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 

 Prev. P 27/81 next