, as perhaps was to be expected of Tennyson when he was describing
a great character with which he had so little sympathy:

I take possession of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all.

To Goethe all things, both in Nature and in Art were but transitory
reflexions of the real and eternal. 'Alles vergaengliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis'--all things transitory are but a parable, an allegory of
truth and reality--such are some of the last words of his great Poem;
and thus too he regarded his own poetry. 'I have,' he said, 'always
regarded all that I have produced as merely symbolic, and I did not much
care whether what I made were pots or dishes.' Even that life-poem of
his, _Faust_, which he planned and began as a young man of about
twenty-five, and the last lines of which he wrote a few months before
his death, aged eighty-two, only represents (as indeed do all great
works of art) _one_ aspect of belief--or perhaps I should rather say a
certain number of truth's innumerable aspects, none of them claiming to
afford a full vision, and not a few of them apparently contradictory;
for, as both Plato and Shakespeare tell us, truth cannot be directly
stated: it lies, as it were, in equipoise between contradictory
statements:

For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine ... do set the word
Against the word.

_Faust_ does not claim to be a universal Gospel, nor to offer a final
solution of the riddle of existence. It makes no attempt to pile up
Pelions on Ossas--to scale heaven with the Babel-towers of the human
reason. It merely holds up a mirror in which we see reflected certain
views of truth, such as presented themselves to Goethe from some of his
intellectual heights. To regard it and judge it otherwise--to analyse
its Idea--to insist on discovering its Moral--to compare it with some
little self-contained system of theory or dogma which we ourselves may
have finally accepted--and to condemn Goethe as a prophet of lies
because, viewing truth from such diverse standpoints (many of them
perhaps quite inaccessible for us) he may seem at times to ignore some
of our pet formulae--this, I think, would convict us of a lamentable lack
of wisdom and humility. And if at times we feel pained by what may seem
irreverent, let us remember that Goethe wrote also these words: 'With
many people who h