But I will not inflict upon you any further description of my tusslings with Teutonic interpreters of _Faust_--with their _egos_ and _non-egos_, their moral-æsthetic symbolisms and so on. Let us leave them to the tender mercies of Goethe himself, who was not sparing of his ridicule in regard to his commentators, nor, alas, at times in regard to his countrymen. 'Of all nations,' he says, 'the Germans understand me least.... Such people make life a burden by their abstruse thoughts and their _Ideas_, which they hunt up in all directions and insist on discovering in everything.... They come and ask _me_ what "Ideas" _I_ have incorporated in my _Faust_. Just as if I myself knew!--or could describe it, even if I did know!' Of course Goethe's great poem contains an Idea, if by that word we mean in a poem what we mean by _life_ in anything living; but it is not by dissection and analysis that we shall discover it. 'He who wishes,' says Goethe in _Faust_, 'to examine and describe anything living first does his best to expel the life. Then he has got the dead parts in his hand; but what is wanting is just the spiritual bond.' It is my purpose--a purpose not easy of fulfilment--to avoid this method of dissection and to place before you living realities, not anatomical specimens. But before we plunge _in medias res_ and grapple our present subject, namely the old Faust-legend, I should like to say just a few words in order to show from what standpoint I think we should regard Goethe as a poet and a thinker--for that he is great both as a poet and as a thinker cannot be denied. Goethe describes his own philosophy as the philosophy of action. He believed in impulse, in inspiration, in action, rather than in reflexion, analysis and logic. 'Reflect not!' he makes Iphigenie exclaim--'Reflect not! Grant freely, as thou feel'st!' And in one of his Epigrams he says: Yes, that's the right way, When we cannot say How we think. True thought Comes as a gift, unsought. Such theory of inspiration is thoroughly Greek, reminding one of Plato's 'muse-inspired madman' and of what Sophocles is related to have said to Aeschylus; 'Thou, Aeschylus, always dost the right thing--but unconsciously ([Greek: all' ouk eidôs ge]).' Thus it was also with Goethe. All intellectual hobbies and shibboleths, all this endless wearisome discussion and dissection and analysis and criticism and bandying about of _opinion_, which is the very life-breath of modern intellectual existence and modern journalistic literature, Goethe rejected, as Plato had done in his _Phaedrus_, where he makes Socrates call such things 'rotten soul-fodder.'