m
down to hell. The Lord grants the permission, and prophesies the failure
of the attempt:--

"Be it allowed! Draw this spirit from its Source if you can lay hold of
him; bear him with you on your downward path, and stand ashamed when you
are forced to confess that a good man in his dark strivings has a
consciousness of the right way."

Here we have a hint of the author's design. He does not intend that the
devil shall succeed; he does not mean to adopt the conclusion of the
legend and send Faust to hell. He had the penetration to see, and he
meant to show, that the notion implied in the old popular superstition
of selling one's soul to the devil--the notion that evil can obtain the
entire and final possession of the soul--is a fallacy; that the soul is
not man's to dispose of, and cannot be so traded away. We are the
soul's, not the soul ours. Evil is self-limited; the good in man must
finally prevail. So long as he strives he is not lost; Heaven will come
to the aid of his better nature. This is the doctrine, the philosophy,
of "Faust." In the First Part, stung by disappointment in his search of
knowledge, by failure to lay hold of the superhuman, and urged on by his
baser propensities personified in Mephistopheles, Faust abandons himself
to sensual pleasure,--seduces innocence, burdens his soul with heavy
guilt, and seems to be entirely given over to evil. This Part ends with
Mephistopheles' imperious call,--"Her zu mir,"--as if secure of his
victim. Before the appearance of the Second Part, the reader was at
liberty to accept that conclusion. But in the Second Part Faust
gradually wakes from the intoxication of passion, outgrows the dominion
of appetite, plans great and useful works, whereby Mephistopheles loses
more and more his hold of him; and after his death is baffled in his
attempt to appropriate Faust's immortal part, to which the heavenly
Powers assert their right....

The character of Margaret is unique; its duplicate is not to be found in
all the picture galleries of fiction. Shakspeare, in the wide range of
his feminine _personnel_, has no portrait like this. A girl of low birth
and vulgar circumstance, imbued with the ideas and habits of her class,
speaking the language of that class from which she never for a moment
deviates into finer phrase, takes on, through the magic handling of the
poet, an ideal beauty. Externally common and prosaic in all her ways,
she is yet thoroughly poetic, transfigured in