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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 A Fragment of Socialist Criticism 
 
 BY 
 
 MARCUS HITCH 
 
 9J9 
 
 CHICAGO 
 CHARLES H, KERR & COMPANY 
 
 1908
 
 Copyright 1908 
 By Charles H. Kerr & Company
 
 
 
 
 ,-The "Divinity that shapes our ends" is Mankind 
 itself, which is both the author and actor of its own 
 Mrama (Marx). But in the class society called.-. 
 "Civilization" what is comedy for the rich is tragedy j 
 foFThe poor. The class character of this civilization i' 
 is reflected in its poetry, as well as in its other in- j 
 tellectual creations, and a clear understanding of this 
 fact is useful, both to curb the insolent pretensions 
 of the oppressors, who assume to portray "uni- 
 versal" human nature, and to arouse the spirits of 
 the oppressed who are destined to recast the great 
 Human Drama and usher in a different kind of 
 "Civilization" and Literature. 
 
 GERMAJi
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. AN OUTLINE OF PART 1 7 
 
 II. OUTLINE OF PART II 16 
 
 III. COMMENTS 36 
 
 IV. THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 87 
 
 V. THE GRETCHEN TRAGEDY 105 
 
 VL GOETHE AND MILTON 116
 
 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 AN OUTLINE OF PART I. 
 
 N 
 
 / Goethe's Faust is the story of a man in \ 
 
 (' the pursuit of happiness and the satisfac- ] 
 tion of his impulses, which pursuit in a 
 , broad sense is the chief occupation of all 
 of us. It is in dramatic form and is labeled 
 a tragedy, with as little propriety as Dan- 
 te's Vision is called a comedy. The only 
 tragedy about it is contained in the first part, 
 and this, though it is the shorter and less 
 important part, is the ony part that is ever 
 acted on the stage or that is widely known. 
 Taking both parts together from first to 
 last it will not be denied that a most inter- 
 esting series of questions is presented by 
 this work and that it furnishes abundant 
 food for reflection. There is the longing of 
 the human soul for freedom, knowledge and
 
 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 satisfaction, which when allowed to run 
 wild leads to the contract with the devil 
 (so-called) ; the question of personal re- 
 sponsibility, of free-will and necessity, and 
 their reconciliation; the "perseverance of 
 the saints," or the victory of good over evil 
 in the individual, because the individual is 
 a unit; the reverse of this law in societary 
 life because society is not a unit, and the_ 
 social institutions prevailing at any partic- 
 ular time are contemplated by the domi- 
 nant part of society as supernatural instead 
 of having only a local and temporary valid- 
 ity, and hence every material modification 
 thereof which is forced by the march of 
 history appears a victory of the bad; the 
 tragedy based on the efifect of one individ- 
 hial's acts upon another under certain social 
 (conditions; the question of the direct deal- 
 ings of supernatural powers with men ; the 
 idea of the conquest of nature ; of the moral 
 i influence of the beautiful ; the idea of a 
 perfect or relatively perfect social State 
 based on benevolence ; the idea of the salva- 
 tion of unrepentant men by repentant wo- 
 men; the future life of the soul apart from
 
 AN OUTLINE OF PART I 9 
 
 the material universe ; these are some of the 
 matters which occupied Goethe's mind dur- 
 ing the fifty-seven years, ofif and on, while 
 he was writing Faust and which are re- 
 flected in the work. We shall comment on 
 some of these matters later. For the pres- 
 ent we give a brief outline of Faust's chase 
 after happiness. 
 
 Dr. Heinrich Faust, a medieval German 
 professor, is sitting in his dingy study room 
 the Saturday night before Easter. It is late 
 and the moon shines in at the window. He 
 reflects that he has studied philosophy, law, 
 medicine, and alas, also theology. Though 
 he has become a learned doctor in all these 
 branches, he finds himself no wiser and no 
 happier than before. In fact he has lost all 
 pleasure in existence. Much learning hath 
 made him mad. Not only has he failed to 
 gain true knowledge, but he has also failed 
 to gain either wealth or honor among men. 
 In despair he turns to magic, hoping to dis- 
 cover the secret forces of nature, the germs 
 of all power. In brooding over this subject 
 he becomes despondent and is finally on the 
 point of committing suicide by poison when
 
 10 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 he is startled by the chiming bells of paster 
 morning and by a chorus of angels' voices 
 which recall the happiness of his youthful 
 days and cause him to put down the cup 
 and desist from his intention. The Easter 
 chorus is certainly beautiful enough to lift 
 even the hardened sinner clean ofif the earth. 
 
 As Dante, following Christ, descends into 
 hell on the night of Good Friday to rise 
 into the earthly paradise on Easter morn- 
 ing; so Faust on the Saturday night before 
 Easter descends into the mental hell of de- 
 spair and is aroused to new hope on Easter 
 morning by a chorus of angels. After one 
 has read the Divine Comedy and Faust 
 every recurring Easter calls up to his mind 
 the powerful emotions produced by the 
 opening pages of these great works. 
 
 A charming picture of Easter holiday in 
 Germany is then given, which, to be fully 
 appreciated, must have been experienced. 
 Faust takes a walk about the suburbs with i 
 one Wagner whose dull philistinism con- 
 trasts sharply with Faust's dreaminess. 
 They witness the various classes of people^ 
 amusing themselves in dififerent ways, care-J
 
 AN OUTLINE OF PART I H 
 
 less and happy. As evening approaches they 
 return. A queer-acting black poodle dog 
 circles round them and finally follows them 
 home to Faust's study and lies down be-_ 
 hind the stove. 
 
 The peace of mind brought on by Easter 
 does not last long. Faust soon finds himself 
 yearning again for something more than 
 earth affords and seeks the light of divine 
 revelation. He takes the New Testament 
 and proposes to translate it from the orig- 
 inal into German. Starting with the Gospel 
 of St. John he writes: "In the beginning 
 was the word." He stops to consider. No, 
 not the "word," the "sense"; no, the 
 "power." Still it does not suit him. Fin- 
 ally he hits it; the "deed." He writes again: 
 "In the beginning was the deed." 
 
 The black poodle dog interrupts him so 
 much that he has to stop and watch his 
 actions. He tries to control him by magic 
 and is astonished to sec him swell up and 
 undergo a transformation until finally Me- 
 phistopheles in the garb of a travelling 
 scholastic steps from behind the stove with„
 
 13 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 a chipper salutation. This was the 'poodle's 
 kernel. 
 
 Mephistopheles is an Evil Spirit, who is 
 described as one who "wills the bad and 
 works the good," and had previously ob- 
 tained leave of the Lord to tempt Faust in 
 a manner recalling the story of Job in the 
 Bible. The Lord gives him a free hand, 
 having confidence that Faust's innate tend- 
 ency towards the good will prevail in spite 
 of his errors. "Man will err as long as he 
 ^triyes." Mephistopheles is not so much a 
 direct tempter as the spirit of rebelliousness 
 and self-indulgence. He merely procures 
 for Faust everything he wishes and lets him 
 take the consequences. After Gretchen's 
 imprisonment, when Faust is wild with re- 
 morse and is cursing Mephistopheles, he 
 silences Faust by asking, "Did I thrust my- 
 self upon you or did you thrust yourself 
 upon me?" Who was it that ruined her, 
 I or you?" Such is the spirit that emanated 
 from the black poodle dog and confronted 
 Faust after he turned to the study of magic. 
 
 Faust is so determined to have happiness 
 and satisfaction at any price that he con-
 
 AN OUTLINE OF PART I 13 
 
 sents to sell his soul to Mephistopheles if 
 ever he shall realize happiness so as to be 
 able to say to the passing moment, "Stay, 
 thou art fair." The bargain is made and 
 signed with Faust's blood. They are about 
 to leave the old study den. While Faust is 
 getting himself ready and changing his 
 clothes for a :Mephisto suit, Mephistopheles 
 dons the Doctor's robe, assumes his place 
 and entertains one of Faust's pupils with 
 much wise counsel, delivered with a mock- • 
 gravity that could hardly be surpassed by a^ 
 University professor. In fact, no one but a 
 bourgeois political economist could equal it. 
 A fitting climax is given to this inimitable 
 piece of irony when Mephistopheles in dis- 
 missing his pupil finally (with a sardonic 
 grin we imagine) discloses his own identity 
 by writing in the young man's album a 
 quotation from Gen. III. 5: "And ye shall 
 be as gods, knowing good and evil." 
 
 Being now ready, they sally forth, a no- 
 ble pair of brothers in deviltry, ready for) 
 anything that comes along. They are to see 
 the world; first, the little world of the in- 
 dividual.^ (Part I), and then the greater
 
 14 GOETHE'S PAUST 
 
 world of social life (Part II.) Faust, who 
 has spent his life over books, feels his lack 
 of manners and knowledge of life. Mephis- 
 topheles reassures him by the assertion that 
 self-confidence is the only art of life. 
 
 In Auerbach's Wine Cellar in Leipzig 
 they meet with a roomful of students whose 
 idea of happiness is to get roaring drunk. 
 Mephistopheles lends a helping hand and 
 this kind of happiness soon reaches its cli- 
 max in the words of one of the company: ; 
 "Happy as the cannibals, 
 Like five hundred swine we swill." 
 This does not satisfy Faust; After being 
 rejuvenated in the witch's kitchen, he is 
 next drawn into a love affair with Gretchen. i 
 It is the old, old story of seduction, aban- | 
 donment, incidental murder of the mother 
 and brother of the girl, infanticide, impris- 
 onment, conviction, insanity and death of 
 the innocent of the two and the escape of 
 the guilty. 
 
 /After killing Gretchen's brother, Faust 
 
 /and Mephistopheles betake themselves to 
 
 / the Harz mountains to take part in the 
 
 ■ witches' dance on Walpurgis night. This
 
 AN OUTLINE OF PART I 15 
 
 and other matters furnish a diversion until 
 /they hear that Gretchen after wandering 
 \about as an outcast for a year is now in 
 prison awaiting execution for infanticide. 
 This brings Faust to his senses for the time 
 being and he tries to rescue her. But she 
 refuses to leave the jail, trusting herself 
 rather to the judgment of God than to any 
 human aid. 
 
 The curtain falls on Part I. Faust has 
 gone through the experience of sensual 
 pleasures. Still he is nojt happy.^
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II. 
 
 Part I is not divided into regular acts. 
 Part II is divided into five acts, and deals 
 with social and political rather than indi- 
 vidual life. It is largely allegorical and is 
 not adapted for production on the stage ; 
 but an acquaintance with it is absolutely 
 necessary in order to come to a fair judg- 
 ment of Goethe and his work. 
 
 The opening scene describes the beauty 
 of nature and its healing powers in restor- 
 ing Faust, after his hard experiences, to a 
 normal mental and moral condition. The 
 wonderful description of a sunrise in the 
 Alps indicates that Faust has made a new 
 start in life. He applies the precept of Mar- 
 cus Aurelius : — 
 
 "Consider thyself to be dead and to have 
 
 completed thy life up to the present time; 
 
 and live according to nature the remainder 
 
 16 -^ 
 
 i
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II 17 
 
 which is allowed thee," or in the words of 
 Faust to Helena : — 
 
 "Let the past be put behind us." 
 
 Faust next appears at the Imperial Court, 
 where Mephistopheles assumes the role oi 
 clown or court jester. Since all branches 
 of the government are in a bad way for lack 
 of money Faust with the aid of Mephisto- 
 pheles supplies the deficiency by the issue 
 of paper money, based, as Mephistopheles 
 explains, on the accumulated treasures of 
 the past which lie hidden in the ground 
 ready to be digged up as needed. 
 
 Faust now enjoys honor and fame as a 
 court favorite. This unlimited supply of 
 money enables the Emperor to donate to 
 each one money enough to procure what 
 he wants. 
 
 One wants a mistress; one a finer grade 
 of wine ; one a castle ; the miser simply 
 adds his new money to his hoards of old. 
 It does not appear here what Faust would 
 do with his share, but this is brought out 
 in the sequel. 
 
 As Ash Wednesday is approaching the 
 Court witnesses the celebration of the Car-
 
 18 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 nival. A beautiful Italian masquerade is 
 here given, full of ingenious allegories. The 
 Emperor and his Court are desirous of see- 
 ing the play of Helena and Paris, the model 
 forms of male and female beauty. Faust 
 with the help of Mephistopheles, brings 
 them up from the world of spirits and Faust 
 experiences a new sensation of happiness in 
 the contemplation of ideal classical beauty. 
 The play being over, as Helena is about to 
 leave the stage, Faust, unable to restrain 
 himself, reaches out his hands to grasp her. 
 An explosion follows which hurls Faust to 
 the ground, leaving him unconscious, and 
 the spirits of Helena and Paris go off in 
 smoke. We shall meet Helena again in the 
 third act. 
 
 Act H. After these fairy scenes at court, 
 they return to Faust's dingy old study den. 
 While Faust is still in a trance from the 
 effect of the explosion, Mephistopheles 
 looks around. The room and surroundings 
 are unchanged, but the traveling scholar 
 v^ho formerly received Mephistopheles' 
 counsel so meekly, has blossomed out into 
 a conceited Bachelor of Arts who imagines
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II ]9 
 
 that the earth, sun, moon and stars all 
 leaped into being merely at his behest. He 
 out-trumps Mephistopheles himself by de- 
 claring that no devil dare exist except by 
 his (Baccalaureus') permission; that it is 
 youth only which accomplishes anything; 
 that "Man is at thirty dead, or all the same." 
 Whereupon IMephistopheles remarks that 
 there is nothing left here for the devil to 
 say; but adds that the devil is quite an old 
 gentleman and that Baccalaureus after 
 growing older and more experienced will 
 understand him better. 
 
 Meanwhile Wagner, the dull, plodding 
 Philistine, has been delving into the deep- 
 est secrets of nature and thinks he has fin- 
 ally succeeded in solving the mystery of life 
 by making a homunculus or living manikin 
 in a glass bottle. He declares that he has 
 abolished the love passion and the old way 
 of generation and has discovered the art of 
 making men as one makes crystals. "Well," 
 says IVIephistopheles, "there is nothing new 
 about that; I have met crystalized men my- 
 self." 
 
 [Ah, Goethe, did you realize that in hold-
 
 20 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 incr up to ridicule Wagner's Homunculiis or 
 little crystalized man in a glass bottle, you 
 were only picturing yourself, the crystalized 
 man of the Property Epoch, corked up in a 
 Property Bottle. 
 
 "Essentially distinct, the Natural 
 Finds in the Universe no resting place ; 
 The Artificial needs restricted space." 
 Your artificial and crystalized Property, 
 artificial Military State, artificial Contract 
 and Court system, artificial Family and 
 Bastardy system, artificial War and Trade 
 system, are the glass bottle in which 
 the property homunculus lives, moves 
 and has his being. He knows no other at- 
 mosphere and denies that any other ever 
 existed or ever can exist. The property 
 homunculus is the true product of the grov- 
 eling Philistine. Wagner with his homun- 
 culus solves the mystery of individual life, 
 but does not attempt the mystery of social 
 organization.] 
 
 The homunculus proposes a visit to the 
 fields of Pharsalus to witness a classical 
 Walpurgis night. So leaving Wagner to 
 plod along at science and discover perhaps
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II 21 
 
 the dot over the letter "i," Homunculus and 
 Mephistopheles take Faust up in the air and 
 head for Thessaly. 
 
