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 

 Prev. P 30/81 next