Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/635

 Reviews and Notes 631 drama) Faust is in a state of turmoil, transition, and develop- ment. Similarly Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen is not an indiscriminate and therefore, from Mr. Babbitt's point of view, immoral emotionalism but a sincere expression of the very best there is in him. It is not because Faust fails to rationalize his beautiful and deeply religious conception of God that he ruins Gretchen, but because the purity of that concep- tion is subsequently troubled by his erotic passion and because the intrigues of Mephistopheles frustrate Faust's intention of saving Gretchen from disgrace. "Gefuhl ist alles," in its proper connection means the unsophisticated voice of the heart, the mystic contemplation and intuition of the divine, the truly religious experience of the unity of God, nature and man, an experience which no reasoning and no denning of boundaries will ever be able to give. There was no Rousseau necessary to generate such a "Gefuhl" in Goethe. Does Mr. Babbitt really not know what the mystics from Eckhart to Fraulein von Klettenberg, what Spinoza, Klopstock, and Herder (Gott) meant to Goethe in his evolution of religious concepts? Again Goebel's Faust commentary might have given him all the in- formation he needed for the purposes of his disquisitions on Goethe. However, important as the history of mystic and of monistic thought is for an understanding of the romantic movement in general and of its German phase in particular, Mr. B. contents himself with brilliant superficialities. Pp.330 f. he offers another specimen of his interpretive sagacity. The work Faust is doing at the end of his life is only of an "utilitarian" character ("happiness of material efficiency" he calls it). "This is the solution of the problem of happiness that Goethe offers at the end of the second Faust, and we may affirm without hesitation that it is a sham solution." How unfortunate for the reputation of our author that he did not hesitate! We can hardly imagine a more complete ignorance of so monumental a work as Goethe's Faust is in spite of all aspersions from the direction of the inner check. Not to men- tion the parallel of Wander jahre with its significant subtitle Die Entsagenden: did Mr. B. really fail to grasp the sym- bolism of it all? Did he really fail to read the poem to the end? Did he not even get as far as to the words "Und hat an ihm die Liebe gar von Oben teilgenommen, begegnet ihm die sel'ge Schar mit herzlichem Willkommen"? No, love has no part in the religion of the inner check, and our humanist has evi- dently never responded to St. Paul's enjoinment that charity rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. A critic so utterly loveless cannot feel the power of love in others, and love is after all the key to understanding. The reviewer is not cruel enough to expose by more literal quotations Mr. Babitt's peculiar Goethe philology and therefore merely refers to pp.