 In Part I Goethe had introduced a Witch- 
 es' Dance in the Harz Mountains on Wal- 
 purgis Night. As a counterpart to this we 
 have in Part II a classical Walpurgis Night 
 on "Sit. Olympus in Thessaly, which occu- 
 pies the greater part of the second Act. 
 Here, in sight of the world-historic battle- 
 fields of Pydna and Pharsalia the poet takes 
 an opportunity to go over almost the entire 
 field of Grecian mythology, particularly that 
 part relating to the ocean and the watery 
 element. For the average reader it is a 
 piece of hard sledding to go through this. 
 
 Faust has been in a trance ever since the 
 explosion at the close of the play of Helena 
 and Paris when he tried to grasp Helena 
 with his hands. As his feet are placed upon 
 the ground after his winged voyage to 
 Thessaly, he recovers consciousness and his 
 first words are, "Where is SHE?" He is 
 told that perhaps Cheiron may help him 
 find her. As Cheiron comes rushing by on 
 his white horse, Faust is taken up behind
 
 22 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 the rider and learns to his delight that He- 
 lena herself was once carried in that same 
 seat — Helena, the ideal of Beauty and 
 Grace. Faust is beside himself to find her 
 and is left by Cheiron with Manto to de- 
 scend into the lower regions to Persephone 
 and search there. He does not appear on 
 the stage again until the middle of the third 
 act when as lord of a feudal castle near 
 Sparta, he receives Helena as his queen. 
 ,. Mephistopheles makes love to the Phor- 
 ; cyads and is transformed into one himself. 
 I He then makes his exit to appear again in 
 I Act HI as the embodiment of ugliness in 
 \ contrast to the beauty of Helena. 
 
 The remainder of this act is taken up with 
 scenes in which Anaxagoras and Thales, 
 representing respectively the Plutonic and 
 Neptunian theories of geology, discuss 
 their theories with Homunculus. This part 
 > is said to be illustrative of the gradual 
 growth of intelligence and of the idea of 
 Beauty in Art and Religion, beginning with 
 the animal worship and crude notions of 
 Phoenicia and Egypt, and culminating in 
 the grandeur and perfection of Greek art, in
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II 23 
 
 which the Gods were represented in human 
 form, and to which Goethe ascribed a 
 purifying and saving power, scarcely less 
 important than that of the beauty of nature. 
 
 Thales takes Homunculus to Nereus, the 
 sea-god. Homunculus wants to enter upon 
 free life, — wants real Existence. Nereus 
 turns him over to Proteus, who assumes the 
 shape of a dolphin and takes Homunculus 
 on his back out to sea. Charmed by the 
 beauty of Galatea, he seeks to play around 
 her feet, but comes to grief; the glass bottle 
 is broken, the living flames spilled out 
 scattering fire over the waves, and Homun- 
 culus is no more. The classical Walpurgis 
 night in Thessaly prepares the way for the 
 third act, which takes us back to the dreamy 
 days of the Greek heroic age. 
 
 Act HI. Faust "gets" Helena. She has 
 just been brought back from Troy by Me- 
 nelaus and is directed to go up from the 
 coast to Sparta and make everything read)'' 
 for offering suitable sacrifices to the gods 
 as soon as Menelaus with his companions 
 can follow. She obeys, makes all ready, but 
 is in doubt what is to be the victim for
 
 24 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 sacrifice, half suspecting from Menelaus' 
 sullen demeanor that she herself is doomed 
 to the altar. Mephistopheles in the guise of 
 a Phorcyad warns her that this will surely 
 be her fate. There is, however, one means 
 of escape. During the long absence of Me- 
 nelaus in the Trojan War and since then, 
 his kingly domain has been neglected, a 
 strange, bold folk has come in from the far 
 Cimmerian North and established itself in 
 the mountains above Sparta. It has built 
 there a magnificent castle of Gothic archi- 
 tecture, dififerent from the Cyclopian struc- 
 tures of the Homeric age. Faust is their 
 leader; there is refuge. Helena follows the 
 advice of Mephistopheles to save herself 
 and her attendants by fleeing to this castle, 
 where she is received as Faust's queen. 
 Menelaus and his forces are beaten back 
 and the whole Peloponnesus falls under the 
 sway of Faust who parcels out the prov- 
 inces among his victorious dukes in feudal 
 fashion. 
 
 Faust now experiences all the pleasures 
 which the possession of the Beautiful can 
 bring. The dream of an Arcadian Kingdom
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II 25 
 
 and age is realized. He has a stately castle 
 and a complete regal establishment, such as 
 many have wished for and but few obtained. 
 He feels a father's pride in his son and pros- 
 pective heir, Euphorion, the brilliant pro- 
 duct of the union of the Teutonic with the 
 Greek, the Romantic with the Classical. 
 But his pleasure is not unalloyed. The By- 
 ronic Euphorion turns out to be a head- 
 strong youth, heedless of his father's wise 
 admonitions. His career is cut short by an 
 early death, due to his own impetuosity. 
 Faust is once more forced to exclaim that 
 grief follows close upon the heels of pleas- 
 ure. His queen, Helena, also now leaves 
 him to return to the other world. She finds 
 that Beauty and Bliss do not long remain 
 companions. Ideal perfection even if it were 
 attainable would not be permanent and 
 hence would not be perfect. 
 
 Faust's wealth and control of the social 
 organism put him beyond the reach of 
 moral reproach, but cannot save him from 
 the mistake of deifying and worshiping a 
 part instead of the whole. The loss of his 
 wife and child, in whom alone he saw the
 
 26 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 embodiment of Beauty, undoes him. He 
 cannot see that he still has the entire and 
 imperishable Universe to worship and that 
 if he had made his idea of Beauty coincide 
 with the Universe (Kosmos) instead of 
 only a fraction of it, he would never have been 
 in danger of losing his ideal. 
 
 Goethe has put into Faust most of his 
 life experiences, but has omitted one im- 
 portant chapter, his ideal love and comrade- 
 ship with Charlotte von Stein. In the story 
 of Gretchen he has shown us what a pas- 
 sionate love is; but this is different from 
 that intellectual and spiritual companion- 
 ship which may exist between a man and 
 woman of similar tastes and equal mental 
 endowment and education, whose mutual 
 understanding creates a confidence between 
 them as great as that arising out of pas- 
 sionate love. Helena is not such a com- 
 panion but is rather the Grecian ideal of 
 physical beauty. In Wilhelm Meister, and 
 especially in the drama, Torquato Tasso, 
 Goethe has given examples of this relation, 
 such as he himself had with Charlotte von 
 Stein.
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II 27 
 
 In the two remaining acts we return from 
 Greece to the Christian-Germanic scenes of 
 the middle ages, which form the back- 
 ground of the whole work. In these Faust 
 endeavors to find a method of attaining 
 happiness in an active life in this work-a-day 
 world. He is done with women. 
 
 Act IV. Mephistopheles now lures Faust 
 with a graphic picture of the seething life 
 of a great metropolis, say of Parisian pro- 
 portions, with Faust as the biggest toad in 
 the puddle, admired and envied by hundreds 
 of thousands. It is tempting, but Faust has 
 one serious objection to it: he likes to see 
 the people increase and prosper, but they 
 invariably turn rebels! That is the hair in 
 the soup. The problem is how to force 
 people to be grateful to you and remain 
 servants after they have passed the age of 
 servantry. Promethean Faust railing at re- 
 bels (himself an arch rebel against all cus- 
 tom and restraint) is as funny as Satan re- 
 buking sin, 
 
 Mephistopheles continues his picture of a 
 metropolis, adding a grandiose suburban 
 palace of pleasure in a park, with groves,
 
 28 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 hills, lawns, gardens, water-falls, fountains, 
 and cosy grottoes with women (in the 
 plural, mind you), which causes Faust to 
 exclaim, "Modern and bad!" He has had 
 enough of sensual pleasure and Mephisto- 
 pheles' influence over him begins to wane. 
 "You," says Faust, "with your sharp, bit- 
 ter, repulsive nature, what do you know 
 about the needs of a human being?" 
 
 Faust feels an impulse to accomplish 
 some great physical work. He wants to 
 acquire dominion of property. He would 
 subdue nature and make it serviceable to 
 man ; would reclaim a tract of land from the 
 sea and convert it into a fertile province 
 To do this he must first obtain the sover- 
 eignty of the sea coast from the Emperor. 
 Mephistopheles suggests that the Emperor 
 is now in hard straits. The paper money 
 which Faust once created for him only 
 served to lead him into extravagance and 
 still greater ruin. In Church and State a 
 strife is raging, similar to the French Revo- 
 lution of later times. An Anti-Emperor of 
 Napoleonic ability has arisen. The subse- 
 quent conversation about the decline of the
 
 OUTLINE OF PAUT II 29 
 
 Emperor's authority gives Goethe the op- 
 portunity to put into Faust's mouth some 
 wise platitudes to the effect that rulers 
 should shun pleasures and find their happi- 
 ness in ruling only. Though the devil's 
 ideal of pleasure no longer has any attrac- 
 tion for Faust he fails to see that his scheme 
 of mastery and property is no less a devil's 
 ideal than pleasure. 
 
 Faust and Mephistopheles proceed now 
 and by using various arts and magic and 
 by calling in some bullies, (primitive men 
 of the mountains) offer the Emperor what 
 help they can. The commanding general 
 reports the situation desperate and resigns. 
 The Emperor gives Mephistopheles practic- 
 ally the command of the army and urges 
 him to do what he can, but has scruples 
 against entrusting him with the Marshal's 
 baton ; he fears he is not the right man for 
 it. Mephistopheles remarks that the baton 
 would be of no use to him anyway : "There 
 was a sort of cross thereon !" The devil was 
 right. The cross is out of place on the in- 
 signia of civil war (class war). War is 
 strictly a devil's business.
 
 80 GOETKE'S FAUST 
 
 Affairs now soon take a more favorable 
 turn; a final victory is won and Faust is 
 rewarded with the dominion of the seashore 
 in feudal right. 
 
 Act V. With a large force of workmen 
 Faust now proceeds to dike and drain the 
 sea marsh, improve it and make it suitable 
 for a teeming population. (It would be 
 cruel to ask where he got the money to 
 do this work or whether he used paper 
 money.) He also builds a spacious harbor 
 to accommodate foreign commerce. 
 
 Mephistopheles and his bullies set out on 
 
 an expedition with two ships and returned 
 
 to the harbor with twenty, loaded with the 
 
 spoils of foreign countries. Might is right. 
 
 "Commerce, war and piracy, 
 
 One in spirit are all three." 
 
 Everything is flourishing, — in fact, per- 
 fectly lovely, but there is again a hair in the 
 soup. The cottage of Baucis and Philemon, 
 an old couple noted for their simple hos- 
 pitality, is an eyesore on Faust's domains. 
 They had been living there before Faust 
 was given the seacoast by the Emperor. 
 He needs that location for a terrace and i
 
 OUTLINE OP PART II 31 
 
 orders them removed to a better place. Me- 
 phistopheles with his bullies undertakes the 
 job. They kick the door in ; the old people 
 faint from fright; a guest who is stopping 
 there shows resistance, but is overpowered ; 
 in the scuffle some coals get scattered and 
 the house catches fire ; incidentally the in- 
 mates perish with it. The history of Na- 
 both's vineyard and King Ahab repeats it- 
 self. Faust regrets it too late ; but how can 
 he help it if people will rebel against Fate, 
 particularly where the Fate is manipulated 
 by the rulers of society? 
 
 Four grey women now come at midnight 
 to Faust's castle, — Want, Guilt, Misery 
 and Care. The door is bolted and they can- 
 not get in. The first three turn away but 
 Care enters at the key-hole. Faust refuses 
 to be affected by her power to annoy and 
 states what we might call his confession of 
 faith (given hereafter). Thereupon she 
 breathes her curse upon him and he be- 
 comes blind. But though old and blind he 
 is still determined to direct the work of 
 reclaiming his land from the sea. One spirit 
 can guide a thousand hands. He gives or-
 
 32 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 ders to rouse up his workmen from their 
 sleep and stands in the doorway to hurry 
 on the work by torchlight, in every way, — 
 by prizes, pay or force. Unconsciously he is 
 providing his own grave, for Mephistophe- 
 les, as overseer, and his husky little devils, 
 instead of constructing a canal, as Faust 
 supposes they are doing, though they pre- 
 tend to obey his orders, are actually dig- 
 ging his grave right under his nose. 
 
 Faust imagines the work is almost done. 
 Only one small swamp remains. Were that 
 drained his triumph would be complete. He 
 foresees in his mind's eye the reclaimed 
 marsh filled with children, adults and aged, 
 living by their honest toil, a free and happy 
 > people owing their fortunate condition to 
 his benevolence. In this presentiment he 
 feels the highest pleasure and can say to 
 the passing moment, "Stay, thou art so 
 fair." His role is ended. He sinks to the 
 ground ready to die. Mephistopheles now 
 i steps up and claims his soul in accordance 
 with the contract; hell's jaws open to re- 
 ceive it ; but swift angels check him and 
 scatter roses about the grave, which drive
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II 33 
 
 back his base crew and scorch them with 
 torments sharper than the flames of hell. 
 
 "See! the purple roses borrowed 
 
 From the hands of pious women 
 
 Who had loved and sinned and sorrowed ; 
 
 Loved above all human measure, 
 
 Sinned and sorrowed and repented. 
 
 Theirs it was for heaven the treasure 
 
 To win home of that hi^gh spirit." 
 
 The lesser devils can't stand it and tum- 
 ble back again into hell; but Mephistophe- 
 les sticks it out and for a time tries to jolTy 
 the angels, but soon realizes that in an at- 
 mosphere of purity his arts have no effect. 
 His role too is here ended, and he bursts 
 out in a storm of self reproaches. 
 
 The angels carry off Faust's soul with the 
 triumphant words :_^ 
 
 "Rescued from the evil one. 
 This noble spirit see! 
 ( Him who unwearied still strives on 
 We have the power to free." 
 
 The closing scene is in heaven and brings, 
 to the front again the long-forgotten Gret- 
 chen. It is decidedly a woman's scene and
 
 34 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 highly characteristic of Goethe, the poet 
 and lover. Gretchen's soul is saved by the 
 prayers and work of Magdalens, and she in 
 turn adds her prayers to theirs in order to 
 save Faust. As Goethe could not put He- 
 lena in this class, no mention is made of 
 her, though she occupied a larger space in 
 Faust's life than Gretchen. But to top off 
 the pseudo-tragedy of Part I, it is Gretchen 
 who now welcomes Faust's soul to heaven 
 and claims the privilege of teaching and 
 guiding him in his new life. No reference 
 is made to .Christ; the Virgin Mary is the 
 one called upon. 
 
 "Aid in man's heart what thou of good. 
 
 Of tender thought and earnest, 
 
 Of holy love, in his best mood, 
 
 Up-breathed to thee, discernest. 
 
 Dost thou command it? Ours is zeal 
 
 And courage all-defying. 
 
 Dost thou breathe peace? At once we feel 
 
 The warlike impulse dying." 
 The close is a chant by a Myatic Chorus: 
 
 "Everything perishing 
 
 Is but a symbol ; 
 
 All insufficiency
 
 OUTLINE OF PART II 
 
 Here is fulfilled. 
 The indescribable 
 Turns here reality; 
 Eternal Womanhood 
 Draws us still on." 
 
 
 i-^
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 COMMENTS. 
 
