present herself as Margaret, or any other; and furthermore he urges Faust toward a little hill, which becomes at once a theatre. By one of those stage transformations in which Goethe delighted, we are swung at once into the Intermezzo, the "Oberon's and Titania's Golden Wedding." Whether it is good art or not that the Walpurgis Night should run into the Intermezzo in this fashion, may be a question. Certainly there would seem to be no question as to the impropriety of the transition being made upon so strong a revulsion of feeling. Goethe must, we should think, have intended this vision of Margaret to stand as the climax of the scene. It comes in, we observe, after Faust's wild dance with the young witch, out of whose mouth a red mouse has leaped, and comes in more strikingly by the contrast. If the end of the scene was possibly changed upon the interpolation of the Intermezzo, the whole should have been recast, and the vision of Margaret placed earlier, before the Proktophantasmist and his group, for instance, who have no connection with the substance of the But whether the clever trick, the shuffle of cards, at the end, were an afterthought or in the original intention, the effect of disproportion, of lack of relative values, is the same upon the mind of the reader. scene. No sane person could dispute that the prison scene, as such, is one of the finest passages in modern literature; that the vision. here is perfect, that this is the sort of thing which strikes through to the soul. None the less, that which impresses the mind when the end of "Faust" is reached, is the lame and impotent conclusion. Margaret should either have been less in the play, or she should have been more. Faust has shown himself so human, he so gains upon us, that when he disappears with Mephistopheles we feel a distinct sense of wrong. If Goethe preferred in his splendid heathenism not to be dominated by the chivalrous idea, and the undue influence of woman, her undue centrality, in a literary work, he should not have suffered the Margaret idea to run away with him. Margaret, having become so much, should somehow have availed for Faust's salvation. But at this point we are confronted by the impression, all along felt, of Margaret's own inadequacy. Perhaps it is the incurable Puritanism to which we have alluded, but others than ourselves must have felt that Margaret's salvation partakes of the nature of a coup de main. She is a victim of the tendencies of things, saved by the compassion of an indulgent Heaven. This perception was intensified by the version of "Faust" in which Margaret was played, not long since, by Ellen Terry. Many will remember how sincere in its way, how pathetic, was the appeal to the Virgin which takes the place of the lyric assigned to Margaret in the original. But the feeling was distinct that in Margaret there was no great sense of moral culpability. If the Virgin by a miracle were to save her from the consequences of her conduct, she might presently, we felt, be imploring again for another miracle. And the point of all this was that Ellen Terry, so widely different from the best Marguerites of the lyric stage, was quite good enough, one felt, for Goethe's conception. Her inadequacy was at the last, in the prison scene. One felt distinctly that she had done nothing to justify the descent of angels, which became, for that reason, the merest stage picture. But here again the discrepancy is in Goethe. An actress capable of the Margaret of the prison scene would be too good for the jewel business and the scenes in Martha's garden; and an actress playing suitably in these earlier scenes would fall off inevitably at the last. Margaret's vivid appeal (in the original "Faust," that is) to the angels and heavenly hosts is out of character. This the more, we may add, since the prison scene itself is not divested altogether of the passional note,-"Hast's Küssen verlernt?" and so on, Margaret asks, when in her distraction she recognizes her lover. To all this it may be answered that "Faust" has a second part as well as a first, and that we must look to the second part for the rounding out of the perfect plan. "Faust" has, alas! a second part; and it is exactly in this second part that we realize how lacking in Goethe's art is the principle of selection. Goethe had apparently substituted for the Helen of the Faust legends another character, suggesting the possibility of a new development. In the second part he returns to the idea of Helen, expanding and enlarging upon it indefinitely. If poetical literature is valuable in proportion to its obscurity, the first three acts, so called, of the second part of "Faust" are among the most valuable productions of the human mind, for human ingenuity has been exhausted upon their interpretation. It does not console us much to be told that Goethe's plan was to reconcile the romantic and classical elements in modern literature. It is to be presumed that there is intention of some sort in the medley of all things in heaven and earth and in the waters under which make up the first three acts alluded to. The question remains, whether anything is reconciled, whether there is not rather a jumble hopeless and inexplicable. When some of Goethe's unqualified admirers admit that they can make little of the second part of "Faust," it is not surprising that those who hold a more moderate view should share the opinion. A school has, indeed, arisen which regards the second part as superior to the first, and which therefore, we must presume, bases upon the second part their claim for Goethe as supreme in poetry. And this notwithstanding the marked inferiority in workmanship; even if the term senile, of the older, severer criticism, is not applied, it would seem that few could fail to notice the lack of virility in the second part of "Faust" as relative to the first. We are concerned here, however, only with our independent judgment, a poor thing, but our own. And of one thing we feel certain, that we prefer to read the second part of "Faust" by the unaided light of nature, rather than by the light of critical interpretation. And we grasp, as we presume, at the principal outcome, that Faust is elevated and purified by the influence of the Greek idea of the beautiful. Notwithstanding this outcome, we find ourselves at the beginning of the fourth act, barring some twenty odd verses which Faust speaks by way of soliloquy, for all practical purposes where we were left