houses, from the bondage of mechanical drudgery, from the confinement of gables and roofs, from the stifling narrowness of streets," Faust, in the gladness of a truly social spirit, cries, "Here is the heaven of the multitude; big and little are huzzaing joyously; here I am a man." Not so Mephistopheles—"the devil is an egoist;" not so the wretched pedant Wagner, who is an enemy to coarseness of every sort," and hates to see "people run riot as if the devil were driving them, and call it merriment, call it singing." Yes, the dominant spirit of Faust is social; and in the Second Part especially the signs of corporate and impersonal being come thick upon us—in a symbolisation of social progress, in allegorical personages such as the four grey women, Want and Guilt, Care and Need. But perhaps the true intent of Goethe is not to take sides with either the individual or the social spirit, but to reconcile their pretensions in an ideal of practical culture.
Before the eyes of Victor Hugo some such reconciliation seems likewise to loom forth as a grand ideal. His best work, like that of Goethe, is impersonal in tone; his ideals are such as an age of social sympathies might suggest—Justice, Liberty, Progress. If Hugo is weak in individual portraiture, it is because there rises before his mind the vast figure of "Humanity" in which the countless differences of individual being disappear. "If his perception of individual character is ordinarily not very exact, some compensation for this lies in his abundant sympathy with that common manhood and womanhood which is more precious than personal idiosyncrasies."[1] In Les Chants du Crépuscule, for example, "the individual appears, but his individuality is important less for its own sake than because it reflects
- ↑ Dowden, Studies in Literature, 1789–1877, p. 437.
