gh
the air into the adjacent room, hovering above Faust, who is still
asleep on his couch.

As it hovers above the sleeper it begins to sing--to describe ravishing
dreamland scenery--inspiring Faust with visions of sensuous loveliness.
It then bids Mephistopheles wrap Faust in his magic mantle and prepare
for an aerial flight.... 'Whither?' asks Mephistopheles. '_To Greece!_'
is the answer: to the Pharsalian plain in Thessaly; and in spite of the
protests of Mephistopheles (who has no taste for the land of classic
art) he is forced to obey. The sleeping form of Faust is borne aloft,
the Mannikin leading the way like a will-o'-the-wisp, gleaming within
his glass retort. '_Und ich?_' exclaims poor old Wagner in piteous
accents. '_Ach, du!_' says Homunculus, '_Du bleibst zu Hause--!_' 'You
just stop at home, and grub away among your musty manuscripts, and work
away at your protoplasms and your elixirs of life.' Thus, guided by the
Homunculus, Faust and Mephistopheles set forth on their aerial journey
to ancient Greece--to the land where the ideals of art have found their
highest realization--in quest of Helen, the supreme type of all that the
human mind has conceived as beautiful.

It is often asked, and I think _we_ may fairly ask, what Goethe meant to
symbolize by his Homunculus. You will have noticed that his material
components (as the carbonic acid and ammonia of Professor Huxley's
protoplasm) are supplied by his scientific 'Daddy,' but that the 'tertia
vis,' that third power or 'spiritual bond' which combines his material
components, is supplied by the supernatural presence of Mephistopheles.
I believe this Homunculus to be a symbol of poetic genius or
imagination, which uses the material supplied by plodding pedantry--by
critical research, antiquarianism, scholarship, and science--slips from
the hands of its poor enamoured Daddy, and flies off to the land of
idealism. Here, as we shall see, the Mannikin breaks free from his glass
retort and is poured out like phosphorescent light on the waves of the
great ocean.

But the quest for Helen, for ideal beauty, leads through scenes haunted
by forms of weird and terrible nature--those forms in which the human
imagination, as it gradually gains a sense of the supernatural and a
sense of art, first incorporated its conceptions--forms, first, of
hideous and terrific character: monstrous idols of Eastern and Egyptian
superstition, Griffins, and Sphinxes, and bull-headed Mol