again Mephistopheles would stir up that selfish longing for dominion, conquest, acquisition ; but now, “ fresh from heroines,” Faust’s energies demand a loftier antagonist.

The mighty spirit of Science is abroad, and can seek no less heroic combatant than the surging sea. Like Columbus, beyond its present confines he will establish a new continent, or bar the tide back, like the heroic Dutch, till Man has found or made a new land, a new opportunity, for mankind. Again the roar of approaching war threatens to overwhelm all with the desolation of its devouring waves ; but here, says Mephistopheles, we shall find our advantage. Notice how the cannon fever is abating. True, the mountains are covered by Mephistopheles with his minions.

What a fearful rattle they make in the world, these empty shells of feudal warriors!

Valuable still, though, to keep rebels in order, but not to be depended upon long. We must rely upon woman and her arts to send what looks like an irresistible torrent down the hill. To Mephistopheles it seems only an illusion of the senses, but, like the Herald’s staff, it is useful to control rebellious natures.

Is this not enough ? Then send along some Stars and Garters, — as unreal, of course, as heat-lightning, but serviceable also for our present purposes ; for the bully, the robber, and the sneak thief, who compose the real strength of the armies of modern warfare, fail us.

Science, the influence of woman, and democracy have done their work. See, symbol and token of this, how our friend the griffin, fighting mid-air in the clutches of the bird of freedom, falls, fatally torn and wounded, behind the trees. The ruffians are driven from pillaging the rival Emperor’s tent, and peace is once more restored. In the conflict Science has rendered such aid that she cannot now be banned, and must be granted scope and freedom, however much the Archbishop may growl, dissatisfied even with his lion’s share of the spoils of war.

Now, in the fifth act, we find our friend Faust established in a glorious palace, which his own exertions have won for him, overlooking that fair domain wrested from the encroaching sea, and filled with blithe and happy homes where all mankind can have its opportunity. The three bullies are here still, but their rapacity is directed into channels of trade. Yonder, too, is the same old church, moss-grown and dwindled to an insignificant feature in the landscape. The old bell still ding-dongs in time with each event of life, and, as the act opens, we learn how many a struggling soul its helpful peal has guided safe to land. In the First Part of the drama we saw these same chimes restrain the child of earth from self-destruction. So it appears that these desolating waves which Faust has been forcing back from the shore are not altogether waves of the material ocean. That is not the only “aimless element” which the Soul of Man has to combat and control; nor is the physical new world the only land of freedom which Faust may win for man. Jarno, in Wilhelm Meister, says : “ Where I have an opportunity to be useful to my kind, there is my country ; here, too, is America.”

The old couple who tend the chapel welcome the returning wayfarer whom in bygone times they rescued, and will by no means give up their inheritance for any new-fangled home on the new plain. But Faust cannot endure this eternal ding-dong. He wants the place for a lookout whence the whole universe can be seen. Take care! If you try to transplant the old people, you will have Mephistopheles and his bullies let loose upon them. See, from the smoke of the burning chapel what ghostly forms are freed ! This is what you did by enthroning your Goddess of Reason on the altar. You let loose those gaunt shapes forming themselves from the smoke of the burning church. One says she is Want, and another is Crime ; the next is Care, and the next is direst Need. Though Want and Crime, and Need, those sisters of their brother Death, must turn from the rich man’s door, Care will creep through the keyhole, and, as she breathes upon him, the light of his eyes goes out forever. But on, on with the great work! There are yet new elements to conquer.

The active agent in all this work has been Selfishness, which, striving for selfinterest, has won a grand new continent, America, with its new opportunity for all mankind. Mephistopheles has done this for us, with his crew of bullies, his traders, his delvers, his horde of gravediggers.

But there is one labor more to make the new land a paradise of home. We have got rid of the superstition of the Church. Our bullies took care of that. Now let us drain this pestilential marsh, this only other superstition left. Let us get rid of the inequality of rank and property. Have a care, Mr. Faust; beware of these Lémures, these treacherous spirits of the dead, these socialistic Saint-Simons, with their great projects for digging canals and schemes for doing away with private property, leveling all ranks of society, throwing the mountain into the marsh. Take care ; this is nothing new. These Utopian schemes are but Lémures, but spirits of the dead. Plato and Sir Thomas More dreamed them. You have seen in the French Revolution what this cry, “Equality and Fraternity,” led you to. Remember, if you do away with private property and personal aggrandizement, you do away with the great incentive to activity. It is not a canal that these Lémures will dig for you, but a grave. Your Utopia is very pretty, and your aim grand, —

but see how self-seeking has stirred you up to great things. Listen to Goethe talking of this theory of Saint-Simonism to Eckermann : “ I think that each ought to begin with himself and make his own fortune first, from which the happiness of the whole wall at last unquestionably follow. This Saint-Simonian theory appears to me perfectly impracticable. It is in opposition to all nature, all experience, and the course of events for a thousand years. . . . Leave some evils untouched, that something may remain upon which mankind may develop his further powers.”