 The foregoing outline, though far too 
 brief, is as much of the contents of Faust 
 as can be given in such small space. Hav- 
 ing come to the end of the story, let us 
 g-lance back and see what it all means. 
 What is the conclusion of the whole mat- 
 ter? Is it not plain that Faust found his 
 happiness in the commonest kind of bene- 
 volentia vulgaris? His ideal of human per- 
 fection and happiness is to be the feudal 
 lord of a colony on a reclaimed marsh, a 
 sort of artificial or toy village, segregated 
 from the main body of human society and 
 connected with it only by piracy or perhaps 
 commerce. The Pullman Car Shops, the 
 Gary Steel Works and the Krupp Gun 
 Works are examples of such toy villages. 
 We are tempted to exclaim in Faust's own 
 language (slightly modified): — 
 
 "The poodle's kernel then is this, 
 
 A Doctor of Philanthrophy! 
 
 The idea makes me laugh." 
 
 36
 
 \ 
 
 COMMENTS 87 
 
 To make a single individual, Faust, happy, 
 there must exist a vast and permanently- 
 dependent population who w^orship him as a 
 benefactor. This plan of becoming a pro- 
 fessional philanthropist with other people's 
 money is enough to raise the laughter of 
 the gods. We shall come back to this 
 subject later. 
 
 In reading Faust we should have in mind 
 the only other works which are at all com- 
 parable with it, viz : Dante's Comedy and 
 Milton's Paradise Lost. If the majestic ser- 
 iousness of Dante has won for his work the 
 appellation of divine, we may justly de- 
 scribe ]\Iilton's stern characters as grandly 
 heroic, while Goethe's are almost human 
 and for that reason more modern and inter- 
 esting. Dante and Milton are both under 
 the spell of dogmatic religion. Goethe is 
 more philosophic. He has freed himself 
 from dogmatism and is feeling about for a 
 new foundation, suspecting that somehow 
 it is to be found in humanity, but is not 'yet 
 clear whether in all humanity or only the
 
 38 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 "good" part of it, or in Eternal Woman- 
 hood. We feel that Faust and Mephisto- 
 pheles and even the Lord himself are all 
 very near to us. But it is human in the 
 individualist sense alone, and herein are 
 found its shortcomings and onesidedness. 
 Whatever the life in heaven may be, 
 whether the individual there is a perfect 
 unit, isolated and independent of social in- 
 fluences or not, one thing is certain, that in 
 this present vale of tears life has two 
 phases, the individual and the social ; and 
 the attempt to treat of one and ignore the 
 other_ while it may be made interesting as 
 an illustration of toy literature, is essenti- 
 ally and fundamentally a failure from the 
 very start. Under class civilization all 
 literature as well as all science may 
 be called toy work; it does not make 
 for human progress directly but only in- 
 cidentally. The sciences and inventions 
 are exploited by corporations primarily 
 for profit, and all new discoveries merely 
 broaden the field of exploitation and give 
 rise to larger corporations. The toy litera- 
 ture and arts merely serve for the diver-
 
 COMMENTS 39 
 
 sion of the same class; they affect the up- 
 per surface of society only and do not rise 
 to the dignity of really human productions, 
 because they are not participated in by 
 humanity, nor is it intended that they 
 should be. 
 
 r— ' It is precisely the conviction of this truth 
 pressing on Faust's soul that makes him 
 feel disgusted with all his sciences and 
 
 I learning, and realize that he is out of touch 
 withhumanity, as many another learned 
 man has also felt. If he had devoted only 
 a portion of that reflective energy, which 
 he lavished so freely in other directions, to- 
 wards investigating the meaning of indi- 
 vidual and social, good and evil, he would 
 not have needed to call in the devil as an 
 instructor in these matters. 
 
 Faust is restless, inquisitive, sticks his 
 nose into everything but is never satisfied. 
 He is as much of a devil as Mephistopheles, 
 but of a different sort. He has more of the 
 characteristics of Milton's Satan than Me- 
 phistopheles has; is an open rebel, bold,^ 
 
 X
 
 40 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 straightforward and defiant. When Mephis- 
 topheles twits him for pausing in his at- 
 tempted suicide, at the sound of the Easter 
 bells, Faust admits that he was temporarily 
 under the spell of old recollections, yet 
 knew all the while that it was a delusion. 
 He then bursts out as follows : — 
 
 "We are but what the senses make of us, 
 
 And this and all illusion do I curse, 
 
 All that beguiles us, man or boy — that 
 
 winds 
 Over the heart its nets and chains us here 
 In thraldom down or voluntary trance. 
 This magic jugglery, that fools the soul — 
 These obscure powers that cloud and flat- 
 ter it! 
 Oh, cursed first of all be the high thoughts 
 That man conceives of his own attributes ! 
 And cursed be the shadowy appearances 
 The false delusive images of things. 
 That slave and mock the senses ! cursed be 
 The hypocrite dreams that sooth us when 
 
 we think 
 Of men — of deathless and enduring names ! 
 Cursed be all that, in self-flattery,
 
 \ 
 
 COMMENTS 41 
 
 We call our own, — wife, child, and slave, 
 
 and plough ; — 
 Curse upon Mammon, when with luring 
 
 gold 
 He stirs our souls to hardy deeds, or when 
 He smoothes the couch of indolent repose^ 
 A curse upon the sweet grape's balmy juice, 
 And the passionate joys of love, man's high- 
 est joys — 
 And cursed be all hope and all belief; 
 And cursed more than all, man's tame en- 
 durance." 
 
 In the same spirit is what we might call 
 Faust's Confession of Faith, made to Care 
 in the last Act, as follows : ■ — 
 
 "I only through the world have flown : 
 Each appetite I seized as by the hair: 
 What not sufficed me, forth I let it fare, 
 And what escaped me, I let go. 
 I've only craved, accomplished my delight, 
 Then wished a second time, and thus with 
 
 might 
 Stormed through my life: at first 'twas 
 
 grand, completely, 
 But now it moves most wisely and dis- 
 creetly.
 
 43 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 The sphere of Earth is known enough to 
 
 me; 
 The view beyond is barred immutably: 
 A fool, who there his blinking eyes direct- 
 
 eth 
 And o'er his clouds of peers a place ex- 
 
 pecteth ! 
 Firm let him stand, and look around him 
 
 well. 
 This World means something to the Cap- 
 able. 
 Why needs he through Eternity to wend? 
 He here acquires what he can apprehend. 
 Thus let him wander down his earthly day; 
 When spirits haunt, go quietly his way; 
 In marching onwards, bliss and torment 
 
 find, 
 Though, every moment, with unsated 
 
 mind!" 
 
 This has the genuine Satanic ring. There 
 is nothing Mephistophelean about it; it is 
 too deep and heartfelt for that. Not even 
 his chagrin at losing Faust's soul could 
 wring from Mephistopheles such sincere 
 expressions as these. It breathes the true 
 spirit of Aeschylus's Prometheus, defying
 
 COMMENTS 43 
 
 the gods of Olympus and aiding the human 
 race in the upward struggle towards free- 
 dom. "Prometheus, unable to bring man- 
 kind back to primitive innocence, used 
 knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil by 
 leading mankind beyond the state wherein 
 they are sinless through ignorance, to that 
 in which they are virtuous through wis- 
 dom." 
 
 Faust struggles forward without remorse 
 and without regard for the effect on others. 
 Both his individual and social progress is 
 made at the expense of others. What we 
 object to is the assumption that this must 
 necessarily and always be so, — that if the 
 power to injure others were cut off there 
 would be nothing left worth striving for, no : 
 room for the play of enthusiasm or ambi- j 
 tion of any kind. We have no objection to 
 another's amusing himself or advancing 
 himself provided he travels on his own ex- / 
 pense. But when he takes his pleasure at 
 the cost of another's ruin ; when he becomes 
 generous with other people's money; when 
 he attains his final happiness at the cost of 
 other people's happiness and the ignore- \ 
 
 V
 
 44 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 ment of their condition, we call a halt. 
 Faust's genteel ignorance, which makes him 
 conveniently oblivious of the effects left in 
 the trail of his progress and blind to the. 
 certain results of further advance, is as 
 devilish as Mephistopheles' insincerity. His 
 head is once for all ruthlessly set on being 
 a philanthropist regardless of consequences. 
 Faust also has the same self-indulgence as 
 Mephistopheles, but in spite of this and 
 combined with it he still retains his im- 
 pulse toward striving forward. 
 
 Wherein then does Faust's badness differ 
 from that of Mephistopheles? In the fact 
 that it is positive instead of negative; it is 
 temporary only and lays a foundation for 
 subsequent goodness, being merely a step 
 in the course of human progress ; whereas 
 Mephistopheles' badness being a negation, 
 stagnation and doing of nothing, cannot 
 serve as a foundation for anything. It con- 
 tains no element of self-effort, but only self- 
 indulgence. Hence with Mephistopheles the 
 having been and ceased is the same as never 
 having been. For Faust there is a valid 
 and important difference between these two.
 
 COMMENTS 45 
 
 During the Class Era of human society, 
 with its peculiar ethics and its separation 
 of rights and duties, good may be tempor- 
 ary evil and evil ultimate good. 
 
 Faust's peculiar merit is supposed to con- | 
 sist in his "unwearied striving," his impulse 
 to go forward, to achieve, to accomplish 
 something, and this impulse is not killed 
 out but still survives after he has become 
 sated with sensual pleasures. This unwear- 
 ied striving seems all right at first glairce. 
 But let us ask, — Striving after what? 
 
 I Why, to get up on the backs of other peo- 
 ple, of course! That is the only kind of 
 
 i striving that counts in the Class State or 
 in the ideals growing out of it. "Mastery 
 and property are what I am going to win," 
 says Faust, in rejecting Mephistopheles' 
 ofifer of still more and greater sensuality. 
 
 1 But there is more than one kind of striv- 
 
 ' ing. If instead of this, Faust had turned his 
 efforts in another direction and striven un- 
 weariedly to study and take part in the 
 world with a view to reconciling the con- 
 flict between individual and social life, in- 
 stead of becoming disgusted with Law, Me-
 
 46 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 dicine, Philosophy and Theology, studied 
 
 simply as disconnected sciences, he would 
 
 have realized the usefulnes of these things, 
 
 when properly correlated with social life 
 
 and made subservient to it, and would have 
 
 arrived at a different conception of progress 
 
 land perfection. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Faust learns to his surprise that laws and 
 justice are not peculiar to heaven and earth 
 but are also found in the infernal regions. 
 This had never occurred to him before, 
 though he was a Doctor of Laws himself: 
 
 Faust. 
 "Hell has its codes of laws then, — well 
 I will think better now of hell, 
 If laws be binding and obeyed. 
 Then Contracts with you may be made." 
 
 Meph. 
 "Made and fulfilled too, nowhere better,^ — 
 We keep our contracts to the letter." 
 
 The Infernal Code has a striking similar- 
 ity to the Constitution of the United States ; 
 it prohibits laws which impair the obliga- 
 tion of Contracts. Faust's contract with
 
 COMMENTS 47 
 
 Mephistopheles' is merely the converse of 
 jthe pioiis -man's contract with God. Both 
 are typical of the bourgeois Age of Con- 
 tract. The pious man contracts to sur- 
 render his freedom and to serve God faith- 
 fully here if he gets paid for it hereafter. 
 Faust wants his pay, his satisfaction, his 
 freedom here, and in consideration thereof 
 promises to serve the Devil hereafter. Oth- 
 erwise the two forms of contract are of 
 the same general character. Both are con- 
 tracts between a helpless human being and 
 a supernatural power and bear all the ear 
 marks of that fairness and equality which 
 are alleged to underlie the contract between 
 a servant and his employer. In every case, 
 it is said, the serving party is perfectly free 
 to contract or not contract as he sees fit. 
 But in the same breath in which we are 
 assured that we are free to choose between 
 God and the Devil, we are also told that 
 there is no other choice; it must be one or 
 the other, yea or nay, a strict metaphysical 
 cinch, excluding any third choice. Not 
 much play for freedom here. We are sus- 
 picious of this kind of freedom. It reminds
 
 48 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 US of the inalienable right of the citizen to 
 vote for either the Republican or the De- 
 mocratic party. 
 
 If we first assume that there are such 
 supernatural powers, then their blood-seal- 
 ed contracts and covenants with men would 
 indeed form the basis for a gruesome trage- 
 dy. The desperate struggle of Faust's soul 
 for freedom and satisfaction drives him into 
 a compact with Mephistopheles which 
 seems uncanny and repulsive to many 
 worthy people and deters them from the 
 study of this work. But is there anything 
 more uncanny about this than about the 
 pious man's covenant with God, to renounce 
 humanity here for a promised satisfaction 
 hereafter? One is as uncanny as the other. 
 
 This idea of present happiness or future 
 salvation by Contract runs clear back to 
 the time when Adam was given the garden 
 of Eden upon the condition (contract) that 
 he should not eat of the tree of knowledge 
 or of life, and it is precisely for the purpose 
 of avoiding or overcoming this original and 
 fundamental condition that Faust enters 
 into a contract with Mephistopheles by
 
 COMMENTS 49 
 
 which he is to taste knowledge and life for 
 a consideration. With open eyes and fully 
 aware of the consequences, he took the step 
 that Eve was led into by deception. 
 
 In the larger and largest sense the story 
 of Faust from first to last, in spite of its 
 happy ending, might be called a tragedy 
 of human existence, the Gretchen episode 
 being a mere incident of the story as 
 a whole. Life may be called either a 
 tragedy or a comedy as best suits the pur- 
 pose and point of view of each individual. 
 
 Dante's glorification of Divine Law, as 
 illustrated in his grandiose system of punish- 
 ment, penitence, and bliss, is only a reflex 
 or adaptation of the institutions of the Civ- 
 ilized Era which were established to con- 
 firm and uphold the Rule of Property, and 
 particularly of the age-famed system of Ro- 
 man jurisprudence and imperial govern- 
 ment. This appears clearly enough from 
 the poem itself. It appears still more clearly 
 when the Vision is read in connection with 
 Dante's prose work De Monarchia. Prop- 
 erty is the spirit of all law, both heavenly 
 and earthly.
 
 60 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 "Justice the founder of my fabric moved ; 
 All hope abandon, ye who enter here." 
 
 From this it appears that Dante's hell is 
 merely a part of the machinery of some 
 vast system of laws or "justice." Most of 
 the punishments in Dante's hell, especially 
 the lower and heavier ones, are for crimes 
 against property, and the heaviest of all 
 is for attempts to overthrow the ruling or- 
 der of society. According to Dante the 
 crucifixion of Christ was an act of justice, 
 and no blame attaches to those who were 
 guilty of it. 
 
 Dante sings the praises of divine and im- 
 perial justice in lOO cantos ; he justifies the 
 murder of Christ. But we are all human 
 and blind to ourselves. After acting as a 
 dispenser of justice for several years, Dante 
 by a turn of the wheel became himself a 
 fugitive from justice and refused to submit 
 to the decrees of his father-city (he was 
 condemned to the stake), which he de- 
 nounced to his dying day as a heaven-out- 
 raging wrong. Such is the difference be- 
 tween prescribing justice for others and 
 taking the medicine oneself.
 
