history in larger relations, and he depicted them as abstract poetical conceptions. Take Queen Katharine, Henry V., Richard II., as illustrations;-he did not falsify, but he overrode history, and used it as a basis upon which his insight and his imaginatively creative power could raise types of a wider and more glorious truth than was comprised in the actual, limited fact. Goethe dealt with the Faust of the old miracle-play in something of the same spirit. No popular legend could present a human soul so complex, so many-sided, so tried and tempted, as that which Goethe evolved out of the rough lumber of legend and tradition. To deal with the old Faust legend according to the highest modern ideas; to use the naïveté of the still vital old popular story as a vehicle for the highest abstract thought and as an enclosure for the most moving tragedy -this was a problem for distinctive genius; this is the problem which has been solved to a marvel by Goethe. The idea that the Evil One should directly bargain with man for man's soul, should satisfy all the desires of the heart, the desire for pomp, pleasure, power, at the price of the soul of the bargainer, is a direct product of the objectivity of conception, of the naïveté, of the superstition, of the very piety itself, of the Middle Ages. The story is essentially German; it is full of the diablerie which is inherent in German imagination. No other country could have so well evolved from its moral consciousness the legend of Faust. No other country could so well have developed the poet who could subordinate the olden story to the highest purposes of thoughtful and imaginative art. The fancy, the half-divine mythus of devil and angel contending for man's soul, is a more direct objective conception; the bargain between man and demon is the distinctive essence of the Faust story. The peculiar characteristic of Faust as the subject of a drama is the circumstance that the Spirit of Evil must appear embodied and incarnate among the merely human characters. The incarnate dæmonic mingles visibly and tangibly with the human action. The infra-human influence is to be watched and traced in its working, and in the result of that working. Take the simple human story of Faust-without visible dæmonic interference-and it resolves itself into a very ordinary drama of seduction, of murder, of sorrow, and of most tragic issue. Place the Evil One ostensibly in action among the mortals, and the drama acquires a weird and deeper meaning—a strange, supernatural influence. How shall the poet conceive and depict this mysterious, this terrible Spirit of Evil? That which the poet's imagination can body forth must be received through the imagination of reader or of spectator. It is difficult to conceive a more difficult imaginative task than that of placing Satan on the stage. How shall the dramatist make such a being speak?-how shall he depict the dark Spirit of Evil, the antagonist of goodness and of God, assuming human conditions and mortal limits? Were not this high problem so nobly solved by Goethe, we should be inclined to hold it to be impossible. In Goethe's Faust the fiend does not appear, as he does in Marlowe's Faustus, as a mere conjuror, a slave of the ring, who can be called upon at any moment to perform wonderful, if sometimes childish, tasks. No; the Mephistopheles creation of great Goethe is touched to finer issues, and appears for quite other purposes. The mystery of the great -the perhaps apparent only, but yet immortal-conflict between Good and Evil has to be indicated, not dogmatically or doctrinally, but imaginatively, and as it can be conceived by the free and holy spirit of man. In that fine air of spiritual thought which outsoars all the churches and extends above all the steeples must the poet work who will deal adequately and nobly with the Faust legend. There was but one poet who, qualified by very many con current circumstances, could discharge the high task; and that poet was Goethe. Small wonder that the completion of a drama on this infinite subject should spread over years, long as well as very many, of the great poet's life. He was not in any hurry to complete a work which even he could scarcely exhaust. A little careful analysis will show how wonderfully Goethe has managed the apparently insuperable difficulty of making Mephistopheles fitly talk. The poet must indicate that the unearthly talker knows more than man can know of the deepest secrets of the universe; and yet Mephistopheles does not need, or wish, to tell all that he knows; he unfolds only so much as is necessary to lead and to mislead Faust and the other characters; though, at times, the fiend speaks as if half thinking his own thought aloud; while on other occasions-as, for instance, with Marthe and with the student-he speaks in order to indulge his irrepressible, grim, hellish, gross, cynical, bitter humour. Goethe had, of necessity, to make his Devil very like a man. If the fiend were absent from the drama, the action would have the same issue; but with the very fiend upon the scene, the spectator is subjected to the weird fascination of seeing the process by means of which the end is to be brought about. Goethe believed in "the shows of evil;" he conceived that the good, that the Deity, was omnipotent and supreme; and that evil, instead of being a rival power, was only an influence tolerated and used by divinity, to work out divine ends. Hence, he draws Mephisto as a Geist der stets verneint; as a spirit working vainly, always labouring for evil, and yet controlled by a higher power, and always involuntarily working for good -a conception which may be theologically wrong, but is yet possibly divinely true. Goethe's Faust, as he wrote it, is more than a drama; not less than a drama; it is never undramatic. The dramatic poem, which deals with such great argument, includes a drama within its larger limit. No great Regisseur-no Tieck or Klingemann-would find any difficulty in compressing action, poetry, and event into the practical stage scope of an acting drama. A work purely, or merely, a dramatic poem is not necessarily a drama. It may contain no moral conflict, no tragic collision with Fate, no action, and no event which springs. from dramatic attrition; but Goethe's Faust contains all dramatic elements, and, as a tragedy half supernatural, half human, it remains "sad, high, and working." H. SCHÜTZ WILSON. THE ECLECTIC USE OF THE GOSPEL NARRATIVES. HOSE whose lot it has been to pass through a gradual THO course of emancipation from the yoke of bibliolatry must all remember the kind persistency with which anxious friends at one time sought to impale them on one or other horn of a dilemma. "Either," it was said, "you must submit to the authority of the Bible in those parts of it which you do not like, or else you can have no authority at all for those parts which you do like." And so long as such inquirers were looking for a positive as distinguished from a natural authority, that is, for an authority imposed from outside the order of nature instead of that which this order resistlessly carries with it, the dilemma was not without its terrors. But so soon as the need for a positive authority ceased to be felt, it was discovered that one of the horns of the dilemma was made of spiritual india-rubber, and, instead of impaling the soul, did not inflict even a prick on the conscience. The Bible was simply taken at its natural value as an embodiment of human experiences within the order of nature. Some of these experiences were felt to have depended on a false interpretation of the external world and of man's relation to it. Others were felt as growing out of universal and fundamental elements in humanity. All practical and moral difficulties then vanished, whatever critical difficulties might remain. Our inquiring souls continued to read their Bibles, not because any positive authority said, "Search the Scriptures," but |