topheles an instrument of
good. Rising on the stepping-stones of his dead self he finds at last a
certain measure of peace and is in the end reunited to her whose earthly
happiness he had indeed ruined but whose love his heart has never
forgotten. Indeed it is her love that is allowed to guide him ever
aright and to draw him up to higher spheres.

When we once realize this we also realize how meaningless, or how
indescribably less full of meaning, the poem would be without its second
Part. And yet many, when they speak of Goethe's _Faust_, mean merely the
first Part--or perhaps merely the little episode of Gretchen given in
Gounod's opera.

I spoke of Goethe's gospel of self-salvation. Since doing so I have
recalled to memory some words of his which may seem to refute me. In
reference to the song of the angels at the end of the poem he wrote as
follows: 'These verses contain the key of Faust's salvation: namely, in
Faust himself an ever higher and purer aspiration, and from above
eternal love coming to his help; and they are in harmony with our
religious conceptions, according to which we cannot attain to heaven by
our own strength unless it is helped by divine grace.'

It is true that _after death_ Faust's soul is saved from the demons and
is carried up to heaven by God's angels, but Goethe's drama is mainly
the drama of Faust's earthly life, and from the 'Prologue in Heaven,'
where, as it seems, the Deity undertakes _not_ to help him, but leaves
him to fight the battle entirely in his own strength, until the last
moment of his earthly existence there is no hint whatever, I think, of
anything but self-salvation. On no occasion does he show the slightest
sense of his own helplessness or of dependence on God's mercy. As for
_remorse_, Goethe regarded it as a false emotion and as unworthy of a
man. Although the perfect balance of his mind and his respect for much
that he could not himself accept saved him from the almost brutal
insouciance of such a form of expression he would probably have agreed
with Walt Whitman, who tells us that animals should serve us as an
example because 'they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their
sins; they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.'

Let us however dismiss criticism and turn to what Goethe as poet has
given us--perhaps the noblest picture that dramatic art can give: that
of a man striving onward and upward in his own strength, confronting (as
Goethe says in