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whatever has the form of goodness * or beauty , or truth . Hence his peculiar style , and that grdtesqueness which gives so unique a character to this work . But when we state that Mephistopheles is an enemy to truth , we mnst explain in what sense this is meant . The lies of Mephistopheles are , at the same time , truths . His sarcastic strictures on human life and character are equally acute and just . They are always uttered to deceive and mislead , but
cannot be reproached with not being true , in any sense . Ihis is , indeed , the character of those misanthropical works of real genius , in which great intellectual power is perverted to an evil purpose , and is remarkably true of one of the most admirable of our prose writers , whose scheme of moral philosophy is as detestable as can be imagined , and concerning whose too-famous book we have been often tempted to say , that every word is both true and falsetrue , as an insulated and individual observation , —false , in its
misrepresented bearing upon the totality of the human mind . This writer , by a singular coincidence , has all but the name of Man-deviL Mephistopheles might have written the c Fable of the Bees . ' We will , before we close this article , illustrate this by a translated scene . The profoundest and most beautiful scenes of the drama are
dialogues between the Evil Spirit and the unhappy man : indeed , the whole of the action lies between these beings . The conflict between them , and its issue , is the sole purpose of the drama . To this , every other object , usually within the scope of the dramatic poet , is sacrificed . Only one person is introduced who at all diverts our attention from Faustus and the demon ; and that
is Margaret , the purest and most lovely of female characters . But to what end are these mighty engines used ? Herein lies the philosophic character of the poem , and Goethe ' s wise departure from the popular legend . The Dr . Faustus of the populace is carried away by the devil ; Goethe ' s Faustus , it is quite certain , is to be victorious over the demon , though this development has not yet been made public . This is clearly announced in the prologue . Faustus , therefore , may be described as a philosophical
drama , exhibiting the successful struggle of the better principle in man with the worse . His guilty passion ; his excessive love of knowledge , had led him to the crime of daring to break the laws imposed on his nature ; but in that desire , and in his susceptibilities of beauty and virtue , lies a principle of good , which saves him from succumbing to the Spirit of Evil that himself has evoked , and over which , becoming an object of divine mercy , he at last triumphs .
That our readers may be able to take , as it were , a bird ' s-eye view of the plan of the author * we will , in the first instance , content ourselves with rapidly passing over the successive scenes , only adverting now and then to a passage which reveals what may be , called the author ' s system . Of his poetry , his incidental philo-
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? 44 Goethe ' s iFVorlcs .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1832, page 744, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1824/page/24/
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