at the end of the first part. Were this act in continuity with the first part, we should easily perceive that Faust, being with increase of years disgusted with pleasure, is desirous of some other resource, some other exercise for his activity, which Mephistopheles is about to provide for him. Our Richard is at least himself again, not only in person of Faust, but notably of Mephistopheles, who was in danger of becoming but a shadow of himself in the reconciliation of elements romantic and classical. And we observe here, as in the first part of "Faust," that Goethe throughout projects himself by occasion not only into Faust, but also into Mephistopheles, with somewhat of injury, at times, to the characterization. For Goethe's capacity for getting outside of himself is in inverse proportion to Shakespeare's, by which token, if no other, we should recognize in his being bracketed with Shakespeare an extraordinary vagary of criticism. Of this fourth act we need observe only that Faust gains, of course, through Mephistopheles, what he desires,—a territory reclaimed from the sea, where he may lord it as over his own. It is in the fifth act that the regeneration of Faust, in the view of those who find in Goethe's work a lofty spiritual motive, is at length accomplished. Allowing the piece to interpret itself, and without the aid of any commentary upon it, we can but say that we should not suspect the regeneration. This we say, not at all because Faust is destitute of lofty impulses, not because he is of the nature of a fiend; such he has never been. Faust is here the same as in our former acquaintance with him; too good, perhaps, to be lost, certainly not good enough to be saved. He wishes the Devil's gifts, though he does not like the Devil's methods; as when seizing upon Naboth's vineyard, he throws upon Mephistopheles the blame of the seizure. Restless, imperious, he is occupied in draining his lands, and making them habitable. He is a law to himself, and conceives that since his work will ultimately benefit humanity, the humbler humanity about him is but vassal to his will. There seems to be here the same fallacy that we find elsewhere in the works of Goethe, that if a man only does a certain amount of good, he may safely indulge in a certain amount of evil by way of compensation. To presume salvation upon this basis is to take an inadequate view of salvation. After his seizure of Naboth's vineyard, his steps are dogged by black Care, by whom he is blinded. The treatment is entirely Goethean, and intended, one might conceive, to spring a trap, as it were, upon the reader. Mephistopheles seems to have altogether the best of the argument; there seems no reason why he should not claim his own. If Margaret's salvation seems a strain upon our sense of the fitness of things, Faust's is of the nature of a trick; and our surprise is little less than that of Mephistopheles himself, when the angels, sweeping down, bear Faust's soul to a somewhat operatic heaven. Amid all the turmoil of the second part, we have almost forgotten Margaret, who has never once been mentioned. She appears at the last, as Faust's companion and guide to a higher sphere. We have no objection to Margaret's being saved; were she of the type of womanhood which has become associated with her, we might have had a passion of desire for her salvation. As it is, we are more than willing that she should be saved; but when we find admirers of this last act associating her with Beatrice, as met by Dante in heaven, our judgment and sense are in arms against the comparison. It is impossible to consider the "Faust" as a great work in the great sense, whether we regard the first part alone, rejecting the second from the estimation, or whether we regard it in its entirety. If we consider it in its entirety, it is too lacking in unity, in a real centre about which the whole might revolve itself, not to speak of the vast prolixity of the earlier acts of the second part, and of the loose and disjointed fashion in which the different scenes are sometimes fitted together. If we consider the first part alone, we are confronted, as has been said, by the unsatisfactory conclusion. Fascinating this first part must always be, if only for a style singularly virile, this being the descriptive word which seems to apply to it preeminently. More, much more, is there in it of genius than in the second part, of the genius peculiar to Goethe. But a work may abound in genius, and yet fall short, as a whole, of the magic test; and "Faust," some passages of noble poetry notwithstanding, is rather an abortive work of genius, a splendid attempt, than a work of genius, at least of the higher order. We can only regret that inexorable limitations of space forbid even the most succinct outline of "William Meister's Apprenticeship," the best-known of Goethe's prose works, — a work which an extreme Goethe school would have us regard as a criticism upon life, broad, large, in a manner divine. Starting with no such vast expectation, we start well. Goethe's narrative vein, if not the best in the world, meets our just expectation. We do not find William's account of the puppet-shows of his childhood the soporific that it was for Mariana. We are not prepared to smile at his fervors or exaltations, in his letter to Mariana he carries our sympathy; and the situation in the whole book which appeals most strongly to the feelings of the reader, which comes the nearest to dramatic in the genuine sense, we should say to be that where he stands under her window, unable to leave her though he has been repelled by her, outstaying the musicians whom he has hired to play for her, and seeing at last his rival, as he believes him to be, glide stealthily from her door. We ask nothing better in their way than the performances of the acrobats, the adventures of the improvised company, and the ways and wiles of Philina, of all the characters of the book the most truly alive, and in her absolute aliveness, her perfect consistency, the best, we had almost said, of Goethe's women. William's affection for Mignon (and we remark in passing that a tender feeling for childhood would seem to be one of the very good things about Goethe) heightens our interest in him. The introduction of Mignon and of the picturesque harper is felicitous to a degree, and we are in a manner indignant when we consider what a thread of gold running through the whole their story might have been, had not |