pt to degrade Faust is a failure. In the
orgy of Auerbach's cellar, while the boisterous young bloods clash their
glasses, the old scholar sits silent, isolated, ashamed. It is only by
infecting his blood with the witch's poison that Mephistopheles can lay
hold of the spirit of Faust even for a time; and had he not seen in the
mirror that vision of Helena, whom he rightly loves, and whom indeed he
needs, he could not have put to his lips the filthy brewage of the
witch. But now indeed he is snared; the poison rages in his veins; for
one hour he is transformed into what the world basely calls a man of
pleasure. Yet Faust is not wholly lost: his better self, the untrained,
untamed idealist, begins to reassert its power; the fumes of the poison
dissipate themselves. Guilty though he be, his love of Margaret is not
what Mephistopheles requires that it should be: it is not calculating,
egoistic, cynical, nor dull, easeful, and lethargic. It is not the crime
of an experienced worldling nor of a dull, low liver: it is the crime of
one whose unwise heart and untaught imagination delude him; and
therefore though his fall be deep, it is not fatal. The wrong he has
wrought may be blind and terrible as that of Othello to Desdemona; but
it is not the serpentine stinging of an Iago or a Mephistopheles.

So through anguish and remorse Faust is doing off the swathe-bands of
delusion, learning to master his will, learning his own heart, learning
the meaning of existence: he does not part from his ideal self, his high
aspirations, his ardent hopes; he is rather transforming these into
realities; he is advancing from dreams to facts, so that in the end,
when his life becomes a lofty prose, it may be interpenetrated by a
noble poetry.

It were long to trace the history of Faust through the ever purifying
and ascending scale of energies exhibited in the Second Part of the
drama. Affairs of State, science, art, war--all that Goethe had known by
experience--appear in this encyclopaedic poem. One word, however, must be
said respecting the 'Helena.' It is a mistake to view this central
portion of the Second Part as solely or chiefly an allegory of the
wedlock of classic and romantic art. As science is shown to form a
needful part of Faust's turning from the inane of metaphysics to the
positive world, so from the Greek spirit he learns sanity and strength;
the deliverance of the ideal man in Faust is aided by the beauty and the
healthfulness of