, to ask a
fairer question, what do we ourselves mean, by being _saved_? No formula
of words seems able to provide us with a satisfactory answer. We can
indeed use metaphors drawn from the universe of Time and Space--we can
speak of 'another world' and of a 'future life'--but as soon as we
attempt to conceive such existence _sub specie aeternitatis_ our
imagination fails: to use the metaphor of Socrates, we are dazzled by
the insupportable radiance of the eternal and infinite, and seek to rest
our eyes by turning them toward shadows, reflexions, images: we accept
the beautiful image--the enigma (as St. Paul calls it) or allegory--of
a heaven in some far interspace of world and world.

As a poet, and especially as a dramatic poet, Goethe, if he treated the
subject at all, was compelled to accept some imaginative conception of a
future life, and he could scarcely accept any other but that which was
in keeping with the old legend--that heaven of angels and saints and
penitents which was the converse of the legendary hell and its fiends.
Whether however he was justified by the principles of true dramatic art
in his attempt to depict his imaginative conception and to place on the
stage a representation of heaven may be doubted. Certainly the effect of
Goethe's picture, especially when seen on the stage, is such that one
cannot but wish some other solution might have been devised, and one
feels as if one understood better than before why it was that
Shakespeare's dramatic instinct allowed no such lifting of the veil. You
remember the last words of the dying Hamlet: 'The rest is silence.'

Thus far therefore we have come: by Faust being saved it is meant that
he escapes from the fiend and reaches heaven, reaches the 'higher
spheres' of existence, as Goethe expresses it.

But the mere fact of his being saved does not form the essential
difference between this drama and earlier versions of the story. The
point of real importance is that he is not saved in a downward course by
the intervention of some _deus ex machina_, some orthodox counter-charm.
His course is not downward. His yearnings are not for bodily ease and
sensual enjoyment but for truth--truth, not to be attained by
speculation or scientific research but by action and feeling--by
struggling onward through error and sin, and by gaining purification and
strength from trial and suffering and resistance to evil; so that evil
itself is a means to his salvation and Mephis