 COMMENTS 61 
 
 But suppose we should find after wider 
 experience and better understanding of 
 things that the assumed fate or supernat- 
 ural power which determines man's weal 
 or woe is in fact only the organized Econ- 
 omic Power of Society; and that Faust's 
 lack of wealth, honor and worldly power 
 which forces him to a dog's life is not due 
 to divine predestination but to the consti- 
 tution of Society as moulded by historic 
 evolution ; and suppose that by further his- 
 torical (not "made-to-order") development, 
 Society should become re-constituted in a 
 way that would assure to Faust his full 
 share of wealth, honor and power and re- 
 move the cause of his complaint, making 
 him feel like a man instead of a dog. What 
 would happen then? Nothing; only the bot- 
 tom would drop out of the so-called human 
 tragedy ; the supernatural would vanish and 
 the clarified soul would find its satisfac- 
 tion not in despising this life and looking 
 forward to a bourgeois heaven, free from 
 the curse of labor, where all are capitalists 
 and none laborers, but in the breadth and 
 variety of its activity here, the joy of co-
 
 6a GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Operation with others and the consciousness 
 of being able both to learn of them and in 
 turn to improve and instruct them, which 
 Faust found himself unable to do; there 
 would be no place then for the fate tragedy, 
 in the sense of servile and despairing awe ; 
 but there would be a certain intelligent 
 serenity and cheerfulness based on an un- 
 derstanding of the Known and a moral con- 
 viction and certainty that the now Un- 
 known, when finally grasped, will be like to 
 the already Known. 
 
 In saying this we have perhaps said but 
 little more than is contained in Napoleon's 
 terse remark to Goethe himelf : — "Policy is 
 Fate." 
 
 Let us now take a glance at Mephisto- 
 pheles. He appears at different times in 
 somewhat different roles, but there is a gen- 
 eral similarity running through them all. 
 In the Prologue he appears as a sort of 
 clown or jester at a reception held by the 
 Lord in heaven, and in this capacity con- 
 trasts strongly with the glory and dignity
 
 COIktMENTS 53 
 
 of the Archangels, Raphael, Gabriel and Mi- 
 chael. The scene opens with the celebrated 
 chorus of the Archangels, which cannot fail 
 to remind the reader of the Nineteenth 
 Psalm. No translation of this chorus which 
 we have seen gives the spirit of it so well 
 as Addison had previously done in No. 465 
 of the Spectator. 
 
 Addison's verses are as follows : — 
 
 "The spacious firmament on high, 
 
 With all the blue ethereal sky 
 
 And spangled heavens, a shining frame, 
 
 Their great Original proclaim : 
 
 The unwearied sun from day to day. 
 
 Does his Creator's power display. 
 
 And publishes to every land, 
 
 The work of an Almighty hand. 
 
 Soon as the evening shades prevail. 
 
 The moon takes up the wondrous tale. 
 
 And nightly to the list'ning earth 
 
 Repeats the story of her birth: 
 
 Whilst all the stars that round her burn. 
 
 And all the planets in their turn. 
 
 Confirm the tidings as they roll, 
 
 And spread the truth from pole to pole.
 
 54 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 What though, in solemn silence, all 
 Move round the dark terrestrial ball? 
 What though no real voice nor sound 
 Amid their radiant orbs be found? 
 In reason's ear they all rejoice, 
 And utter forth a glorious voice, 
 Forever singing as they shine, 
 "The hand that made us is divine." 
 
 Goethe has added one important thought, 
 — the inconceivably swift whirling of the 
 earth with its succession of paradisal splen- 
 dor by day and gloomy darkness at night, 
 and especially the perpetual conflict of the 
 elements, which is typical of the lifelong 
 struggle of the soul to overcome its mater- 
 ial environment until it finds peace at last 
 in discovering and becoming reconciled to 
 the wisdom of natural and divine (i. e. so- 
 cial) law, and leads a life of serenity in spite 
 of all inner and outer conflicts. 
 
 Goethe's meaning, but not his poetry may 
 be given as follows : — 
 
 "Though o'er the earth the tempests rage, 
 The waves beat high against the cliffs.
 
 COMMENTS 66 
 
 The lig-htnings flash and thunders roar, 
 
 And land and sea and air and fire 
 
 Wage with each other ceaseless war; 
 
 Yet earth pursues its even course, 
 
 Regardless of the elements. 
 
 And over all reigns peace supreme 
 
 Imposed by God's eternal laws ; 
 
 The sight makes angels' hearts rejoice." 
 
 After hearing this chorus Mephistopheles 
 feels himself out of place, but remembers 
 that the Lord has generally been glad to 
 see him on these occasions. He cannot sing 
 any chant about suns and planets, but re- 
 ports to the Lord that mankind is still 
 groveling about on the earth the same as 
 on the day of creation. Though gifted with 
 reason they use their reason so perversely 
 that they would be better oflF without it. 
 Their condition is so miserable that Me- 
 phistopheles really hasn't the heart to an- 
 noy them. 
 
 The Lord speaks kindly to him ; invites 
 his attention to Dr. Faust as being a likely 
 spepimen of humanity ; gives him leave to 
 draw Faust away from the right path if he
 
 56 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 can, and is confident that in spite of his 
 errors Faust will prove himself true to his 
 consciousness of what is right. Mephisto- 
 pheles takes the bet and is sure of winning. 
 The Lord says he has never hated Mephis- 
 topheles, but has in fact made him a com- 
 panion to man to arouse him from sloth- 
 fulness. Mephistopheles remarks (aside) 
 that he likes to see the "Governor" from 
 time to time and is careful not to break 
 with him completely. 
 
 It will be seen at once that Mephistophe- 
 les is not the typical Satan. He is a modern 
 and degenerate devil, smart and pessimistic. 
 He is described by the Lord as one who de- 
 nies, — a rogue, caviller, scoflfer and dis- 
 sembler. He describes himself as one who 
 wills the wrong and works the right; as 
 "Old Iniquity." A more accurate name 
 would be "Old Insincerity." He is frivolous, 
 a hypocrite, a scofifer at every serious thing ; 
 without purpose, ambition or aspiration of 
 any kind. He forbids the witch to call him 
 Satan. He has laid aside horns, tail and 
 claws; he has become modernized and got 
 "culture." His title is "Herr Baron." He
 
 COMMENTS CT 
 
 wears a long rapier at his side and is a 
 cavalier like other cavaliers. His ideal of 
 happiness is sensual pleasure, something of 
 the Versailles type, as described in the be- 
 ginning of Act IV. After Faust's death he 
 tries to flirt with the angels who come for 
 Faust's soul, but feels his own powerless- 
 ness when brought face to face with pure 
 love. It is as hard for him to scoff in this 
 atmosphere as it was for Gretchen to pray 
 when he was around, and he reproaches 
 himself for losing Faust's soul by carrying 
 his smartness too far and not knowing when 
 to stop. 
 
 This picture of the devil is rather too 
 modern to harmonize well with the general 
 medieval-Catholic setting of the whole dra- 
 ma. As a personification of Evil it is a 
 failure. It is erroneous to hold up the fri- 
 volity and sexual indulgences of fashionable 
 society as being the quintessence of wicked- 
 ness. To do so is to make the same mis- 
 take as to confound the vices of the slum 
 proletariat with the real wickedness of the 
 revolutionary working class. The slum pro- 
 letariat of the barrel houses and the slum-
 
 68 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 mers of fashionable society, say at Newport 
 or Versailles, are both excrescences on the 
 social body and are simply vicious and fool- 
 ish, that is all. They are not really danger- 
 ous to any one except themselves. 
 
 To properly contrast good and evil you 
 have to line up the moral, benevolent and 
 pious capitalists (the so-called honest busi- 
 ness men) on one side and the revolution- 
 ary union labor class on the other side — 
 men who preach sedition, slug scabs, de- 
 stroy property and care nothing for capi- 
 talist laws, courts or contracts. This is no 
 parlor deviltry ; it is real wickedness com- 
 parable to Satan's sin against God, as rep- 
 resented by Milton. It is outside the realm 
 of jokes. In this contrast, on one side all 
 crimes dwindle into insignificance compared 
 with the fundamental crime of class subjec- 
 tion ; and on the other side all sins are pec- 
 cadilloes compared with the attempt to in- 
 ,terfere with the Rule of Property. \ 
 
 \ Mephistopheles is not maliciously bad, \ 
 but is insincere and indifferent. As Gret- I 
 chen says, he has no sympathy or interest 
 in anything. His enmity to God does not
 
 COaiMENTS 59 
 
 take an active form. IMilton's Satan is an 
 older and far stronger type. He is a fierce 
 and defiant Archangel, in grim earnest, 
 thoroughly sincere. His crime was that he 
 failed in an attempt to gain the rulership 
 of Heaven and he remains God's open and 
 implacable enemy. He attempts to ruin 
 Adam and Eve, for the purpose of thwart- 
 ing God's plans, not because he has any dis- 
 like of them. He is a typical rebel. Faust 
 himself has more of the Satanic defiance 
 about him than Mephistopheles has. Satan's 
 acts are not ordinary vices, but sins against 
 God himself. Apart from these he is a 
 strong and manly character. In his discus- 
 sion with Christ during the temptation in 
 "Paradise Regained" Satan has decidedly 
 the best of the argument. Milton was some- 
 thing of a rebel himself, on all fields except 
 the religious ; his training in this prevented 
 him from seeing how his political and so- 
 cial views would look if applied to the ce- 
 lestial realm. 
 
 For Part H of Faust what Goethe really 
 needed was a new sort of devil. Mephisto- 
 pheles plays the role very well for Part I,
 
 60 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 representing the evil of self-indulgence in 
 the individual life. But for the broader so- 
 cial world of Part II and especially in Acts 
 IV and V, he is a failure. However, Faust 
 alone with the unerring instinct of an erring 
 mortal hits the right trail here. He sets out 
 for "dominion and property." This is some- 
 thing worthy of a truly Satanic nature. Me- 
 phistopheles lends what assistance he can, 
 but his heart is not in this work. He calls 
 it foolishness. From Goethe's own stand- 
 point the right sort of a devil here would 
 be one who would have drawn Faust over 
 to the revolutionary army and made him 
 leader of the Sansculottes, bringing about a 
 victory over the Emperor and the ruin of 
 Society. But that would not be literature. 
 All literature of the Property Age must 
 stop this side of the brink of social ruin. 
 And the same limit is set to the much 
 vaunted bourgeois science. According to 
 this all things may be made the object of 
 scientific study except politics. The science 
 of politics spells the doom of class rule and 
 hence is excluded from the domain of "legit- 
 imate" science. Goethe himself was as
 
 COMMENTS 61 
 
 great in the toy sciences as in toy literature, 
 but it never occurred to him to apply scien- 
 tific methods to the study of political phe- 
 nomena. What does the ruling class care 
 for a little thing like science unless it serves 
 either for profit or to strengthen its suprem- 
 acy? To expect this class to put itself out 
 of existence for the sake of being scientific, 
 is as foolish as to expect it to reform itself 
 away by legislation or benevolence, or to 
 observe the law to its own destruction. 
 
 When we go over all the wonderful dis- 
 coveries and inventions of the past century 
 we should expect to find the mass of the 
 human race correspondingly elevated, as 
 was predicted ovei and over again every 
 time an important invention was brought 
 out. Yet such has not been the result; 
 and were it not for the smouldering hope 
 that sometime somehow a change will be 
 wrought, the words of Mephistopheles 
 would have to be admitted as substantially 
 true and not sufficiently refuted by the 
 Lord's pointing to Faust as an example of 
 one good man: —
 
 G2 GO£THi3-S FAUST 
 
 "I only see how men fret on their day; 
 The little God of Earth is still the same 
 Strange thing he was, when first to life he 
 
 came; 
 That life were somewhat better, if the light 
 Of heaven had not been given to spoil him 
 
 quite. 
 Reason he calls it — see its blessed fruit. 
 Than the brute beast man is a beastlier 
 
 brute." 
 When we see little children working like 
 mules, and see men and women in an un- 
 necessary struggle for the necessaries of life 
 while these great scientists piddle along 
 with their little hobbies like telephones, 
 turbines and tupenny tubes, which benefit 
 the mass nothing, is it not right to say that 
 they are only "fiddling while Rome burns"? 
 But after all this is only one more proof 
 that the working class will never be free 
 unless it frees itself. 
 
 This personification of evil in Mephisto- 
 pheles as an absolute, active force is taken 
 from the old theology; but it strikes us as
 
 COMMENTS 63 
 
 inconsistent with Goethe's representation of 
 man as having an ineradicable inclination 
 towards the good which eventually saves 
 him. If this were true, none would perish. 
 This would not be consistent with the doc- 
 trines of the old theology on the damnation 
 and punishment of the wicked. It would 
 seem to us more logical from Goethe's own 
 standpoint to represent Good as the active, 
 positive force and Evil as the passive, nega- 
 tive side of the same force; i. e., instead of 
 good versus evil, say struggle versus sloth, 
 self-control versus self-indulgence. 
 
 If on the other hand Faust is to be con- 
 sidered not as a type of all men, but only 
 of a "capable" man, as he calls himself, or 
 of a "good" man, as the Lord calls him, then 
 Goethe has begged the question right at 
 the start. He has selected a "good" man to 
 show us how a good man can be saved. 
 This does not interest us. What we want 
 to know is how one can get to be good and 
 capable in the first place before one is pit- 
 ted against the devil. This Goethe forgot 
 to tell us. 
 
 "Man errs as long as he strives," says the
 
 64 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Lord in the Prologue. In other words, Faust 
 in contrast to Mephistopheles wills the 
 good, but in groping blindly for it works 
 the bad, and is saved for the sake of his 
 good intentions in spite of his misdeeds. 
 Instead of picturing man as fallen and re- 
 quiring a Redeemer, Goethe represents him 
 as possessing innate germs of goodness so 
 indestructible that even the devil himself 
 cannot ruin him. But this applies only to 
 the good and capable. The idea that the 
 good and capable individual arises as an 
 accidental or self-created product, independ- 
 ent of heredity, education and environment, 
 is enough to bring a smile from a saint. 
 / Now the fact is that this personification 
 of Evil as an active force, attacking the 
 Good, is not applicable to the individual 
 life at all. Nature does not establish moral 
 laws, distinguishing the good from the evil. 
 This is done by Society. The individual is 
 a unit and is not divided into two parts, 
 one bad and the other good. 
 
 "In my breast 
 
 Alas! two souls dwell — all there is unrest|„ 
 Each with the other strives for mastery, 
 
 I
 
 COMMENTS 65 
 
 Each from the other struggles to be free. 
 One to the fleshly joys which coarse earth 
 
 yields, 
 With clumsy tendrils clings, and one would 
 
 rise 
 In native power and vindicate the fields, 
 Its own by birthright — its ancestral skies." 
 
 If these two souls are to be understood as 
 typifying Good and Evil we take exception 
 to the sentiment. The earthly soul is not 
 evil; in moderation and under self-mastery 
 it is good. It is only in its excesses that it 
 is evil. It is only through the existence of 
 favorable conditions for the earthly soul 
 that the heavenly soul itself can be pro- 
 perly developed. The heavenly soul is not 
 unqualifiedly good, regardless of time. If it 
 were, suicide would be the immediate duty 
 of all. These two souls are not striving 
 with each other for mastery but are bound 
 inseparably together, and man must un- 
 wearied still strive on for the good which 
 both afford and for mastery over the ex- 
 tremes which each one alone would lead to. 
 There is nothing particularly heavenly 
 about draining a sea marsh and providing
 
 66 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 food and homes for a colony of poor peo- 
 ple. Yet Faust found good in this. 
 
