That is the important point. Mephisto plunges Faust in the pleasures of revelry, love, power and classic beauty, but in spite of his burning craving for supreme happiness, he is incapable of enjoying the blissful moment. There never is a fleeting moment to which he can say “Ah, still delay—thou art so fair!” There is no absolute truth or absolute beauty, and therefore no absolute happiness. The blissful moment does not exist, and the only satisfaction which man is free to enjoy is in striving after an imaginary absolute. Faust never becomes absorbed in a moment of ecstasy and therefore the Devil loses the wager. By using his power unselfishly to further the lot of others, he is the instrument of his own salvation; he redeems himself by an ever higher and purer form of activity, as Goethe himself said, and dies with the conviction that “He only earns his freedom and existence, Who daily conquers them anew.” When Mephisto summons his devils to carry the soul to hell, a host of angels flies from heaven to repel them, and as they bear Faust’s immortal soul into the upper air, they proclaim “Whoe’er aspires unweariedly Is not beyond redeeming.” The Devil had not given Faust the blissful moment, but had only enabled him to find a compromise between dream and reality by creative work. Faust’s craving remained unfulfilled, and his reconcilement to the conditions of life was only temporary. But as that is the only possibility, as man’s highest aspirations never can be completely satisfied, the wager was from the first destined to be unfulfilled. In Goethe’s _Faust_ the theme received the highest treatment of which it was capable. At the time when he first came in contact with the story, Faust dramas were being announced by authors from all corners of Germany, and perhaps it would not be too much to say that every German poet since Goethe has cherished the hope of some day creating his own Faust. Of the tragedies, farces, operas, pantomimes, ballets, novels, short stories, poems, folk-songs and even parodies on the subject, it may be said that their name is legion, and it appears to have been cast into every possible art-form. It will, perhaps, suffice to mention here a dance-poem which was written by the poet Heinrich Heine in 1851 for performance at Drury Lane. Lumley, the director of the theatre, had already made preparations for the production, when it was laid aside as unsuitable. One of the latest treatments of the theme is _Faust and the City_, by Lunacharski, the Minister of Education in Soviet Russia. [Footnote 12: K. Engel: _Zusammenstellung der Faust-Schriften_ [Oldenburg, 1885], pp. 188 ff.] [Footnote 13: Bayard Taylor’s translation.] V _The Wagner Book_ The first edition of the German Wagner book was published anonymously, without mention even of its place of origin, in 1593, under a title of which the following is a translation:—