Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/391

 trasts individual and collective life in a manner which would seem to mark this contrast as the primary thought in Goethe's mind. "Speak not to me," says the Poet to the Manager, "of that motley multitude at whose very aspect one's spirit takes flight; veil from me that undulating throng which sucks us, against our will, into the whirlpool." "You can only subdue the mass by mass," responds the Manager; "each eventually picks out something for himself. … Consider you have soft wood to split; and only look whom you are writing for." But the Poet is not ready to subject himself to Das Gemeine; "the Poet, forsooth, is to sport away the highest right which Nature bestows upon him. By what stirs he every heart? Is it not the harmony—which bursts from out his breast, and sucks the world back again into his heart?" A mysterious union of individual with social being, almost worthy of an Oriental philosopher-poet; but Goethe's Mystery-play is indeed throughout the great mystery of individual contrasted with social life, the mikrocosm contrasted with that makrocosm of corporate unity at whose sign Faust, thrilled with rapture, sees "Nature herself working in his soul’s presence." On which side is Goethe? Is he for the individual mikrocosm, or for the group—the makrocosm? "It is a great pleasure to transport one's self into the spirit of the times," says Wagner. "What you term the spirit of the times," Faust replies, "is at bottom only your own spirit in which the times are reflected.”" This looks like individualism of Byron's type. But "before the gate" moves a world of social types—mechanics, servant-girls, students, the townsmen, the beggar, the soldier—"under the gay quickening glance of the Spring;" and as the "motley crowd" presses out of the town, "from the damp rooms of mean