 The conception of Good and Evil in a 
 moral or social sense was not developed un- 
 til the coming in of the Property Age and 
 the division of society into two classes, the 
 possessing or good class, and the properti- 
 less or bad class ; and afterwards these terms 
 were applied to individuals according to 
 their attitude towards the property class, 
 as being friendly or hostile to it. 
 
 It is remarkable that Plato, the first real 
 philosopher in a civilized State, in his Re- 
 public when he sets out to define what is 
 good or just, postpones the application of 
 these terms to the individual until after he 
 has first determined what is just as applied 
 to the State, saying that after we have thus 
 learned to read JUSTICE in large letters 
 we can more readily decipher it when writ- 
 ten small in the individual. He then pro- 
 ceeds to show in a roundabout way what 
 in substance amounts to this, viz : that those 
 who rule or ought to rule are good and 
 those who serve are bad. Then coming 
 down to the individual he shows that by
 
 COMMENTS 67 
 
 analogy the governing part of man, i, e. his 
 reason, is good and the serving parts, the 
 appetites and passions, are bad; and the 
 good man, being himself ruled by his rea- 
 son, will recognize the right of the "reason- 
 able class" to rule in the State, otherwise 
 he would not be good. All of which amounts 
 to this : that inasmuch as only those can rule 
 in a State who either control its property 
 or are the retainers of those who do, and 
 only those can be forced to serve who do 
 so from economic necessity, the good, 
 broadly speaking, are the property owners, 
 including their retainers who constitute the 
 military force, and the bad are the proper- 
 tiless. 
 
 Plato does not represent the State as a 
 magnified individual, as many have errone- 
 ously interpreted him ; on the contrary, like 
 Menenius Agrippa in his fable to the Roman 
 Plebeians, taking the class State as a norm, 
 Plato represents the individual as a miniat- 
 ure class State and applies the attributes of 
 the State to the individual. Such is the 
 power of social environment to shape un-
 
 (58 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 consciously what appears to be the free 
 play or self-directed activity of the mind. 
 
 What is called reason is, however, itself a 
 variable quality; people do not agree on 
 what is reasonable nor on what persons are 
 wise and best fitted to govern. To say with 
 Goethe that a man who is good in the be- 
 ginning will turn out good in the end, and 
 if he fails to do so, then he was not really 
 good in the beginning ; or to say with Plato 
 that the wise man is just and the just man 
 is wise, is only marking time, shifting from 
 one foot to the other without getting for- 
 ward; but when we connect justice with the 
 material world and human life by saying 
 that it is only the interest of the dominant 
 economic class, or from the opposite stand- 
 point that it is the interest of the subject 
 class, we have got past the stage of tautol- 
 ogy and invaded the realm of Property; the 
 hair begins to bristle and the fur begins to 
 fly; poetry and philosophy, morality and 
 reason give way to vile denunciations, 
 coarse threats and physical force, and we 
 then get our first taste of pure justice un- 
 sugarcoated.
 
 COMMENTS 69 
 
 Plato's analogy between the State and the 
 Individual is of course lame. Under civili- 
 zation the State is not an institution exist- 
 ing for the common benefit of all, as as- 
 sumed by Plato and by all other philoso- 
 phers down to the present time, but is an 
 exploitative, military organization which is 
 only the tool of the property class ; its func- 
 tion is to protect this class against its so- 
 called "fellow"-citizens at home and to aid 
 it in conquering and subjugating its neigh- 
 bors abroad. The art of managing this State 
 is classed by the philosophers as a separate 
 profession and the knowledge required for 
 this is called the sum of all wisdom. But 
 when exploitation comes to an end this 
 particular kind of wisdom will appear fool- 
 ishness and will die out. The final suprem- 
 acy of the Avorking class pre-supposes its 
 training by evolution to the point where it 
 is competent for industrial administration, 
 but not for exploitative government, as 
 "philosophers"; hence this class can never 
 become wise and good in Plato's sense nor 
 in Goethe's either, which is fundamentally 
 the same. Faust became at the close of his
 
 70 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 life as perfect a philosopher and ruler as 
 Plato could wish for; but he required the 
 assistance of the Devil to execute his or- 
 ders. 
 
 To personify the subject class as an Evil 
 Being, seeking to destroy the ruling class, 
 would be perfectly correct. With what un- 
 disguised gusto could Mephistopheles, em- 
 bodying the spirit of the despised bourge- 
 oisie of the i8th Century, scoff at every- 
 thing which was sacred to the then ruling 
 class, the feudal nobility! For a picture of 
 the Devil Triumphant we must turn to the 
 Communist Manifesto: — 
 
 "The bourgeoisie (class devil), wherever 
 it has got the upper hand, has put an end to 
 all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It 
 has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feu- 
 dal ties that bound man to his "natural su- 
 periors," and has left remaining no other 
 nexus between man and man than naked 
 self-interest, callous "cash payment." It has 
 drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of re- 
 ligious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of 
 Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water 
 of egotistical calculation. It has resolved
 
 COilMENTS 71 
 
 personal worth into exchange vahie, and in 
 place of the numberless indefeasible char- 
 tered freedoms, has set up that single, un- 
 conscionable freedom — Free Trade (and 
 Free Contract). In one word, for exploita- 
 tion, veiled by religious and political illu- 
 sions, it has substituted naked, shameless, 
 direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie 
 has stripped of its halo every occupation 
 hitherto honored and looked up to with rev- 
 erent awe. It has converted the physician, 
 the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of 
 science, into its paid wage laborers." 
 
 We are told by Bayard Taylor that 
 Goethe intended in the second part of Faust 
 to treat of politics, but gave it up and sub- 
 stituted finance and paper money instead. 
 If this be true it shows that Goethe had at 
 least an inkling of the truth that somehow 
 or other man's social life has something to 
 do with his development as an individual. 
 But Goethe knew enough to drop a hot 
 potato. He would not have to study polit- 
 ical history very long until he made the- 
 discovery that in the class war of politics 
 it is the so-called Evil which ultimately
 
 72 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 overthrows the Good and that this is the 
 law of social progress. The reason of this 
 is that an individual, being a ph3^sical unit, 
 may be reformed or changed and still retain 
 its identity; while a class by its very nature 
 can never be reformed: the only way to 
 change it is to supplant it by a different 
 class, which change in the case of a ruling 
 class amounts to a revolution and to a 
 transposition of the words "good and evil," 
 "right and wrong" and their use in a dif- 
 ferent sense from before; we have then 
 crossed the social equator and the words 
 "summer" and "winter" have the reverse 
 of their former meaning. 
 
 This is the very opposite of Goethe's 
 "good man" theory and of course he could 
 make no use of politics in his celebrated 
 "tragedy." All of Mephistopheles' irony, 
 sarcasm, scorn, sly innuendoes, sneers, ven- 
 om, cynicism, contempt and pessimism, 
 which when applied in individual life are 
 unjustified and are properly described as 
 evil, are applied with perfect propriety and 
 justice by a subject class struggling for its 
 life against the oppression of a domineering 
 class.
 
 COMMENTS 73 
 
 " • Force with force 
 
 "Is well ejected when the conquered can," 
 says Milton. As the accepted rules of war 
 do not apply between a civilized nation and 
 savages, so also they do not apply in a 
 war of one class against another. In this 
 war there are no proprieties. Everything is 
 fair. No quarter is asked or given. The 
 class which is down has nothing to lose. 
 The ruling class has already done its worst 
 and fears its subjects as the only devil and 
 loss of power as the only hell. This quality 
 of the working class never to acquiesce in 
 its condition short of obtaining complete 
 mastery of its masters is the one redeeming 
 characteristic which puts it on a par with 
 Faust's ceaseless striving, which ultimately 
 saves him. Such is the Class Devil as he 
 really exists and ultimately prevails over 
 the Good. The individual devil that we read 
 about as tempting the good man to do evil 
 is merely a poetic license and of course 
 never wins a final victory, — at least not 
 over a "good" and "capable" man. He is 
 only allowed temporary successes to keep 
 up the interest in the play.
 
 74 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Why did it never occur to Goethe to let 
 his typical man seek happiness in the role 
 of Wagner, the servant, or Valentine, the 
 common soldier, or one of the laborers who 
 with pick and shovel drained the marsh? 
 Because in the eye of a Property Society 
 these are not human beings, but are merely 
 pawns, like Gretchen, who exist only for 
 the purpose of allowing a real human being 
 like Faust to work out what is pompously 
 called the tremendous "problems of life" 
 that present themselves to the bourgeois 
 mind. This overpowering sense of the 
 "tremendosity" of human "problems" is 
 one of the manifestations of that hypocrisy 
 which has ever characterized the domineer- 
 ing class. These problems are nothing more 
 nor less than how to keep dow^n the subject 
 class and make it believe itself incompetent 
 to assume control and make itself happy. 
 Overwhelmed by the "tremendosity" of this 
 problem, the bourgeois mind seeks to solve 
 it by formulas more difficult than the prob- 
 lem itself. For instance, ostensibly the 
 principal problem of the capitalist class is 
 to provide for the employment, prosperity
 
 COMMENTS 76 
 
 and happiness of the working class; and 
 this is the problem that Faust finally un- 
 dertook to solve by reclaiming the marsh. 
 Instead of doing this in the direct way by 
 simply giving the working class the choic- 
 est land and the entire product, the capital- 
 ist class withholds a large part of this prod- 
 uct for foreign commerce; then it builds 
 an expensive navy of both merchantmen 
 and battleships, establishes a vast consular 
 system, commercial treaties, tarifif systems 
 to "protect" labor from every one except 
 those who are robbing it, sends armies 
 abroad to conquer colonies and markets, 
 irrigates deserts at home or drains marshes 
 a la Faust. What is all this for, anyhow? 
 Answer: "We are extending our commerce 
 so as to provide for the employment and 
 welfare of our working class," We repeat, 
 this is what is called solving a problem by 
 a formula more difficult than the problem 
 itself. No wonder it causes headaches for 
 the bourgeoisie. 
 
 Why does bourgeois literature always 
 represent the struggle with the supernat- 
 ural as an individual affair? Instead of con-
 
 76 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 ceiving this contract as made between an 
 individual and a supernatural power, let us 
 try to conceive it as made between the 
 ruling class and a supernatural power, say 
 with God, for future happiness or with 
 Satan for present happiness. Then it will 
 at once be seen that the supernatural power 
 is nothing but the ruling class itself. For 
 as to future happiness, when and where did 
 a ruling class ever efface itself here to win 
 the hereafter? And as for present happi- 
 ness, what more could Satan give the ruling 
 class than it now gives to itself? 
 
 ^ ^ ^ 
 
 Some years ago the producing class in 
 Egypt began to agitate this question of 
 Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, not from 
 an individual standpoint, but from a class 
 standpoint. They had been rescued from 
 starvation by the ruling class of Egypt and 
 had been treated so well that they had mul- 
 tiplied enormously. Yet, just as Faust says, 
 they turned rebels. They were wholly dead 
 to any feeling of gratitude towards their 
 benefactors. They decided that the pre- 
 requisite of all justice and righteousness
 
 COMMENTS 77 
 
 from their standpoint was economic inde- 
 pendence, and to accomplish this end all 
 crimes were justifiable, if contributing to 
 that end and not done out of mere wanton- 
 ness. The most shocking- measures were 
 taken against the Egyptians. The French 
 Revolution with its Reign of Terror was 
 mild compared with the ten plagues and the 
 slaughter of the first-born. Finally, with the 
 aid of a supposed supernatural power the 
 end was accomplished ; the leading civilized 
 nation of the then world was humbled and 
 one step forward was taken in social prog- 
 ress by the victory of Evil over Good. And, 
 mark well, it was only by being offered 
 present economic advantage that the de- 
 pendent class could be induced to place any 
 reliance on the supernatural leader in this 
 struggle. Classes are not moved by prom- 
 ises of the hereafter, though individuals 
 sometimes are. The deity of a class must 
 and does invariably stand for the economic 
 interests of that class. That the working 
 class and the master class cannot worship 
 the same god was as true in the days of the 
 Pharaohs as it is today.
 
 78 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Let US suppose now that some Egyptian 
 Goethe, a councilor at the court of Karl 
 August Pharaoh, should wish to write a 
 great tragedy on the dealings of supernat- 
 ural powers with the human race and the 
 conflict between Good and Evil in all the 
 phases of human life ; but instead of taking 
 for his theme this world historic class strug- 
 gle, should select some obscure member of 
 the Egyptian hierarchy and detail his in- 
 dividual life and fidelity to his caste as 
 showing the final victory of Good over Evil ; 
 could anything be more ridiculous? And 
 yet he would only be doing what Goethe 
 has done in ignoring the epochal social con- 
 flict of his day and writing the biography 
 of a professor as an illustration of the con- 
 flict between Good and Evil, — a professor, 
 who though he pretends to renounce his 
 religion and play the role of tough boy on 
 the surface, yet in fact remains sound to 
 the core on the one vital point of class 
 
 domination. 
 
 * * * 
 
 When we consider the mighty longing of 
 Goethe's soul for real life and freedom, like
 
 COMMENTS 79 
 
 the longing of the Homunculus, and see 
 how he was hemmed in by the narrow circle 
 of life at Weimar, and aside from that hem- 
 med in by the property organization of so- 
 ciety, prevailing among all the advanced 
 portions of the human race, with its iron- 
 clad customs, laws and institutions, evolved 
 and administered not to promote human free- 
 dom, but to maintain the supremacy of a 
 small class against the ceaseless struggles 
 of the suppressed mass of mankind and 
 against the single-handed efforts of here 
 and there a Titanic individual, always re- 
 sulting in his own destruction : — 
 
 "Who may dare 
 To name things by their real names? The 
 
 few 
 Who did know something and were weak 
 
 enough 
 To expose their hearts unguarded — to ex- 
 pose 
 Their views and feelings to the eyes of men, 
 They have been nailed to crosses — thrown 
 to flames." 
 
 And when we consider further that this
 
 80 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 had been the condition of humanity during 
 all those periods of history about which in 
 Goethe's time anything definite was known ; 
 and that Goethe clearly realized the fact of 
 this oppression and sympathized with the 
 oppressed, as many passages in his works 
 show, but could not attain to an under- 
 standing of what this mysterious and ap- 
 parently absurd social phenomenon meant 
 and could not trace its source nor outcome ; 
 and when we consider further what Goethe 
 had seen and sufifered under the French 
 Revolution and the wars arising out of it ; 
 and the fact that though he had become 
 sufficiently emancipated on the religious and 
 philosophical side, his social standing as 
 well as the backward political condition of 
 the Fatherland prevented him from sym- 
 pathizing with the democracy or seeing any 
 hope in it; in view of all this, is it any 
 wonder that Goethe despaired of finding 
 happiness in the sphere of normal human 
 society under these conditions, but like a 
 monk who renounces civil life, Goethe let 
 his hero find his ultimate happiness in a 
 secluded corner of the world, inflicting so-
 
 COMMENTS 81 
 
 called benefits upon those who do the actual 
 work of his microcosmic community while 
 he himself stands aloof from them. 
 
