on. 'He whom Helen paralyzes,' he says,
'doesn't come to his wits again so soon.' He then pulls the bell. The
windows rattle and the walls shake, as with earthquake. Wagner's
terrified Famulus appears. He says that his master, the Herr Professor,
has locked himself up for days and nights together in his laboratory;
that he is engaged in a most delicate and important operation, namely
that of manufacturing a human being, and he really cannot be disturbed.
Mephistopheles however sends him back to demand admittance. Meanwhile he
dons Faust's professorial costume, which he finds hanging in its old
place but infested with legions of moths, which buzz around him piping
welcome to their old mate. Then he takes his seat in Faust's
professorial chair, and the same scholar enters to whom as a timid
'Fuchs,' or freshman, Mephistopheles had in the first Part of the play
given his diabolic advice as to the choice of a profession. The scholar
is _now_, after a course of University education, a match for the devil
himself. He flouts poor Mephisto as a dried-up old pedant, not up to
date with the new generation's aesthetic and literary self-conceits, or
with its contempt for its elders--and for everything else except its own
precious self. 'Youth and its genius,' he exclaims, 'are the only things
of value; as soon as one is thirty years of age he's just as good as
dead ... and it would be far better if all people at thirty were knocked
on the head'; and he storms out of the room. Mephistopheles consoles
himself with the fact that the devil is old enough to have seen a good
many such new generations, with all their absurdities, their up-to-date
fads and follies, pass away and give place to other forms of still more
up-to-date and self-conceited absurdity.

Mephisto now enters the laboratory, where Wagner is intently engaged in
watching his chemical compound gradually crystallizing within a huge
glass retort. As he watches, the outlines of a diminutive human being--a
mannikin or 'homunculus'--become visible and rapidly gain distinct form.
A tiny voice is heard issuing from the glass retort and addressing
Wagner as 'Daddy' and Mephistopheles as 'Cousin'; and it is to the
presence of this 'Cousin,' we may infer, rather than to his scientific
'Daddy' that the Homunculus really owes his existence. With the
connivance of Mephistopheles, the Mannikin, still in his glass retort,
slips from the enamoured paternal grasp of Wagner, and floats throu