the aid of his better nature.  This is the doctrine, the philosophy, of “Faust.”  In the First Part, stung by disappointment in his search of knowledge, by failure to lay hold of the superhuman, and urged on by his baser propensities personified in Mephistopheles, Faust abandons himself to sensual pleasure,—­seduces innocence, burdens his soul with heavy guilt, and seems to be entirely given over to evil.  This Part ends with Mephistopheles’ imperious call,—­“Her zu mir,”—­as if secure of his victim.  Before the appearance of the Second Part, the reader was at liberty to accept that conclusion.  But in the Second Part Faust gradually wakes from the intoxication of passion, outgrows the dominion of appetite, plans great and useful works, whereby Mephistopheles loses more and more his hold of him; and after his death is baffled in his attempt to appropriate Faust’s immortal part, to which the heavenly Powers assert their right....

The character of Margaret is unique; its duplicate is not to be found in all the picture galleries of fiction.  Shakspeare, in the wide range of his feminine personnel, has no portrait like this.  A girl of low birth and vulgar circumstance, imbued with the ideas and habits of her class, speaking the language of that class from which she never for a moment deviates into finer phrase, takes on, through the magic handling of the poet, an ideal beauty.  Externally common and prosaic in all her ways, she is yet thoroughly poetic, transfigured in our conception by her perfect love.  To that love, unreasoning, unsuspecting,—­to the excess of that which in itself is no fault, but beautiful and good,—­her fall and ruin are due.  Her story is the tragedy of her sex in all time.  As Schlegel said of the “Prometheus Bound,”—­“It is not a single tragedy, but tragedy itself.” ...

[The First Part ends with the prison scene, where poor Margaret, escaping by death, ascends to heaven, while Mephistopheles, shouting an imperious “Hither to me!” disappears with Faust.] The reader is allowed to suppose—­and most readers did suppose—­that the author meant it should be inferred that the devil had secured his victim, and that Faust, according to the legend, had paid the forfeit of his soul to the powers of hell.

But Faust reappears in a new poem,—­the Second Part.  He is there introduced sleeping, as if burying in torpor the lusts and crimes and sorrows of his past career.  Pitying spirits are about him, to heal his woes and promote his return to a better life....

[At the end of his hundred years of earthly life,] Mephistopheles ... fails to secure the immortal part of Faust, which the angels appropriate and bear aloft: 

     “This member of the upper spheres
      We rescue from the devil;
      For whoso strives and perseveres
      May be redeemed from evil.”

The last two lines may be supposed to contain the author’s justification of Mephistopheles’ defeat and Faust’s salvation.  Though a man surrender himself to evil, if there is that in him which evil cannot satisfy, an impulse by which he outgrows the gratifications of vice, extends his horizon and lifts his desires, pursues an onward course until he learns to place his aims outside of himself, and to seek satisfaction in works of public utility,—­he is beyond the power of Satan:  he may be redeemed from evil.