The Philosophy of Goethes Faust

Tennyson's In Memoriam a vehicle for all the most universal impulses that move humanity. The ballad, which among a simple rural population is a mere pastime for winter evenings, becomes in the hands of a Homer, a Vergil, a Dante, a Milton, a form into which the whole content of life can be poured. The little mime which all children delight to play has but to wait for Eschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, in order to receive for its content the whole of human culture. And as with poetry so with'prose. The novel, which thus far has been mainly a form for working out un- professionally the details of certain semimorbid pathological conditions on the part of imperfectly regulated individuals, gives promise at last of becoming, in the hands of a few modern writers, the effective medium for the embodiment of all truth in living shape, ? in a word, for the democratizing of truth. There is a very old strife between the pulpit and the theater as democratic truth agencies. I think that strife will, to a large extent, settleitself in the novel, which to-day is visibly tending to replace both. To be sure, most of our popular novelists are still paltering away with the old pathological amorosi- ties, which, like the supernatural, have always a strong attraction for uncultured minds; but I think their trumpet of judgment has sounded, and the near future will give us world novelists. Faust is a drama meant to embody the entire spiritual movement of an epoch, jiot, as philosophy wou...