our conception by her
perfect love. To that love, unreasoning, unsuspecting,--to the excess of
that which in itself is no fault, but beautiful and good,--her fall and
ruin are due. Her story is the tragedy of her sex in all time. As
Schlegel said of the "Prometheus Bound,"--"It is not a single tragedy,
but tragedy itself." ...

[The First Part ends with the prison scene, where poor Margaret,
escaping by death, ascends to heaven, while Mephistopheles, shouting an
imperious "Hither to me!" disappears with Faust.] The reader is allowed
to suppose--and most readers did suppose--that the author meant it
should be inferred that the devil had secured his victim, and that
Faust, according to the legend, had paid the forfeit of his soul to the
powers of hell.

But Faust reappears in a new poem,--the Second Part. He is there
introduced sleeping, as if burying in torpor the lusts and crimes and
sorrows of his past career. Pitying spirits are about him, to heal his
woes and promote his return to a better life....

[At the end of his hundred years of earthly life,] Mephistopheles ...
fails to secure the immortal part of Faust, which the angels appropriate
and bear aloft:

"This member of the upper spheres
We rescue from the devil;
For whoso strives and perseveres
May be redeemed from evil."

The last two lines may be supposed to contain the author's justification
of Mephistopheles' defeat and Faust's salvation. Though a man surrender
himself to evil, if there is that in him which evil cannot satisfy, an
impulse by which he outgrows the gratifications of vice, extends his
horizon and lifts his desires, pursues an onward course until he learns
to place his aims outside of himself, and to seek satisfaction in works
of public utility,--he is beyond the power of Satan: he may be redeemed
from evil.

One could wish, indeed, that more decisive marks of moral development
had been exhibited in the latter stages of Faust's career. But here
comes in the Christian doctrine of Grace, which Goethe applies to the
problem of man's destiny. Faust is represented as saved by no merit of
his own, but by the interest which Heaven has in every soul in which
there is the possibility of a heavenly life.

And so the new-born ascending spirit is committed by the Mater gloriosa
to the tutelage of Gretchen [Margaret],--_una poenitentium,_--now
purified from all the stains of her earthly life, to whom is given the
injunction:-