lgar, back
to Germany. His vehicle of cloud lands him on a mountain-summit, where
he is soon joined by Mephistopheles, who puts the question, What next?
We are now at the beginning of Act IV. Faust proceeds to unfold a
grand scheme of conflict with the Sea. On his flight he has observed
the tides eternally beating in upon the shore and evermore receding,
all to no purpose. This blind waste of energy has excited in him the
spirit of opposition. He proposes to fight the sea by building dikes
which shall hold the rushing water in check and make dry land of the
tide-swept area. Mephistopheles enters readily into his plans. They
help the Emperor to win a critical battle, and by way of reward Faust
receives a vast tract of swampy sea-shore as his fief.

In Act V the great scheme has all been carried out. What was a watery
desolation has been converted into a potential paradise. Faust is a
great feudal lord, with a boundless domain and a fleet of ships that
bring him the riches of far-away lands. But thus far he has simply
been amusing himself on a grand scale. He has thought always mainly of
himself. He has courted experience, among other things the experience
of putting forth his power in a contest with the sea and performing a
great feat of engineering. But it has not brought him a satisfaction
in which he can rest. And he has not become a saint. An aged couple,
who belong to the old regime and obstinately refuse to part with the
little plot of ground on which they have lived for years, anger him to
the point of madness. He wants their land so that he may build on it a
watch-tower from which to survey and govern his possessions. He sends
his servitor to remove them to a better home which he has prepared for
them. But Mephistopheles carries out the order with reckless
brutality, with the consequence that the old people are killed and
their cottage burned to the ground. Thus Faust in his old age--by this
time he is a hundred years old--has a fresh burden on his conscience.
As he stands on the balcony of his palace at midnight, surveying the
havoc he has unintentionally wrought, the smoke of the burning cottage
is wafted toward him and takes the form of four gray old women. One of
them, Dame Care, slips into the rich man's palace by way of the
keyhole and croons in his ear her dismal litany of care. Faust replies
in a fine declaration of independence, beginning--

The circle of the Earth is known to me,
What's on the oth