e advice of German
friends well versed in the matter. I set to work on what was presumably
the best of these commentaries. As I laboured onwards, page after page,
I found myself from time to time turning back to the title of the book.
Sure enough, it was _Ueber Goethe's Faust_. I laboured on--the suspicion
deepening at every turn of the page that perhaps the binder might have
bound up the wrong text under the title _Ueber Goethe's Faust_. At the
fifty-third page I came to a dead stop. Except quite incidentally
neither Goethe nor Faust had as yet been mentioned. These fifty-three
pages had been entirely devoted to what seemed to my rather
unmetaphysical mind a not very luminous or edifying dissertation on the
difference between _Ansicht_ and _Einsicht_--between mere Opinion and
true critical Insight; and, as far as I could discover, the only
conclusion as yet arrived at was that the writer possessed an exclusive
monopoly in the last-mentioned article.

But I will not inflict upon you any further description of my tusslings
with Teutonic interpreters of _Faust_--with their _egos_ and _non-egos_,
their moral-aesthetic symbolisms and so on. Let us leave them to the
tender mercies of Goethe himself, who was not sparing of his ridicule in
regard to his commentators, nor, alas, at times in regard to his
countrymen. 'Of all nations,' he says, 'the Germans understand me
least.... Such people make life a burden by their abstruse thoughts and
their _Ideas_, which they hunt up in all directions and insist on
discovering in everything.... They come and ask _me_ what "Ideas" _I_
have incorporated in my _Faust_. Just as if I myself knew!--or could
describe it, even if I did know!' Of course Goethe's great poem contains
an Idea, if by that word we mean in a poem what we mean by _life_ in
anything living; but it is not by dissection and analysis that we shall
discover it. 'He who wishes,' says Goethe in _Faust_, 'to examine and
describe anything living first does his best to expel the life. Then he
has got the dead parts in his hand; but what is wanting is just the
spiritual bond.' It is my purpose--a purpose not easy of fulfilment--to
avoid this method of dissection and to place before you living
realities, not anatomical specimens.

But before we plunge _in medias res_ and grapple our present subject,
namely the old Faust-legend, I should like to say just a few words in
order to show from what standpoint I think we should regard Goet