Some alien substance more and more is cleaving To all the mind conceives of grand and fair; When this world’s Good is won by our achieving, The Better, then, is named a cheat and snare. The fine emotions, whence our lives we mould, Lie in the earthly tumult dumb and cold. If hopeful Fancy once, in daring flight, Her longings to the Infinite expanded, Yet now a narrow space contents her quite, Since Time’s wild wave so many a fortune stranded. Care at the bottom of the heart is lurking; Her secret pangs in silence working, She, restless, rocks herself, disturbing joy and rest; In newer masks her face is ever drest, By turns as house and land, as wife and child, presented,— As water, fire, as poison, steel; We dread the blows we never feel, And what we never lose is yet by us lamented.[201] Fear of the evils which lie in wait for us and against which we can make no provision render life insupportable. Faust’s frame of mind as described in these lines recalls Schopenhauer, who was always afraid of something; fear, sometimes of thieves, sometimes of diseases, tormented him. He would never go to a barber’s to be shaved, and always carried his own drinking cup with him. “Is it not better to end such a life, and to kill oneself, even if it mean annihilation?” asked Faust. He took up the poisoned goblet and put it to his lips, but, arrested by singing and the sound of bells outside, he refrained, and life laid hold of him. Not religious faith, however, but memories of childhood, “the happy sports of youth and the gay festivals of spring” were the agencies that recalled Faust to the earth. He went out of doors, mingled with the crowd, tried to amuse himself amongst men, and savoured the beauty of the new-born spring, but all these could not make him forget the evil of life. He met his pupil, talked with him, and again displayed his pessimism. O happy he, who still renews The hope, from Error’s deeps to rise for ever! That which one does not know, one needs to use; And what one knows, one uses never.[202] Then follows the celebrated monologue of Faust over which so many commentators have lost their heads and wasted oceans of ink. Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother. One with tenacious organs holds in love And clinging lust the world in its embraces; The other strongly sweeps, this dust above, Into the high ancestral spaces.[203] On this passage has been built up a whole theory of “double natures” with which has been incorporated the dualism of Manicheism, the two natures of Christ and what not besides.[204] There exists in literature no better expression of human disharmony than this monologue “of the two souls.” It portrays the unbalanced condition so frequent in youth and is a valuable indication of the real youth of Faust. On his return to his study, Faust again revealed his pessimism.