 Faust, notwithstanding his delusions to 
 the contrary, ended about where he began. 
 He began as a book worm, and complained 
 that although he knew books he knew 
 nothing of men and the world. He there- 
 fore proceeds to go through what he is 
 pleased to call a course of experience in the 
 world, in which he experiences everything 
 except the one thing necessary to ex- 
 perience, viz., producing his own livelihood' 
 side by side with his fellowmen and co- 
 operating with them politically. He winds 
 up not as one of the world himself but as a 
 benefactor of the world from the outside. 
 He goes, as it were, into the old clothes 
 donation business on a large scale; instead 
 of clothes he donates second rate scraps of 
 land to the homeless or to those few of the 
 homeless that he can directly reach, and 
 claims the gratitude due to a benefactor. 
 But the literary and scientific labors of a 
 bookworm inure ultimately to the benefit of 
 others and entitle him also to the rank of a
 
 83 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 —J 
 
 benefactor. So that Faust has changed 
 himself from a benevolent distributer of 
 knowledge into a benevolent distributer of^ 
 marsh land. He began as a four-times 
 doctor. He quit with one additional title, — 
 Doctor of Philanthropy; that is all. Were 
 it not for the fact that he acts as gravedigger 
 for his ideals as well as his body, the re- 
 mark of Mephistopheles would be true, viz : 
 that his death left things just the same as if 
 he had never lived. He is still outside of 
 real productive society, real life, and his 
 benevolence produces merely a happiness of 
 despair, the same as the Stoic philosophy 
 and Christian religion (when confined to 
 private life only) are the consolation of a 
 soul resigned, either temporarily or perma- 
 nently to a condition of mental servitude 
 which despairs of working class emancipa- 
 tion, i. e. race emancipation. It is the con- 
 dition of the resigned, confirmed and in- 
 corrigible pessimist with a forced cheerful- 
 ness in his despair, suggestive of the "Smile 
 that won't come ofif", which is only a 
 modification of the Mephistophelean grin. 
 He postpones all his noble aspirations until
 
 COMMENTS 83 
 
 the future life and so far as this world is 
 concerned he is as completely without faith 
 or hope as the Old Sinner himself. It is 
 only with reference to the future life that 
 hope finds a place in his bosom. The "de- 
 pravity of human nature" is the broad cloak 
 with which he covers and excuses not only 
 the vices and crimes of individuals, but also 
 the injustice of the governing class, thus 
 maintaining that class government is an 
 inherent part of "human nature." 
 
 Dr. George Weber in his Universal 
 History recognizes the unsatisfactory char- 
 acter of the concluding part of Faust, with- 
 out knowing the seat of the difficulty. He 
 puts the matter thus : 
 
 "In order to bring the Faust poem (Part 
 I) to a satisfactory close it would be neces- 
 sary to bring about a reconciliation between 
 man's spiritual freedom and development 
 and his sensual nature ; for only in this 
 harmony of the highest spiritual develop- 
 ment with the strong passions of a healthy 
 nature is found the ideal of a perfect man. 
 To establish this harmonious union, and to 
 guide man, so organized, into real and active
 
 84 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 life, — to let deeds follow upon the heels 
 of knowledge and enjoyment, — this would 
 have been the problem of the Second Part of 
 Faust. But neither the numerous con- 
 tinuations which Goethe himself invited 
 others to attempt, (which, moreover, were 
 only repetitions), nor Goethe's own Second 
 Part, which betrays the marks of old age 
 and of changed views, can be considered as a 
 successful solution of this problem," 
 
 We reply that Goethe has solved the 
 problem as well as it can be solved from a 
 class standpoint. He has represented economic 
 charity, class charity, as the pinnacle of 
 human happiness, — higher than justice, be- 
 cause justice between classes is a thing 
 inconceivable to the bourgeois mind. In 
 fact "justice" in its technical sense is a 
 product of class civilization and is hence 
 irreconcilable with Social Solidarity. Social 
 justice is a negation of the idea of justice 
 in the same way that common or public 
 property is a negation of the idea of 
 property. The difficulty exists not in 
 Goethe's old age nor in the method of the 
 solution, but in the fact that the problem
 
 COMMENTS 86 
 
 itself, which Weber states, is iinsolvable 
 until classes have been abolished. Until 
 then the perfect or near-perfect man must 
 divide his life between profit grinding on 
 one hand and charity dispensing on the 
 other, as Carnegie and Rockefeller have 
 done. No reconciliation between man's 
 spiritual development and his sensual nature 
 can take place until after there has been a 
 reconciliation between the individual and 
 society, for the reason that man's spiritual 
 freedom and development involve questions 
 relating to social life, upon which depend 
 our definitions of Good and Evil. 
 
 We cannot therefore agree with Bayard 
 Taylor \vhen he says that in Faust we find 
 the problem of Good and Evil simply stated 
 and sublimely solved, by the discovery that 
 only in working for the benefit of his fellow 
 beings can man taste happiness. This is a 
 luxury which very few can enjoy in the 
 manner that Faust employed. It is all right 
 for these few, but it is hard, bitter hard on 
 the multitude who are the victims of this 
 artificial and essentially selfish happiness. 
 Not in working "for" others as their
 
 86 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 domineering benefactor but in working 
 "with" others as an equal comrade is 
 happiness to be found. If we must have 
 benevolence, let it not be one sided, but 
 reciprocal. 
 
 Our conclusion, then, is that Goethe 
 judged from a socialist standpoint, although 
 his intentions were all right and he did as 
 well as any one could in his circumstances, 
 nevertheless undertook too big a job for a 
 Property Homunculus. In attempting to 
 treat of Good and Evil as absolute qualities, 
 he made a botch of it. The Property Age is 
 not the absolute age, much less is the Bour- 
 geois Division of it the final resting stage of 
 humanity. The Working Class Devil will 
 overthrow it and establish a dififerent kind 
 of happiness and a different kind of good 
 and of evil.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM, 
 
 Goethe began to work on Faust in 1774 
 when he was twenty-five years old. Part I 
 was substantially finished before the out- 
 break of the French Revolution, though it 
 was not published till 1790. Faust's restless 
 and defiant spirit is typical of the seething 
 activity of the intellectual world in those 
 pre-revolutionary years. Part II occupied 
 Goethe at intervals during the rest of his 
 life and was finished in 1831, a few months 
 before he died at the ripe age of eighty two 
 years. When he began this work French 
 Rationalism was at its height ; all of the old 
 institutions of society were subjected to 
 unsparing criticism. So far as this was 
 directed against the church and priestcraft 
 Goethe joined heartily in it. He never lets 
 an opportunity slip to take a fling at the 
 priests. But he drew the line at democracy 
 and materialism. He had been elevated to 
 
 87
 
 88 GOETHETS FAUST 
 
 the ranks of the nobility and was an ideal- 
 ist. Democracy was at that time exclusively 
 political, and materialism was gross and 
 physical. Goethe could not foresee that 
 democracy was to expand so as to include 
 modern industry and afiford a basis for a 
 universal nobility, and that materialism was 
 to expand so as to include the world of mind 
 and imagination and become idealistic. Too 
 enlightened and honest to accept the 
 catechism, too sentimental to be satisfied 
 with the then current one-sided rationalism, 
 he found in the heart of woman that self- 
 sacrificing, unquenchable, all-forgiving and 
 all-forgetting love and inspiration which for 
 him answered the purpose of both philos- 
 ophy and religion. 
 
 As for politics, he got as far as benevolent 
 paternalism and let it rest at that. After 
 the victory over the Anti-Emperor and his 
 forces the Archbishop, in the double role of 
 Archbishop and Chancellor, impresses on 
 the Kaiser the magnitude of his sin in 
 allying himself with the powers of darkness. 
 To atone for this nothing will suffice except 
 the most liberal donations to the Church and
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 89 
 
 tithes from the whole reahn ; and it is only 
 with difficulty that he is prevented from 
 claiming tithes from the sea which overflows 
 Faust's land. But the worm at last turns, 
 and this is refused. Whatever the defects 
 of Faustdorf were, Goethe with masterful 
 satire rescued it from the clutches of the 
 Church, though he could not shake off 
 Mephistopheles. But if the class-state is 
 forever compelled to choose between an 
 alliance with the Church on one hand and 
 the Devil on the other, it is truly in a sorry 
 plight. 
 
 Between the time of beginning Faust in 
 1774 and finishing it in 1831 the French 
 Revolution had come and gone (apparent- 
 ly) ; the Napoleonic wars were all over ; 
 democracy had failed; the Bourbons were 
 back on the throne and the Holy Alliance 
 had reached the height of its power. All 
 that even well-intentioned men of those 
 times asked for was that the people be 
 treated with mercy and benevolence, but 
 ruled with a strong hand. The watchword 
 was, "Everything for the people, nothing by 
 the people." There is no doubt that in
 
 90 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Part II of Faust Goethe has caught the true 
 spirit of the times and environment in which 
 he lived as regards the relations of ruler and 
 ruled. We see reflected here the spirit of 
 feudal reactionism as truly as the struggles 
 of the English Revolution are reflected in 
 Paradise Lost, or as the spirit of universal 
 empire, joined but not subject to a universal 
 church, is reflected in the work of Dante, 
 the Ghibelline. All these works are by men 
 who were more than poets; they had ab- 
 sorbed all history, literature and science 
 down to their respective times and combined 
 and moulded this mass into their immortal 
 works, tinged with the characteristics both 
 of the individual authors and of the social 
 organizations in which they lived. 
 
 In order to be fair towards Goethe we 
 here give Faust's last words, his Swan Song 
 in full :— 
 
 "Below the hills a marshy plain 
 
 Infects what I so long have been retrieving: 
 
 This stagnant pool likewise to drain 
 
 Were now my latest and my best achieving. 
 
 To many millions let me furnish soil. 
 
 Though not secure, yet free to active toil ;
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 91 
 
 Green, fertile fields, where men and herds 
 
 go forth 
 At once, with comfort, on the newest Earth, 
 And swiftly settled on the hill's firm base, 
 Created by the bold, industrious race. 
 A land like Paradise here, round about; 
 Up to the brink the tide may roar without. 
 And though it gnaw, to burst with force the 
 
 limit, 
 By common impulse all unite to hem it. 
 Yes! to this thought I hold with firm 
 
 persistence; 
 The last result of wisdom stamps it true : 
 He only earns his freedom and existence. 
 Who daily conquers them anew. 
 Thus here, by dangers girt, shall glide away 
 Of childhood, manhood, age, the vigorous 
 
 day: 
 And such a throng I fain would see, — 
 Stand on free soil among a people free! 
 Then dared I hail the Moment fleeing: 
 "Ah, still delay — thou art so fair." 
 The traces cannot, of mine earthly being. 
 In aeons perish, — they are there! — 
 In proud fore-feeling of such lofty bliss, 
 I now enjoy the highest Moment, — this!"
 
 92 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 The subjection of external nature to the 
 needs of man which Faust aims at in re- 
 claiming the marshy sea coast is a good 
 thing. It is one element of human progress. 
 It can be accomplished by social effort only. 
 Faust makes use of social power but seems 
 entirely blind to its significance, as blind as 
 if he had already been stricken by Care, as 
 he finally was. This subjugation of Nature 
 should be considered as only preliminary to 
 the emancipation of the race from the King- 
 dom of necessity, giving it the conscious 
 control of its own destiny. This result 
 Faust does not aim at. He perverts his 
 subjugation of Nature to his own glorifica- 
 tion and to providing his colony with the 
 material comforts of life, accompanied by 
 what he calls Freedom. Nothing is said 
 about the education of these people. The 
 education of successive generations by 
 means of written language and numerals is 
 in a certain sense an artificial and com- 
 pulsory process, but it is a necessary part 
 of freedom. And this is only elementary; 
 next comes their education in other matters, 
 particularly in political affairs. Then it is
 
 THE MODEL COLOXY: FREEDOM 93 
 
 all over with, the model coloii}^ of Freedom, 
 Feudalism and Filanthropy. 
 
 If in a class society the acme of happiness 
 is found in the hopeless social conditions 
 which force the tender hearted to take 
 refuge in philanthropy, so much the worse 
 for class society and the literature it pro- 
 duces; for this benevolence is exercised 
 without affecting the prime source of 
 wretchedness, class subjection. Philanthro- 
 pists are non-factional as between the differ- 
 ent factions of the property class, but are 
 not non-partisan. There are no philanthro- 
 pists but such as oppose the working class 
 revolution in its positive activity. As soon 
 as a philanthropist opposes property rule 
 and advocates working class supremacy he 
 is dropped off the list of philanthropists. 
 Philanthropy is based on property rule. If 
 the essential product of present society is to 
 be simply a crop of philanthropfsts on one 
 hand and an ever recurring crop of helpless 
 victims on the other, the society will wither 
 away as did ancient society and bring forth 
 no offspring capable of independent life and 
 of becoming its legitimate successor. The
 
 94 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 problem is not how to supply the world 
 Avith benefactors, but how to eliminate 
 benefactors from the world entirely Cand 
 substitute social justice instead). 
 
 Faust's work however, in draining the 
 marsh, required sacrifices: — 
 
 "Human victims bled and suffered 
 Nights was heard the cry of woe." 
 
 If you think that progress and the con- 
 quest of nature, made under class conditions 
 for profit or to satisfy the cupidity of a 
 morbid philanthropist, is a matter of holiday 
 sport, read the construction reports of the 
 Chicago Drainage Channel or any similar 
 work and learn how the men were treated; 
 how they worked; what food and shelter 
 they had ; what form of recreations ; how 
 they were mutilated, suffered, died, their 
 bodies thrown away and forgotten, all for 
 the sake of "human" progress, they them- 
 selves of course not being human. 
 
 O Progress, what crimes are committed 
 in thy name! Faust's colony was won by 
 war, drained by slaughter, enriched by 
 piracy and supported by the permanent 
 subjection of the people.
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 05 
 
 In our most advanced industries (the 
 Steel Works, for example) it has become 
 necessary to enclose the grounds with a 
 wall and establish private hospitals inside 
 for the victims of "progress" ; and the 
 records of these so-called "accidents" are 
 concealed from the public with the con- 
 nivance of the civil authorities as being so 
 horrible that their exposure would endanger 
 the foundations of society. 
 
 Or read the history of the Homestead 
 strikes and learn how Philanthropist Car- 
 negie worked for human progress. We are 
 not told how Faust managed his strikes, but 
 we can easily see that Mephistopheles and 
 his rustlers would be ideal strike breakers, 
 from the way they treated Baucis and 
 Philemon. 
 
 Mephistopheles' devil-may-care report on 
 this exploit of making away with these 
 helpless old people forms a striking passage. 
 Instead of allowing the old couple to make 
 themselves happy in their own way, Faust 
 was determined to make them happy in his 
 own Avay, so as to have the selfish pleasure 
 of seeing them grateful to him for economic
 
 96 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 blessings bestowed after he had first reduced 
 them to want. 
 
 "They soon will learn to thank me and to 
 
 praise 
 For all life's blessings in life's closing days; 
 Feel how much I have served them and the 
 
 sight 
 Of their contentment will give me delight." 
 
