out the "Three Reverences" and the "Creed" is as good an
instance of that sublime Spinozistic way of dealing with the current
religion as that amazing remark he made once to Eckerman about
his own faith: "When I want scientific unity, I am a Pantheist. When
I desire poetical multifariousness, I am a Polytheist. And when my
moral nature requires a Personal God--_there is room for That
also?"_

When one comes to speak of Faust, it is necessary for us to
remember the words the great man himself used to his follower
in speaking of this masterpiece. Eckermann teased him for
interpretations. "What," said he to Goethe, "is the leading Idea in the
Poem?" "Do you suppose," answered the Sage, "that a thing into
which I have put the Life-Blood of all my days is able to be
summoned up in anything so narrow and limited as an Idea?"

Personally, I do not hesitate to say that I think Faust is the most
permanently _interesting_ of all the works that have proceeded from
the human brain.

Its attitude to life is one which ultimately has more to strengthen and
sustain and put courage--if not the Devil--into us than anything I
know. When I meet a man who shall tell me that the Philosophy of
his life is the Philosophy of Faust, I bow down humbly before him. I
did meet such a man once. I think he was a Commercial Traveller
from Buffalo.

How wisely Goethe deals in Faust with the problem--if it be a
problem--of Evil! His suggestion seems to be that the spirit of Evil
in the world--"part of that Nothing out of which came the All"--plays
an absolutely essential role. "By means of it God fulfils his
most cherished purposes." Had Faust not seduced poor little
Gretchen, he would never have passed as far as he did along the
road of Initiation, and the spirit of his Victim--in her translunar
Apotheosis--would not have been _there_ to lift him Heavenwards
at the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages the
enormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles,
when, on those "black horses," they are whirled through the night to
her dungeon, "She is not the first," has the essence of all pity and
wrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the most
interesting of all Devils. And he is so because, although he knows
perfectly well--queer Son of Chaos as he is--that he is bound to be
defeated, he yet goes on upon his evil way, and continues to resist
the great stream of Life which, according to his view, had better