no mystery behind it! It is rather the
custom among clever, tiresome people to disparage that _second
part of Faust,_ with its world-panoramic procession of all the gods
and demi-gods and angels and demons that have ever visited this
earth. I do not disparage it. I have never found it dull. Dull would he
be, as "the fat weed that rots itself in case on Lethe's wharf," who
found nothing curious and provocative about these Sirens and
Centaurs and Lemures and Larvae and Cabiri and Phorkyads! I can
myself endure very pleasantly even the society of those "Blessed
Boys" which some have found so distressing. As for the Devil, in
the end, making "indecent overtures" to the little Heavenly
Butterflies, who pelt him with roses--even that does not confuse my
mind or distract my senses. It is the "other side of the Moon"--the
under-mask of the world-comedy, and the incidental "saving" of Dr.
Faust is not more essential in the great mad game!

Read Faust, both portions of it, dear reader, and see if you do not
feel, with me, that, in the last resort, one leaves this rich, strange
poem with a nobler courage to endure life, and a larger view of its
amazing possibilities!

I wonder if that curious novel of Goethe's called the "Elective
Affinities" is perused as widely as it deserves? That extraordinary
company of people! And the patient, portentious interest Goethe
compels us to take in the laying out of gardens and the beautifying
of church-yards! "The Captain," "the Architect"--not to speak of the
two bewildering women--do they not suggest fantastic figures out of
one's memories of remotest childhood? I suppose to a world-child
like Goethe, watching, with grave super-human interest, all our little
pre-occupations, we have all of us something of the sweet pedantry
of these people--we are all of us "Captains" and "Architects" with
some odd twist in our quiet heads.

The solemn immorality, amounting to outrageous indecency, of
those scenes between the assorted lovers when they make "double"
love, and behind the mask of their legitimate attachments follow
their "elective affinities," is a thing that may well stagger the puritan
reader. The puritan reader will, indeed, like old Carlyle, be tempted
more than once to fling these grave, unblushing chronicles, with
their deep, oracular wisdom and their shameless details, into the
dust-heap. But it were wiser to refrain. After all, one cannot conceal
from one's self that things are _like t