 The result is, they are killed by the cure. 
 One of the deepest lessons of life and one 
 that Faust never learned is to allow others 
 not only the naked right, but also the inde- 
 pendent and inalienable means to make 
 themselves happy in their own way, and not 
 insist on forcing them into a position where 
 they will have to be thankful to you for 
 helping them. 
 
 In Faust's treatment of Baucis and Phile- 
 mon Goethe pictures the covetousness of 
 the rich in robbing the poor as being the 
 Great Evil. Again he has missed the mark. 
 He strains at a gnat and swallows a camel. 
 Faust's fundamental crime was not in ruin- 
 ing two old people, but in the exercise of 
 political power to organize a whole colony
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 97 
 
 into a perpetual condition of servitude and 
 degradation. The crimes of a great in- 
 dividual are as insignificant as his benevol- 
 ence. It is not the occasional crimes of the 
 rulers that hurt. Their Old and Standing 
 Iniquity consists in their class honesty and 
 goodness. It is when the honesty and 
 goodness of the ruling class are shown at 
 their best that the hopeless condition of the 
 working class stands out convincingly in 
 all its horrid reality, because then it is all 
 the more inexcusable. 
 
 The quintessence of Faust's wisdom is 
 expressed in the lines: — 
 
 "He only earns his freedom and his living 
 Who daily conquers them anew." 
 
 It reads right. But Faust himself in 
 another place has raised a question which, 
 slightly modified, applies here: 
 
 "Ja was man so 'verdienen' heisst 
 "Wer darf das Kind beim rechten Namen 
 nennen?" 
 "What is hight 'earning', who will dare 
 "To call the child by its right name?" 
 
 From whom are we to "earn" and "con-
 
 98 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 quer" our freedom and livelihood? Say, 
 from the master class? And these latter, 
 from whom do they "conquer" their liveli- 
 hood. Well, let that pass for now. 
 
 Freedom is something which can neither 
 be earned nor conquered by anvbody from 
 anybody. Neither can it be the gift of a 
 benefactor; nor can it be found in any 
 secluded corner, sheltered from fierce social 
 struggles. It can only be won by the evolu- 
 tion of the main stream of human society 
 through successive class supremacies, based 
 on advances in industrial development, and 
 culminating in the almost miraculous per- 
 fection of machinery and the final suprem- 
 acy of the all-inclusive and class-abolishing 
 working class. 
 
 We think we do Goethe no injustice 
 when we assume that by the word "Free- 
 dom" he means that kind of political free- 
 dom which in his own life-time the bour- 
 geois class was trying to establish in lieu 
 of the previously existing feudal system 
 of government. At that time freedom looked 
 good. What this "freedom" means we are 
 now able to judge. It is no longer a question
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 99 
 
 of theory, as it was in Goethe's time. It has 
 been tested in practice, has exhausted the 
 good which it was capable of developing 
 and has now become intolerable, being a 
 clog to further progress. It means the 
 freedom of the strong to destroy the 
 freedom of the weak. The pen of Goethe 
 himself would be inadequate to describe the 
 travesty of freedom which Goethe's ideal 
 freedom has resulted in. Bourgeois freedom 
 means freedom of exploitation, which in- 
 volves economic dependence ; hence efifect- 
 ive, economic freedom is a negation of 
 bourgeois freedom and is called the "Coming 
 Slavery". 
 
 It may appear to some that our comments 
 are flippant and savor too much of Goethe's 
 Baccalaureus, Perhaps so. Nothing which 
 attacks the present order of society could 
 be in good form, no matter what shape it 
 took. An attack on proprietorship necessari- 
 ly involves a violation of the proprieties. 
 But we speak not by our own power, 
 we are pleading the cause of a class ; 
 and if our words have any weight it will be 
 owing to that fact. And we are willing to
 
 100 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 pit our flippancy against that genteel ignor- 
 ance, intellectual dishonesty and silent 
 denial of daylight facts, which form the 
 distinguishing characteristic of ruling class 
 moralists to-day, and make the frank brutal- 
 ity of the slavery- age appear almost a 
 virtue. What in Goethe's time might be 
 excused as owing in some degree to an 
 honest ignorance or unconsciousness is to- 
 day nothing but pure cussedness, (say 
 simulated unprejudice, or class interest con- 
 cealed). This agnosticism or apodictic un- 
 certainty of capitalist moralists as to the 
 claims of the proletariat appears all the 
 more ridiculous when contrasted with their 
 positive support of the "vested rights" of 
 their patrons. This pride of assumed 
 impartiality which declines to be classified is 
 simply a cheap form of self-flattery. 
 
 The final and ticklish problem before 
 Goethe' was how to smuggle Faust into 
 heaven and thus bring the story to a happy 
 conclusion, like getting the lovers married 
 at the end of a novel. He cannot get in by 
 the door of Christ, so much is certain. His
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 101 
 
 confession of Faith, as delivered to Care, 
 has not a very striking similarity to the 
 Apostles' Creed; Baucis and Philemon will 
 not help him to get in, nor will the work- 
 men whose lives were ruthlessly sacrificed 
 in draining the marsh. Helena is of no use 
 to him. We would have expected that the 
 v Lord, who turned him over to Mephisto- 
 '^ pheles in the beginning would now appear 
 and say : "Well done, thou good and faithful 
 servant, enter thou into the joy of thy 
 Lord;" but no Lord appears. So he must 
 fall back on Gretchen, the magdalens and 
 mater gloriosa. It is her unfathomable love 
 which saves Faust's soul without any 
 mediation of Christ. The Catholic worship 
 of the Virgin Mary fits in nicely with 
 Goethe's idea of Eternal Womanhood as the 
 elevating and saving force. It would further 
 appear from the characters in the last scene 
 that a woman has to repent before she gets 
 into heaven, but a man doesn't. This is a 
 striking commentary on the peculiar ethical 
 code by which a sin, common to both, ruins 
 the woman but leaves the man unscathed. 
 Woman's love deified is certainly a very
 
 102 GOETHE'S FJnrST 
 
 pretty idol. If we had to choose as an idol 
 some fraction of the Universe we think we 
 should choose this. Hut we make the same 
 objection to it that we make to Helena's 
 beauty — viz. it is transitory. In order to 
 make it eternal it must be transferred to 
 heaven. But if Helena's beauty had been 
 transferred to heaven it too would have been 
 eternal and might have served Faust for an 
 idol just as well. But as there is some 
 doubt whether there is any heaven which 
 can exist outside of and beyond the infinite 
 Universe, the only thing left which is 
 eternal is the ever changing and ever ident- 
 ical Kosmos or totality of all idols, both 
 material and ideal, earthly and heavenly, 
 considered as a Unit; and the man who 
 worships this will never be in danger of 
 having his idol taken away from him. 
 
 But after all we have no desire to criticize 
 Goethe's plan of salvation. In fact we are 
 able to derive some comfort from it. If 
 Infinite Love, working spontaneously, will 
 save such as Faust, who lived a life of un- 
 restrained self-indulgence at the expense of 
 others (accompanied, it is true, by a laud-
 
 THE MODEL COLONY: FREEDOM 103 
 
 able striving for advancement) without 
 remorse and without any apparent effort to 
 sharpen his conscience or even to have any 
 conscience of any kind, we may certainly 
 rest easy as to the future of those who hold 
 themselves responsible not only for their 
 acts, but also to some extent for the state of 
 their conscience itself, and do not satisfy 
 themselves with the approval of a conscience 
 which has never been aroused from a 
 comatose or morbid state. A man is 
 responsible for the healthy condition of his 
 conscience, no less (and no more) than for 
 the healthy condition of his body. His 
 control over both, though not absolute, is 
 considerable. 
 
 It is generally assumed that conscience is 
 a uniform, invariable factor, alwaj'-s right. 
 Yet some of the greatest crimes of history 
 have been committed under mistake of 
 conscience. The uprightness of "conscience" 
 is as much a myth as its opposite, called 
 the "depravity of human nature*'. In the 
 Prologue the Lord skilfully dodged this 
 point by saying that the conscience of a 
 good man will keep Rim in the right way.
 
 104 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Yes, a good man will go right without any 
 conscience. But as the Lord omitted to 
 define a good man we will here supply that 
 oversight: — A man whose conscience is 
 moulded by the ruling class is a good man ; 
 and one whose conscience is moulded by the 
 subject class is a bad man^ an undesirable 
 citizen. Faust, when he became old and 
 wise fulfilled the Lord's prophecy. He 
 assisted the Emperor to put down the 
 revolution and took good care to provide for 
 his own colonists in such a way that they 
 would never revolt, (so he hoped).
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE GRETCHEN TRAGEDY. 
 
 Let US now go back to the pseudo- 
 tragedy of Gretchen, which occupies about 
 one half of Part I in space and more than 
 that in popular interest. 
 
 If Goethe's idea of women does not coin- 
 cide with that of Euripides, viz., that one 
 man is worth ten thousand women, it is 
 certain that in Goethe's time their social 
 position and learning sank into insignific- 
 ance when compared with an intellectual 
 giant like Faust. We cannot discuss here 
 the large question of the wretched position 
 of the female sex during the entire Property 
 Age. But we shall take exception to the 
 practice of treating seduction as the subject 
 of a tragedy, no matter how beautifully it 
 may be handled. If it be excused as a 
 necessary part of a great man's experience in 
 class society then again we say, so much 
 the worse for class society. 
 
 105
 
 106 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Gretchen was a pure, young girl, a devout 
 Catholic, almost a child in experience. Her 
 mother is a widow and p^r, of course. 
 Necessarily poor, or you couldn't make the 
 tragedy. Gretchen's education has been 
 neglected and she is overworked from dawn 
 till dark. — No need of going any farther. 
 There is the tragedy right there ! Stop and 
 think a moment. A girl "past fourteen"; 
 no father, no property, no education, no 
 experience. 
 
 "Must cook, knit, sew, must wash and dry; 
 Run far and near^ — rise ere the light. 
 And not lie down till late at night." 
 
 Isn't that tragedy enough? One would 
 think so for a person of normal taste. But 
 the morbid taste of class society demands 
 "hot stuflf". It finds its highest entertain- 
 ment in the unhappy condition of its own 
 victims. 
 
 The first step, of course, towards winning 
 Gretchen's attention is to give her what she 
 lacks most, — property. A casket of jewels is 
 sent her. Why that? If Gretchen is a 
 human being in the pursuit of happiness, 
 why shouldn't she give Faust a box of
 
 THE GRETCHEN TRAGEDY 107 
 
 jewelry, — gold watch, cuff buttons, diamond 
 stud and all. Think what pleasure it would 
 have given her to witness Faust's gratitude 
 for such a gift. But that is not the way to 
 make a tragedy; Gretchen is not a human 
 being and has no right to pursue happiness. 
 Faust monopolizes this business for himself. 
 What would an economically independent 
 girl, with an economically independent 
 mother and the education and training 
 which this implies, care for a casket of 
 jewels from a stranger? It would be re- 
 sented as an insult. That the underlying 
 cause of seduction in a majority of cases is 
 an economic one is so generally recognized 
 as to need no proof. The overworked and 
 underpaid department store and sweat shop 
 girls are regularly, almost proverbially, 
 cited in illustration of this. But not only 
 in the inception of the evil is the economic 
 cause predominant. In its ultimate results 
 it is the economic condition of the un- 
 fortunate one which becomes so unbearable 
 as to lead to despair. She is deprived of the 
 opportunity to earn an honorable livelihood, 
 even if she is able and willing to do so.
 
 108 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 That Gretchen's moral defect is not fatal, 
 Goethe himself has shown by landing her 
 in heaven, and if she is good enough for 
 heaven, why should she not be given a 
 chance on earth instead of being served up 
 as material for a tragedy? Her love is so 
 pure that it saves Faust in spite of himself. 
 
 When Mephistopheles, seeing her at 
 Martha's house with the box of jewelry, 
 pretends to take her for a "lady" she and 
 Martha are perfectly dumfounded, and in- 
 form him that she is nothing but a "poor 
 girl." The seduction of a "lady" might 
 furnish material for the yellow newspapers, 
 but it could not afiford the basis for a high 
 grade literary "tragedy." It lacks the 
 element of Economic "Fate." The seduction 
 tragedy is based on the fictitious necessity 
 of poverty and ignorance. 
 
 It requires no great insight to see that 
 most of the little romances and love 
 tragedies which Goethe experienced in his 
 own life and which caused him and others 
 that infinite sufifering which only sensitive 
 natures can understand, were owing to 
 economic (and hence social) differences in
 
 THE GRETCHEN TRAGEDY 109 
 
 the situation of the respective parties inter- 
 ested. 
 
 If the victim in these cases were given a 
 chance to become again a useful member 
 of society, doing her share of the w^ork and 
 receiving her share of the good things of 
 life, she would, it is true, carry a sad heart 
 in her bosom, but all the other noble 
 qualities of a human being would still be 
 hers, — intelligence, skill, gentleness, help- 
 fulness, kindness, truthfulness, courage, 
 justice, yes, even "benevolence". Just think 
 of that! Do all these count for nothing? 
 Is the mere animal side of woman of such 
 paramount importance that when this is 
 once marred, nothing is left of her? This 
 is the characteristic bourgeois view of 
 woman as an instrument of production and 
 sensuality. Her impairment for such 
 purposes is looked upon as depreciating her 
 commercial value, is called her "ruin". 
 
 So deep seated is this commercial estima- 
 tion of woman and so ruthless and irresist- 
 ible is the property instinct that it has falsi- 
 fied the teaching of Christ and created a 
 sole and only "scriptural" ground for
 
 110 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 divorce, viz : throwing suspicion on the 
 genuineness of a paternal heir to the family 
 estate. Tolstoy has clearly shown that 
 according to Christ's teaching there is no 
 scriptural ground for divorce whatever. It 
 is strange that his acuteness did not reveal 
 to him the reason why this particular 
 ground, out of so many, was interpolated 
 as the one necessary concession to the 
 Property State; and this would have led to 
 the further discovery that not religion 
 moulds the ruling class, but on the contrary 
 the ruling class moulds religion. Instead 
 of the Christian marriage being adopted by 
 society, the property marriage has been 
 foisted upon Christianity. 
 
 The working up of this so-called "ruin" 
 of a lower member of society into a 
 factitious and frenzied tragedy is the high- 
 est delight of those who think that the 
 economic conditions created by their own 
 class rank the same for tragic purpose as 
 those arising from the uncontrollable work- 
 ings of nature. This, of course, is much 
 nicer than to allow the victim to become 
 recuperated through the beneficent in-
 
 THE GRETCHEN TRAGEDY HI 
 
 fluences of nature and start with an Alpine 
 sunrise to begin life over again, as did 
 Faust. The essence of the Tragic is that it 
 appear inevitable. The moment it appears 
 to be avoidable, it loses its tragic force and 
 is detected as a spurious article. 
 
 There is another point that must not 
 escape us. Gretchen got to heaven and 
 welcomed Faust on his arrival there. But 
 what became of the baby that was thrown 
 into the pond? Did Faust welcome it in 
 heaven? It is the constant boast of modern 
 society that it protects the sanctity of 
 motherhood. But here is a large class of 
 mothers whose sufferings are ignored, and 
 who are looked upon as a burden to the 
 taxpayers and who, in many cases, have no 
 other course but to abandon or murder their 
 off-spring, for which a merciful God may 
 forgive them, but Society never does. This 
 circumstance gives simply additional zest 
 to the tragedy in the eyes of a bourgeois 
 audience. It flatters the ruling class to 
 reflect that its laws are as immutable as 
 fate. 
 
