ough the air
on their adventures--first through the small and then the greater
world--first the world of personal feelings and passions, then the
greater world (is it really greater?) of art and politics and Humanity.

Faust had said, as you remember,

What wilt thou, poor devil, give me?
Was the human spirit, in its aspirations
Ever understood by such as thou?

This is the leading motive of all that follows. With ever-deepening
disgust and contempt Faust, in his quest for truth through the jungles
and quagmires of human passions, follows his guide. If ever Faust seems
to catch sight of any far-off vision of eternal truth and beauty--as he
does at times in his love for Gretchen, and again in his passion for
ideal beauty in Helen, and once again in that devotion to the cause of
Humanity which finally allows him to express a satisfaction in life, and
thus causes his life to end--if ever Faust shows any sign of real
interest or satisfaction, it is just _then_ that Mephistopheles displays
most clearly his utter inability to understand the 'human spirit in its
aspirations'; and it is _then_ that he shows most plainly his own
diabolic nature, pouring out his cynical contempt and gnashing his teeth
at what he deems Faust's irrational disgust for all those bestialities
that seem to him (Mephistopheles) the sweetest joys of existence.

His very first attempt is a dead failure. He has carried Faust off
through the air to Leipzig, and here he brings him into what to the
Mephisto-nature doubtless seems highly desirable and entertaining
company--to the 'sing-song' (as I believe it is called in England) of
tippling brawling students. The scene is Auerbach's Cellar, a well-known
Leipzig 'Kneipe'--a kind of Wine taproom or Bodega. Among these brawling
comic-songsters Mephistopheles is in his element, and he treats them to
a comic ditty:

Of old there lived a king,
Who had a great big flea
As dear as any thing,
Or any son, could be ...

and so on. We need not linger over the repulsive scene--so graphically
described.

Finally Mephistopheles bores holes in the table and draws wine from
them.

The students come to handicuffs over it; they spill the wine, and it
turns into flame.

Amidst their drunken uproar Faust and Mephistopheles disappear.

During the whole of this scene Faust _speaks no single word_, except a
curt but polite greeting on entering the Cellar and an appeal to
Mephistopheles