himself recklessly of the supernatural elements in the legend, with
the disregard of reason and plausibility characteristic of the
romantic mood. When he returned to it in the beginning of the new
century his artistic standards had changed, and the supernaturalism
could now be tolerated only by being made symbolic. Thus he
makes the career of Faust as a whole emblematic of the triumph of
the persistent striving for the ideal over the temptation to find
complete satisfaction in the sense, and prepares the reader for this
interpretation by prefixing the "Prologue in Heaven." The
elaboration of this symbolic element is responsible for such scenes
as the Walpurgis Night and the Intermezzo, scenes full of power
and infinitely suggestive, but destructive of the unity of the play as
a tragedy of human life. Yet there remains in this First Part even in
its final form much that is realistic in the best sense, the carousal
in Auerbach's cellar, the portrait of Martha, the Easter-morning
walk, the character and fate of Margaret. It is such elements as
these that have appealed to the larger reading public and that have
naturally been emphasized by performance on the stage, and by
virtue of these alone "Faust" may rank as a great drama; but it is
the result of Goethe's broodings on the mystery of human life,
shadowed forth in the symbolic parts and elaborated with still
greater complexity and still more far-reaching suggestiveness--and,
it must be added, with deepening obscurity--in the Second Part,
that have given the work its place with "Job," with the
"Prometheus Bound," with "The Divine Comedy," and with
"Hamlet."