We recall what the Lord said in the Prologue as to Selfishness, the comrade who stirs mankind up to constant activity. With no incentive to action, Faust at last will sink into inactive enjoyment, — that state into which the great Enemy of Mankind has been trying to trap him. Faust, in anticipation of the new paradise, repeats those words of the contract in the First Part which were to stop the clock of Time and send him to destruction : —

But to linger, to cease from labor, is to stagnate and die.

Is Faust now the slave of Mephistopheles ? No ; for he has “ hitched his wagon to a star,” not joined himself to the principle of destruction, and happiness has come to him as the gift, not of Selfishness, but of Labor. He has found enjoyment in seeking to create a new world of happy homes for the race, and thus become a part of the Immortal Purpose, the Schaffender Freude, which we trace in all things. And so

His deeds of love will plead for him though all the devils in hell issue from its flaming jaws. Even now, as they drag those dreadful jaws upon the stage, the glory shines from above. The blessed boys circle through the heavens, and drive the devils waiting to seize his soul back again with the irresistible roses of love. Where one touches, it burns like red-hot coals of fire.

Amid the solemn solitudes of nature, we may now read, in these Holy Anchorites, the course of human aspiration, ever clarifying through the ages to the perfect vision of the Love Divine.

The angels, bearing Faust’s immortal part, sing of his salvation through constant striving, through labor and love. At last, in the “ highest and purest cell ” of all, Doctor Marianus exclaims that

In the midst of the splendor he sees the Glorious One in the wreath of stars, — the Queen of Heaven ; a symbol which the old Church, with all her shortcomings, her cruel claws, her animal greed, has forever held up to us in her image of that

So Faust has at last that master key of knowledge, — reverence ; and in the voices of those once-despised ones learns to recognize

learns what the teacher told Wilhelm Meister was the hardest task of all, — to reverence what is beneath him, and to recognize what lies in humility and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death; to recognize these things as divine; nay, even not to look on sin and crime as hindrances, but to honor and love them as furtherances to what is holy. “ This being once attained, the human species cannot retrograde.” As the Mater Gloriosa soars into view, the three despised and sinning ones, who have loved much, — “ the Magna Peccatrix, Chief of Sinners, the Woman of Samaria, and Mary of Egypt,—begin that exquisite hymn to Love, complement of the splendid pæan to Labor with which the drama of the First Part opened. God is Labor, but He is also the Eternal-Womanly ; the Love that leads us upward and on. And now this lovely “penitent, formerly called Gretchen,” joins in the supplication, to plead, not for herself, but for her lover: —

MATER GLORIOSA.

From Woman, from Gretchen, then, who, in that gray streak of dawn, surrendered her life to the judgment of God, he “ learns the high meaning of renunciation, of sacrifice of personal desire as on the altar of a god.” “ Ah, yes,” says Doctor Marianus,

Here is the answer to that deep question which Faust strove to fathom when we first met him in his cell translating the Scriptures : “ In the Beginning was the Deed,” — a translation to which Mephistopheles decidedly objected. This is the answer to that question. What and whence is life? For life’s ” Brook,” the Source of Life towards which the spirit yearns, for Life, “which is really so simple,” says the poet, “go to life itself.”Go to Nature. Life is everywhere manifest as Labor, as the Deed, the Creative Principle, as Light, the Sun, “ the greater Light,” the Maker, the Laborer. He is the Hero of the natural life, of the life of Nature. But we were to

Then look within. In all the history of the past, through all man’s experience, we have seen this Creative Principle made operative through that reflected glory, Queen of Heaven, the feminine attribute of Love; the gentle power of Beauty leading us always upward towards the perfect Light. This has ever been the element which has lifted us out of the night and death of selfishness into the glorious light of day, making us co-creators with the Creator, till, in giving ourselves to his purposes, we at last find our long-sought Happiness. Throughout all human story we have seen this principle incarnated for us and manifested in Woman. Here, then, is the true Heroine of our Drama of Existence, which closes with this as the final word of life : —

William P. Andrews.