eauty and force of Goethe's words is almost bound to prove a
failure.

In my third lecture I shall treat the second Part of the play, the
action of which is far less generally known. It is not often read and is
seldom seen on the stage. Indeed it was not written for the stage and
does not lend itself to ordinary dramatic and operatic purposes, as the
first Part does with its Gretchen episode. It embraces too huge a
circle--a circle within which lie all the possibilities of human life.
It is a kind of framework for all the tragedies and comedies and epics
and lyrics ever conceived, or conceivable. What unity it has is not of
the stage or the dramatic Unities. But nevertheless on the stage it
produces effects which impress one with the sense of an imaginative
power of an extraordinary kind.

Many years ago, when it was being given in the Dresden theatre, I saw it
performed four or five times and I remember noticing the wonderful
attraction that it had for minds of a certain class (and no very limited
class), while for others it was just such an unintelligible farrago of
wearisome 'Zeug' as Dante's _Paradiso_ and Beethoven's _Ninth Symphony_
are sometimes said to be.

I believe it is the fashion with certain critics (especially with those
who have read it superficially) to speak of the Second Part of Goethe's
_Faust_, as they do of _Paradise Regained_, with a certain
superciliousness, as a superfluous excrescence, the artistically almost
worthless product of a mind that had worked itself out and had exhausted
its 'Idea.'

The truth is that the _first_ Part is only the merest fragment, and
although the subject of Faust is endless and can never be fully treated
in any one work of art (the whole poem 'necessarily remaining a
fragment,' as Goethe himself said), nevertheless the _second_ Part does
solve in one of many possible ways the problem left unsolved by the
first half of the poem, namely the final attainment of peace and
happiness by the human soul, and it is one of the noblest monuments of
the human intellect existing in the literature of the world.

Indeed it is, I think, still more than this. It is not merely a monument
of intellect but of poetic imagination, and I am much inclined to
believe that the _Paradiso_ of Dante and the Second Part of Goethe's
_Faust_ are perhaps two of the best, the most infallible, touchstones
for discovering whether we really possess what Tennyson calls the
'poetic heart'--not a trum