“Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.”
In Goethe’s description of the Falls of the Rhine, at Schaffhausen, we find the germ from which his thought grew: “The rainbow appeared in its greatest beauty: it stood with unmoving foot in the midst of the tremendous foam and spray, which, threatening forcibly to destroy it, were every moment forced to create it anew.”
I have not translated the above line strictly in harmony with Goethe’s Farbenlehre. “Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben” is, literally: “In the colored reflection we have Life.” Goethe’s theory is that Color is not produced by the refraction of the ray, but is the result of the mixture of light and darkness, in different degrees. His conclusions were drawn from only partial observation, and have been proved to be incorrect. I therefore feel justified in using a term which best interprets his thought as a poet, without reference to this glimpse of his theory as a man of science.
The opening scene strikes the keynote which reverberates through the Second Part. Faust lets his “dead Past bury its dead” but his intellect has been purified by his experience of human love, delight, and suffering. He resumes, in another and more enlightened sense, his aspiration for the “highest being,” and we must accompany him, henceforward, with our intellectual, and not, as in the First Part, with our emotional nature.
7. Emperor.
On the 1st of October, 1827, Goethe read the manuscript of this scene to Eckermann. “In the Emperor,” said he, “I have endeavored to represent a Prince who has all possible qualities for losing his realm—in which, indeed, he afterwards succeeds.
“The welfare of the Empire and of his subjects gives him no trouble; he thinks only of himself, and how he may amuse himself, from day to day, with something new. The land is without order and law, the judges themselves accomplices with the criminals, and all manner of crime is com-