 Why not have Gretchen appear as a
 
 112 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Madonna with her child in her bosom, as 
 she welcomes Faust, and he taking it and 
 tossing it in his arms for joy. But no, the 
 bourgeois heaven, modeled after the bour- 
 geois eartTi, will not stand for any foolish- 
 ness on the bastardy question ; it touches a 
 property right, — the right of inheritance. 
 
 Faust's love afifair with Helena in the 
 castle near Sparta, though a greater breach 
 of morality than that with Gretchen, 
 occasioned no tragedy, not even a ripple. 
 The child, Euphorion, instead of being 
 drowned in a pond was the pride and joy of 
 the entire household. That is the difference 
 between the law of the castle and the law 
 of the "plain room". Wealth stands above 
 the moral law. It is wealth (the wealthy 
 class) that moulds the moral law as it 
 pleases and pays those who teach it as so 
 moulded. "She was not the first one", 
 Goethe lets Mephistopheles say. No, Goethe, 
 and (leider!) she will not be the last one. So 
 long as the Property Age endures there will 
 be thousands like her every year in spite of 
 your Gretchen tragedy. Even if this were 
 played in all the theaters of the land every
 
 THE GRETCHEN TRAGEDY 113 
 
 night in the year as a moral lesson, it could 
 have but little effect so long as economic 
 conditions remain unchanged ; and while 
 these are ignored, we do not care to have 
 you try your skill in working up our pity. 
 It is not a fit subject for that purpose and 
 the effort falls flat upon one who has seen 
 the light. 
 
 This method of teaching virtue is as 
 roundabout and maladroit as the capitalists' 
 famous plan of making workingmen happy 
 by extending commerce, etc., It consists of 
 these steps. 
 
 1. Provide a large class of girls oppressed 
 by poverty and ignorance and overwork. 
 
 2. Provide a class of wealthy and idle 
 men seeking sensual pleasure. 
 
 3. The natural result will then happen. 
 
 4. Provide a great poetical genius to 
 write a tragedy involving a seduction. 
 
 5. Have it played in the theaters as a 
 moral lesson and warning to all "good" 
 men and girls.
 
 114 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 6. Influence on the aforesaid working^ 
 g\rls=0. 
 
 We object therefore to seduction as a 
 subject of tragedy for the same reason that 
 we object to the tramp and the hobo as a 
 subject of comedy either on the stage or in 
 the ilkistrated papers. The reason is, that 
 in both cases the victim of social injustice is 
 utilized for the entertainment of the class 
 which is responsible for the wrong. Viewed 
 in this light, there is nothing comic about 
 the one nor tragic about the other. 
 
 It is a hopeful sign that the working class 
 has now reached a stage where it no longer 
 enjoys being either laughed at or pitied by 
 its masters. It is imbued with a seriousness 
 which does not admit that its inferior con- 
 dition is to remain an accepted fact — 
 much to the discomfort and unrest of the 
 class whose highest literature is rooted in 
 the assumption of the helplessness of 
 women and the degradation of the wealth 
 producers. 
 
 But it will be said that we have criticized 
 a poem, a work of art, as if it were a 
 philosophical treatise. No, we have simply
 
 THE GRETCHEN TRAGEDY US 
 
 shown that in Class Society the highest 
 poetry reflects merely class ideas, — is 
 merely class poetry, toy poetry, and gets its 
 recognition, its standing from that fact 
 alone.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GOETHE AND MILTON. 
 
 Goethe and Alilton were separated by 
 about one hundred and fifty years. It is 
 worth while with a few rough strokes to 
 compare these two men. Both were born 
 in important cities and belonged to the well- 
 to-do burgher class. Goethe's father was a 
 councilor, Milton's a scrivener, combining 
 probably the work of an attorney and 
 conveyancer. Both were most carefully 
 educated in the classics from early youth, 
 finished the University and continued their 
 studies for a considerable time thereafter, 
 Both were students of Italian literature and 
 visited Italy. Milton did this earlier in life, 
 when his youthful enthusiasm led him even 
 to vie with the native poets in their own 
 tongue. Goethe made the journey later in 
 life and devoted more attention to matters 
 of art. Milton was the more intellectual ; 
 his mind (and we had almost said his body) 
 
 116
 
 GOETHE AXD MILTON 117 
 
 was scholarly and classical of the purest 
 type and his whole education tended to 
 develop this character. Aside from music, 
 in which he was proficient, he does not 
 seem to have cultivated the arts, nor the 
 sciences either. In his Paradise Lost, 
 perhaps for poetic reasons, he still uses the 
 Ptolemaic system of astronomy. Goethe's 
 range of studies was wider and embraced 
 all the arts and sciences. Also the influence 
 of French literature was much greater on 
 Goethe than on Milton, as was to be ex- 
 pected, for reasons that are apparent. Both 
 exhibited in early life great talent for 
 dramatic writing. Although Milton's trend 
 in this direction was checked by external 
 circumstances, his ability was unquestioned. 
 Goethe was able to give full swing to his 
 genius in this field. 
 
 In their marriage relations both were un- 
 fortunate. Milton, having experienced the 
 domestic inferno, was too honest and 
 courageous to tamely submit in silence, as 
 many do, but straightway wrote his treat- 
 ises on Divorce, proved the righteousness 
 of divorce for incompatibility by the infall-
 
 118 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 ible authority of the Bible and set the ideal 
 of domestic liberty on a par with religious 
 and civil liberty. Finding polygamy justi- 
 fied by the Old Testament, he justified 
 polygamy. He did not assume to be wiser 
 than the God of Abraham. Goethe, having 
 entered into an unfortunate domestic rela- 
 tion, bore it to the end with a fortitude and 
 constancy which commands our profoundest 
 respect. He wrote his Elective Affinities, 
 which, contrary to popular opinion, teaches 
 that marriage is or should be indissoluble 
 upon any ground whatever. On the marriage 
 question we should say that the supposed 
 Epicurean stands on as high a plane of 
 morality as the pretentious Christian, if not 
 higher. 
 
 Milton's supposed puritanism is as dis- 
 tasteful to the Germans as Goethe's 
 supposed libertinism is to the English, and 
 prejudice in both cases has no doubt pre- 
 vented many from appreciating these two 
 men. Goethe's Teutonic physique and 
 exuberant spirits and vitality would make 
 poets like Spenser and Milton seem to him 
 squeamish, cold and self-righteous. The
 
 GOETHE AND MILTON 119 
 
 hearty, lusty humanness and animalism of 
 Chaucer, Shakespeare and Byron was more 
 congenial to the poet who could write the 
 scene in Auerbach's Cellar, a feat which we 
 venture to say would have been utterly 
 impossible for Milton to accomplish. He 
 could be coarse when necessary for serious 
 purposes, as he was in his reply to Salmas- 
 ius, but not out of mere frivolity. In order 
 to contrast Milton's daintiness with the 
 revelry of the wine cellar, let us quote here 
 his sonnet giving his idea of conviviality : — 
 
 "Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son, 
 Now that the fields are dank and ways are 
 
 mire, 
 Where shall we sometimes meet, and by 
 
 the fire 
 Help waste a sullen day, what may be won 
 From the hard season gaining? Time will 
 
 run 
 On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire 
 The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire 
 The lilly and rose, that neither sowed nor 
 
 spun. 
 What neat repast shall feast us, light and 
 
 choice.
 
 120 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may 
 
 rise 
 To hear the lute well touched, or artful 
 
 voice 
 Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? 
 He who of those delights can judge and 
 
 spare 
 To interpose them oft, is not unwise." 
 
 Goethe's inner life was full of storm and 
 stress. Milton, so far as we can judge, 
 never had to go through the fierce struggle 
 for self-mastery which Goethe has so vividly 
 pictured in Faust's advances to Gretchen. 
 and he was consequently spared the humil- 
 iation of such a fall as Faust suffered. In 
 Milton's case continence was no great 
 virtue. He never realized in his own ex- 
 perience the full meaning of the truth that 
 the man who stops in a downward course is 
 greater than he who successfully resists the 
 first temptation. 
 
 Each of these men occupied an official 
 position in the government and lived 
 through a period of great political upheaval. 
 Goethe's position was insignificant and
 
 GOETHE AND MILTON 121 
 
 needs no further notice. Milton, hearing 
 the rumblings of the approaching conflict 
 while in Italy, hastened home from his 
 travels, dropped his cherished studies and 
 his poetry and threw himself with absolute 
 devotion on the side of what was then 
 progress. He was ill-fitted for such rough 
 and tumble strife, a thing which many of us 
 make into an excuse for shirking duty at 
 the present time. Even when using his pen 
 in support of the commonwealth as Crom- 
 well's Foreign Secretary, he felt as though 
 he were working only with his left hand, 
 as he expresses it. Yet with this left hand 
 he wrote the Defense of the English People 
 and completely demolished Salmasihs and 
 the whole crew of royal apologists. 
 
 Read his stern protest in Cromwell's 
 name to the Prince of Piedmont against the 
 massacre of the Waldenses and warning 
 against any further attem.pt to coerce them 
 on account of their religion (which was 
 heeded) ; compare this vigorous action with 
 the passive attitude of the so-called 
 American Commonwealth towards the 
 massacres that have been going on now for
 
 122 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 years in Russia and see how faint censure 
 here amounts to practical approval of those 
 atrocities ; see how our milksop statesmen 
 and presidential candidates, traveling in 
 Russia, hobnob with the authorities who are 
 responsible for these things ; and then figure 
 out if you can, how long it will take at this 
 rate of backsliding for bourgeois democracy 
 to reach the goal of Liberty. 
 
 For twenty years Milton fought the good 
 fight, and after working himself blind and 
 seeing his cause temporarily defeated, he 
 withdrew to devote himself again to the 
 Muses. Another in his place might easily 
 have given up hope and lent his genius to 
 the victorious reaction. But not Milton. 
 Although he had got a little ahead of the 
 procession, it was not for him to go back 
 to the mass. He looked forward to the time 
 when the body of the procession would 
 catch up with him and appreciate his work. 
 His last piece, the Grecian-modeled drama 
 Sampson Agonistes, breathes a spirit of 
 defiance rather than defeat. Though un- 
 successful he had made no mistake. 
 
 What Goethe would have done had he
 
 GOETHE AND MILTON 123 
 
 been drawn into the vortex of a first rate 
 social war such as the English Common- 
 wealth, the French Revolution or the 
 struggle now going on in Russia, it is im- 
 possible to say. He was never put to the 
 test. As a spectator beyond the border he 
 witnessed the French Revolution. The 
 enlightenment which took place in the in- 
 tellectual world preceding that outbreak had 
 its influence on him. Its restless and defiant 
 spirit is reflected in the character of Faust 
 in Part I. But in later years when the 
 popular cause had apparently failed, Goethe 
 seems to have had no higher political ideal 
 than a benevolent paternalism. His moral 
 courage and convictions cannot be quest- 
 ioned ; but his environment was un- 
 propitious and his mission seemed to lie in 
 another direction. It was the ambitious 
 scope of Part II of Faust, intended to cover 
 the whole social activity of man, which 
 forced Goethe to venture to some extent on 
 political ground, with indifferent success, 
 as we have tried to show. 
 
 Goethe could have learned something 
 from Milton about politics and also about
 
 124 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 cultivating the sense of duty and educating 
 the conscience, instead of merely running 
 through the world, as Faust boasts to Care. 
 But in some things Goethe shows a long 
 advance over Milton : — he had freed him- 
 self not only from scholastic austerity and 
 the slavish imitation of classical literature, 
 but also from dogmatic theology. For 
 Milton the Bible was the truth, the whole 
 truth and nothing but the truth ; although 
 he did pretty much as he pleased, his 
 argumentative skill was always equal to the 
 task of reconciling his acts and views with 
 the Bible. Goethe too was familiar with 
 the Bible, but in his day the influence of 
 the dogmatic-metaphysical was on the 
 wane and the effect of the evolutionary 
 method was already noticeable. Goethe's 
 combination of the romantic and the 
 classical, of the spirit and the flesh, gave 
 him broader human sympathies. If it was 
 the merit of the Greeks to have first 
 represented the gods in human form instead 
 of in the earlier forms of animals and 
 monsters, we may say it was Goethe's merit 
 to have drawn both Lord and Devil from
 
 GOETHE AND MILTON 125 
 
 the far away regions in which they dwelt 
 in the strained imaginations of Dante and 
 Milton, and brought them down to earth to 
 talk and act like human beings. 
 /Milton sings of woman's fall as the cause 
 of all our woe, and his estimation of woman 
 is strictly patriarchal. She is an inferior 
 being. The race ruined by her must be re- 
 deemed by a male, the first-born of God. 
 
 Goethe's story is the reverse of this. Re 
 shows us a man, and a strong one at that, 
 yielding to the devil and his salvation by a 
 daughter of Eve instead of by the son of 
 God. And the woman makes the vicarious 
 atonement too; she so loved the man that 
 she not only gave up all for him in her life 
 time, but died on the block that the re- 
 quirements of "justice" might be fulfilled to 
 the strict letter of the law. It was this that 
 made her prayers to the mater gloriosa, the 
 Queen of Heaven, effectual to save Faust's 
 soul. 
 
 The duality of sex seems to be as great a 
 stumbling block in religion as the duality 
 of mind and matter formerly was in phil- 
 osophy. This difficulty has now be.'^n over-
 
 126 GOETHE'S FAUST 
 
 come in philosophy, by the work of bietz- 
 gen and others, not by denying to one the 
 right of existence or by sacrificing one to the 
 other or trying unnaturally to force one into 
 the category of the other; but by referring 
 both mind and matter to a genus high 
 enough to include both, viz. the unifying 
 Infinity or infinite Universe. Nature is 
 large enough to contain and unify all differ- 
 ences and apparent opposites. The next 
 great poet who attempts anything on these 
 lines will have to reconcile this duality of 
 sex. The abolition or reconciliation of 
 economic classes will go far towards clear- 
 ing the way for the reconciliation of the 
 sexes ; and we suspect that instead of being 
 compelled to resort to the expedient of 
 having one sex save the other by the sacri- 
 fice and death of the innocent to atone for 
 the guilty, our future poet will be able to 
 find a way by which the whole race can 
 co-operate in harmony for the salvation of 
 all its members of both sexes without the 
 unneccessary sacrifice of any. 
 
 Goethe had no use for Christianity. Al- 
 though Jesus was human enough to be
 
 GOETHE AND MILTON 127 
 
 attractive, yet in his genuine, original 
 character he was too radical and plebeian 
 for Goethe's purposes ; and in the distorted 
 and monstrous character which has been 
 foisted upon him by the political hierarchy 
 called the Church, putting the seal of 
 heaven's approval on every form of 
 oppression, he is more like Mephistopheles 
 than Jesus, Hence Goethe had to get 
 along without him. 
 
 Milton's theme is now dead. Paradise 
 Lost was once quite generally used as a 
 reading and parsing book in schools ; but 
 that day is past. Goethe's theme however 
 is still fresh and will continue to occupy 
 reflecting minds until the abolition of class 
 society has enabled mankind to eat the for- 
 bidden fruit of Knowledge and has revealed 
 the mystery of human "government" and 
 of Plato's "wisdom" and at the same time 
 revealed the mystery of so-called Good and 
 Evil.
 
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