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 

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