Cheat me into tranquillity?—come then
And welcome life’s last day.
Make me to the passing moment plead.
Fly not, O stay, thou art so fair!
Then will I gladly perish.
The pomp and power of the court, luxury and wealth, equally fail to make the scholar at peace with himself. They are symbolised in the paper money by which Mephistopheles replenished the imperial exchequer. The only allusion to the printing-press, whose inventor Fust had been somewhat associated with Faust, is to show its power turned to the work of distributing irredeemable promises.
At length one demand made by Faust makes Mephistopheles tremble. As a mere court amusement he would have him raise Helen of Troy. Reluctant that Faust should look upon the type of man’s harmonious development, yet bound to obey, Mephistopheles sends him to the Mothers,—the healthy primal instincts and ideals of man which expressed themselves in the fair forms of art. Corrupted by superstition of their own worshippers, cursed by christianity, they ‘have a Hades of their own,’ as Mephistopheles says, and he is unwilling to interfere with them. The image appears, and the sense of Beauty is awakened in Faust. But he is still a christian as to his method: his idea is that heaven must be taken by storm, by chance, wish, prayer, any means except patient fulfilment of the conditions by which it may be reached. Helen is flower of the history and culture of Greece; and so lightly Faust would pluck and wear it!
Helen having vanished as he tried to clasp her, Faust has learned his second lesson. When he next meets Helen it is not to seek intellectual beauty as, in Gretchen’s case, he had sought the sensuous and sensual. He has fallen under a charm higher than that of either Church or Mephistopheles; the divorce of ages between flesh and spirit, the master-crime of superstition, from which all devils sprang, was over for him from the moment that he sees the soul embodied and body ensouled in the art-ideal of Greece.
The redemption of Faust through Art is the gospel of the nineteenth century. This is her vesture which Helen leaves him when she vanishes, and which bears him as a cloud to the land he is to make beautiful. The purest Art—Greek Art—is an expression of Humanity: it can as little be turned to satisfy a self-culture unhumanised as to consist with a superstition which insults nature. When Faust can meet with Helen, and part without any more clutching, he is not hurled back to his Gothic study and mocking devil any more: he is borne away until he reaches the land where his thought and work are needed. Blindness falls on him—or what Theology deems such: for it is metaphorical—it means that he has descended from clouds to the world, and the actual earth has eclipsed a possible immortality.
The sphere of Earth is known enough to me;