Page:Stories as a mode of thinking.djvu/6



The story of Faust is an Acted Sermon on the text, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul." The natural heads for such a sermon are two:


 * 1. What is it to gain the whole world?


 * 2. What is it to lose the soul?

But to act the answers to these questions is very different from putting them from a pulpit in words. There are two famous versions of this story:

1. As to the first head both versions agree. Gaining the whole world is dramatized under the form of Magic, that is, the suspension of second causes allowing unlimited realization of Will.

2. The answers to the second head are as widely apart as the sixeenth and nineteenth centuries.

In dramatic form, the Romantic Drama is seen in the process of settling down—traces of Greek Chorus, Old English Masque and Miracle, Extempore relief scenes. The play treated as a story falls naturally into three divisions: