reference to Shakespeare's plays) the inexorable course
of the universe with the might of human will. We might take as the Alpha
and Omega of _Faust_ these two lines from the poem:

Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt,

and

Nur rastlos betaetigt sich der Mann,

the sense of which is that human nature must ever err as long as it
strives, but that true manhood is incessant striving.

It is a noble picture--perhaps the noblest conceivable. You remember
Browning's lines:

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

It will have already become evident what abstruse and insoluble
questions present themselves--rise, as it were, like ghosts of many an
ancient creed, on every side, as soon as we have crossed the threshold
of this great Mausoleum of human thought and imagination. There is the
spectre of the great Mystery of existence--of Life and Death and
Eternity; and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and that of Evil
itself--a phantom assuming at times such a visible and substantial shape
and then dissolving into thin air as mere negation. And this
Mephistopheles--are we to regard him as a self-existent genuine demon of
a genuine Hell, or as our own mind's shadow? Is he something external,
something that we can avoid, something that we can put to flight by
resisting and get entirely free of--or has each one of us signed with
the blood of his human nature a compact with some such spiritual power,
with the demonic element within him, with that spirit of negation, of
cynicism, of cold unideal utilitarian worldly-wisdom which mocks at
faith and love and every high and tender impulse--that part of our
nature which, when some poor girl is sinking in the abyss, prompts us to
answer our heart's appeal with the sneer of Mephistopheles: 'She isn't
the first!'? Surely we can well understand the scorn and contempt which
Faust feels for this demon companion of his. 'What canst thou, poor
devil, give me?' he exclaims--'Was the human spirit's aspiration Ever
understood by such as thou!'

The real action of the play begins with the celebrated monologue of
Faust. But this is preceded by a _Dedication_, by the _Prelude in the
theatre_, and by the _Prologue in Heaven_, added at various periods of
Goethe