ens the book of Nostradamus and gazes upon
the sign of the Macrocosm; here in a symbol he beholds the life and
energy of nature:--

"Where shall I grasp thee, infinite Nature, where?
Ye breasts, ye fountains of all life whereon
Hang heaven and earth."

He cannot grasp them; and then turning from the great Cosmos, he thinks
he may at least dare to invoke the spirit of our own mother planet
Earth. But to Faust, with eyes bleared with the dust of the study, to
Faust, living in his own speculations or in dogmatic systems, the aspect
of the Earth Spirit--a living fire--is terrible. He falls back upon
himself almost despairing, when the famulus Wagner enters. What Werner
was to the idealist Wilhelm Meister, Wagner is to the idealist Faust:
the mere scraping together of a little hoard of barren facts contents
Wagner; such grief, such despair as Faust's, are for this Philistine of
learning impossible. And then the fragment of 1790 passes on to
Mephistopheles. Whether or not Goethe found the features of his critical
demon in Herder (as Grimm supposes), and afterwards united these to the
more pronounced likeness in his friend Mephistopheles Merck, matters
little. Whether Herder and Merck had been present or not, Goethe would
have found Mephistopheles in his own heart. For the contrast between the
idealist Faust and the realist Mephistopheles exists in some form or
other in almost every great creation of Goethe. It is the contrast
between Werther and Albert, between Tasso and Antonio, between Edward
and the Captain. Sometimes the nobler spirit of worldliness is dwelt on,
as in the case of Antonio; sometimes the cold, hard, cynical side, as in
the case of Mephistopheles. The theme of Faust as originally conceived
was the turning of an idealist from his own private thoughts and dreams
to the real world; from all that is unnatural,--systems, speculations,
barren knowledge,--to nature and the founts of life; from the solitary
cell to the company of men; to action, beauty, life, and love. If he
can really succeed in achieving this wisely and well, Faust is saved. He
is delivered from solitude, the inane of speculation, the vagueness of
idealism, and made one with the band of his toiling fellows. But to
accompany him there is the spirit of base worldliness, the realist, the
cynic, who sees the meaner side of all that is actual, who if possible
will seduce Faust into accepting the world apart from that elevating
spirit which enno