tion of both the heroes is effected by one and the same power -love.' The final lesson in the religious parable of the East is that of Resignation, that of the Western sage is the duty of unremitted striving after higher attainment. Nothing remains but to submit, concludes the author of Job; nothing remains but to perform the daily task' with cheerful acquiescence, says the author of Faust. Both agree in this, 'there are problems which cannot be resolved, which must be passed over

the march of the world is enveloped in darkness, but its direction is Godward.' There is a crisis, or more than one crisis, in the career of each hero, when apostasy is imminent, yet both recover, and in this way Job and the Faust are universal types of human struggles, the one of a moral and religious, the other of an intellectual and spiritual struggle, neither ending in tragic fashion, but each full of solemn interest and incident throughout. In the Aryan poem the human interest predominates, in the Semitic the Divine. God is just, for he is all-powerful, such is the close of Job. We touch heaven when we touch the human body,' the words of Novalis, occur to our mind when the angels carry away the precious part in this mortal coil' of what remains of Faust. though the salvation of the soul is effected finally in both cases, the complete solution of the problems put is not found, so as to leave a sense of disappointment behind. Do not expect a solution' (Aufschluss '), writes Goethe to Reinhard, after sealing up the final revision of the Faust MS., 'as in the case of the world's history and that of Humanity, the last solution of a problem always reveals another yet to be solved in its place.'

But

The Prometheus has been called the Job of heathenism, and the play in which his trials are depicted ends like the Book of Job, in a thunderstorm. Elihu has been called the Hebrew Wagner, as Hermes in the Prometheus has been compared to the old bachelor in Faust. Prometheus, as the son of Themis, or law, is in conflict with the arbitrary decrees of Jupiter. These are points of contact which have more than once suggested comparisons between the Hebrew and the Hellenistic preachers of righteousness in their respective

dramas. The unfinished Prometheus of Goethe, as well as his Satyros, Mahomed, and The Wandering Jew, all belong to that period of Sturm und Drang which led to the first conception of the Faust as a 'Himmelsstürmer.' They have the same leading idea in common, that of alienation from, or antagonism against, the higher powers, man's proud, self-conscious strength, measuring itself with the deity, enduring reverses without flinching, and pressing onwards in a forlorn cause, restlessly and resolutely to the bitter end, with self-sufficient pride and vain presumption, and failing accordingly in its Titanic effort. The Eschylean formula, Pain is gain,' is more akin to Job's mode of reasoning than that of the German Titan.' In both the Hebrew and Greek poems we have the same questionings in the current controversies, ethical and religious. But the resemblance between the modern and ancient dramas is closer if we compare the idea of an 'all-pervading destiny' in the latter with something like the doctrine of scientific necessity' in the former. Again, the authors of the Faust and the Prometheus are both doctors, skilled in mantic and magic arts, and use the poetic art metaphysically in a mystery.'

'All arts for mortals from Prometheus spring.'

Goethe, too, brings the light of modern enlightenment from Olympian heights, but his Faust is not caught in 'Até's net,' but in the network of his own passions and self-created surroundings. We do not know the real end of the Prometheus of Eschylus, the portion of the trilogy which contained it having been lost. Nor do we know the end intended for Goethe's drama under that name: it breaks up with a complete revolt in tone and tenor, like the curse in the first part of Faust, upon which follows the remarkable passage most akin in spirit to the Greek Prometheus, and given, in translation, on p. 159, supra.

'Mein Busen, der vom Wissensdrang geheilt ist,
Soll keinen Schmerzen künftig sich verschliessen,
Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist,
Will ich in meinem innern Selbst geniessen,
Mit meinem Geist das Höchst' und Tiefste greifen
Ihr Wohl und Weh auf meinen Busen häufen,

Und so mein eigen Selbst, zu ihrem Selbst erweitern,
Und, wie sie selbst, am End' auch ich zerscheitern.'

The struggling of the individual soul and the idea of the man merged in humanity is a new idea introduced by Christianity, inter-penetrating the Aryan mind. The further development of Faust in the second part is more in keeping with the idea expressed somewhere by Eschylus: Calm wisdom gained by sorrow profits much.' But the final solution, by an act of divine love, to unravel the tangled web of human life,' is entirely due to the effect of Christianity on modern thought.

