It will have already become evident what abstruse and insoluble questions present themselves--rise, as it were, like ghosts of many an ancient creed, on every side, as soon as we have crossed the threshold of this great Mausoleum of human thought and imagination. There is the spectre of the great Mystery of existence--of Life and Death and Eternity; and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and that of Evil itself--a phantom assuming at times such a visible and substantial shape and then dissolving into thin air as mere negation. And this Mephistopheles--are we to regard him as a self-existent genuine demon of a genuine Hell, or as our own mind's shadow? Is he something external, something that we can avoid, something that we can put to flight by resisting and get entirely free of--or has each one of us signed with the blood of his human nature a compact with some such spiritual power, with the demonic element within him, with that spirit of negation, of cynicism, of cold unideal utilitarian worldly-wisdom which mocks at faith and love and every high and tender impulse--that part of our nature which, when some poor girl is sinking in the abyss, prompts us to answer our heart's appeal with the sneer of Mephistopheles: 'She isn't the first!'? Surely we can well understand the scorn and contempt which Faust feels for this demon companion of his. 'What canst thou, poor devil, give me?' he exclaims--'Was the human spirit's aspiration Ever understood by such as thou!' The real action of the play begins with the celebrated monologue of Faust. But this is preceded by a _Dedication_, by the _Prelude in the theatre_, and by the _Prologue in Heaven_, added at various periods of Goethe's life. The _Prelude_ consists of a scene between a poet, a theatrical director and a 'comic person.' It is merely a clever skit in which Goethe has a hit at the public and those who supply it with so-called drama. It has no organic connexion with the play. The _Prologue in Heaven_ begins with the songs of the three Archangels--sonorous verses of majestic harmony, like some grand overture by Bach or Handel. These verses are, I think, meant to intimate the great harmonious order and procession of the natural and moral universe, as Pythagoras intimated them by his 'Music of the Spheres'--those eternal laws against which man, that tiny microcosm, so vainly strives.