chen and Helena, Wagner and
Mephisto, Homunculus and Euphorion, the Emperor's court and the shades
of the Greek past, the broodings of medieval mysticism and the
practical tasks of modern industrialism, the enlightened despotism of
the eighteenth century and the ideal democracy of the future--all this
and a great deal more enters into Faust's being. He strides on from
experience to experience, from task to task, expiating guilt by doing,
losing himself and finding himself again. Blinded in old age by Dame
Care, he feels a new light kindled within. Dying, he gazes into a far
future. And even in the heavenly regions he goes on ever changing into
new and higher and finer forms. It is this irrepressible spirit of
striving which makes Goethe's _Faust_ the Bible of modern humanity.

INTRODUCTION TO FAUST

BY CALVIN THOMAS, LL.D.

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University

The central theme of Goethe's _Faust_ may be put in the form of a
question thus: Shall a man hate life because it does not match his
dreams, or shall he embrace it eagerly and try to make the best of it
as a social being? Goethe's answer is at once scientific and
religious, which partly explains its vital interest for the modern
man. To be sure, his answer is given at the end of a long symbolic
poem which contains much that is not exactly relevant to the main
issue. It must never be forgotten that _Faust_ is not the orderly
development of a thesis in ethics, but a long succession of
imaginative pictures. Some of them may seem too recondite and
fantastic to meet our present-day demand for reality, but on the whole
the poem deals with vital issues of the human spirit. At the end of it
Faust arrives at a noble view of life, and his last words undoubtedly
tell how Goethe himself thought that a good man might wish to end his
days--unsated with life to the final moment, and expiring in an
ecstasy of altruistic vision.

Goethe was about twenty years old when his imagination began to be
haunted by the figure of the sixteenth century magician Doctor Faust.
In 1772 or 1773 he commenced writing a play on the subject, little
thinking of course that it would occupy him some sixty years. The old
legend is a story of sin and damnation. Faust is represented as an
eager student impelled by intellectual curiosity to the study of
magic. From the point of view of the superstitious folk who created
the legend this addiction to magic is itself s