The intermediate link between the ancient and the modern modes of thought on the problem of life we have in Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' still cast in medieval form, but standing on the threshold of the new world and the new learning, in which the classic and Christian ideal are finally united. It has been called by Dr. Döllinger a sacred poem,' a name scarcely applicable to Goethe's Faust. Yet there are many points of comparison, though we are told in the Prelude the order here pursued is the reverse of that in the Italian masterpiece,

6

'Vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle,'

which was the intended course of action in the first part of Faust by Goethe, as he told Eckermann in 1827. Both poems resemble each other in this, that the earlier are by far the most powerful portions from a literary and artistic point of view, but chiefly because they give the 'history of a human soul,' and the history of the soul's struggles in the respective authors. What Döllinger says of the 'Divina Commedia' is true exactly of the Faust:

'Dante develops his work into a Theodicée, representing the divine economy of the world's story within the bounds naturally of contemporary knowledge. Dante sets himself forth as a man who has sinned much, but also has loved much, and who, through repentance and purified love, has merited forgiveness.'

The need of pardon is greater in the Faust, and we somehow miss in it that deeper consciousness of guilt on which the severe Florentine dwells. But if we do not hear the refrain of

medieval misereres and groans of purgatorial agonies with which Dante's poem abounds, we have a more vivid picture of the gloria in excelsis at the close, which with all it faults of studied art, resorting to what Fischer calls contemptuously 'stockkatholischen Bildern,' compares favourably with the pale splendours of the white light in the 'Paradiso.'

Dante lived and thought at the dawn of the Renaissance, Shakespeare under the noon-day blaze of its inspiration, and as Goethe himself has pointed out, he moreover feels the breath of the Reformation. In Hamlet, which is the nearest approach to Faust, we have the result on mind and heart of the complete break with mediæval conceptions of religion. The effect of this at first is appalling, the new scepticism makes the head reel and the heart grow sick under the deep sense of human wɔe, unrelieved by divine consolation. Hence the bitter irony and sarcasm in which the wounded spirit vents its grief when robbed of its simple faith, hence the wistful questioning whether it is worth while to live since human life and its ideals are but illusions. Here we have, again, the 'maddened rage' of reason rebelling against the conditions of existence, the struggles of the individual soul like that of a caged bird, striving to free itself from its confining limits, and sorely wounded, bleeding itself to death. Polonius and Mephisto are not unlike in their sordid humour; Gretchen and Ophelia in the sorrow which unhinges the mind's balance. There is a further resemblance in the minor characters of Horatio and Valentine. The mysterious machinery of this superstitious past are to be found in both, the spirits, witches, and hobgoblins, move more freely on the stage than in either. The free thought of the Renaissance and the critical spirit of the Reformation find their expression in Hamlet as the new natural revival and the new 'Protestantismus' of the eighteenth century are apparent in the Faust; Goethe like Shakespeare, with the magician's aptitude, turning ancient mysteries to modern use, attaching new meanings to old saws, satisfying the exigences of a stage in providing popular amusement, and, at the same time, satisfying the intellectual requirements of the cultured few. But the essential difference between the two poets is the scientific

spirit which pervades the Faust, not only, as Quinet says, producing intellectual fatalism and despair because of what it cannot tell us, a contempt for Vernunft und Wissenschaft,' which is only a temporary phase of thought-the passage referred to was written in 1791-but also a firm resolve we miss in Hamlet to make use of mechanical appliances for practical ends, so as to increase the well-being of our species, and thus to make the experiences of life serve the purposes of self-development, in short, moral evolution by a natural process, in accordance with the forming and healing laws of nature. Religion, in all its varying forms, according to Goethe, is nothing else but an expression of this healing force in nature. This introduces the religious motive, which comes in in the first part, where Faust is saved from self-destruction by the first sounds of the Easter hymn, and again at the beginning of the second part by a moral lustration performed by the elfs, and at its close by the choirs of angels and supernatural agency. It is, therefore, an over-statement of Scherer and Grimm, as representing the philosophical critics on the one hand, to say that in the Faust we have the gospel of human beneficence or the salvation of manly activity, by which the hero is saved, and of the religious expositors on the other, e.g., Rieger at the close of his sensible treatise on Goethe's Faust, in its religious bearings, when he speaks disparagingly of the Goethe cultus of the present day, which regards the great poet as a kind of aesthetic-ethical world saviour. In the Faust itself, unless we are determined to read into it what is not there, from fear or predeliction, neither human activity nor the pursuit of the ethical and aesthetical ideal in themselves, or taken together, bring about the final redemption. Piety is regarded by Goethe as one of the essential requisites of the highest culture and intellectual productivity, he says, and is peculiar to religious minds, imitation and repetition being characteristic traits of the irreligious. Moreover, he seems to consider all self-culture only as a means to an end for the great Entelechie' to make ourselves here what we would be hereafter. But granting this, another scruple may rise in some minds. Does not Goethe take things too easy in this matter of purification? Is there no laxity in his plan of sin and forgiveness,