"What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate
For being deprived of the joys of heaven?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess."
Goethe's Mephistopheles near the end of the play taunts Faust in the
words, "Why dost thou seek our fellowship if thou canst not go through
with it?... Do we force ourselves on thee, or thou on us?" And one has
the feeling that, like most other things the fiend says, it is an
apparent truth which is really a lie; but it would have been entirely
true if Marlowe's devil had said it.
The Mephistopheles of Goethe is seldom solemnised at all. Once indeed on
the Harz Mountains he says--
"Naught of this genial influence do I know!
Within me all is wintry.
* * * * *
How sadly, yonder, with belated glow,
Rises the ruddy moon's imperfect round!"
Yet there it is merely by discomfort, and not by the pain and hideous
sorrow of the world surrounding him, that he is affected. He is like
Satan in the Book of Job, except that he is offering his victim luxuries
instead of pains. In the prologue in Heaven he speaks with such a jaunty
air that Professor Blackie's translation has omitted the passage as
irreverent. He is the spirit that _denies_--sceptical and cynical, the
anti-Christian that is in us all. His business is to depreciate
spiritual values, and to persuade mortals that there is no real
distinction between good and bad, or between high and low. We have seen
in the character of Cornelius in _Marius the Epicurean_ "some inward
standard ... of distinction, selection, refusal, amid the various
elements of the period." Here is the extreme opposite. There is no
divine discontent in him, nor longing for happier things. He would never
have said that he would climb to heaven upon a ladder of razor edges.
There is nothing of the fallen angel about him at all, for he is a
spirit perfectly content with an intolerable past, present, and future.
Before the throne of God he swaggers with the same easy insolence as in
Martha's garden. He is the very essence and furthest reach of paganism.
So we have this curious fact, that Marlowe's Faust is the pagan and
Mephistophilis the idealist; while Goethe reverses the order, making
paganism incarnate in the fiend and idealism in the nobler side of the
man. It is a far truer and more natural story of life than that which
had suggested it; for in the soul of man there is ever a hunger and
thirst for the highest, however much he may abuse his soul. At the
worst, there remains always that which "a man may waste, desecrate,
never quite lose."
One more contrast marks the difference of the two plays, namely, the
fate of Faust. Marlowe's Faust is utterly and irretrievably damned. On
the old theory of an essential antagonism between the secular and the
sacred, and upon the old cast-iron theology to which the intellect of
man was enjoined to conform, there is no escape whatsoever for the
rebel. So the play leads on to the sublimely terrific passage at the
close, when, with the chiming of the bell, terror grows to madness in
the victim's soul, and at last he envies the beasts that perish--
"For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven."
Goethe, with his changed conception of life in general, could not have
accepted this ending. It was indeed Lessing who first pointed out that
the final end for Faust must be his salvation and not his doom; but
Goethe must necessarily have arrived at the same conclusion even if
Lessing had not asserted it. It is clearly visible throughout the play,
by touches here and there, that Faust is not "wholly damnable" as Martha
is. His pity for women, relevant to the main plot of the play, breaks
forth in horror when he discovers the fate of Margaret. "The misery of
this one pierces me to the very marrow, and harrows up my soul; thou art
grinning calmly over the doom of thousands!" And these words follow
immediately after an outbreak of blind rage called forth by
Mephistopheles' famous words, "She is not the first." Such a Faust as
this, we feel, can no more be ultimately lost than can the
Mephistophilis of Marlowe. As for Marlowe's Faust, the plea for his
destruction is the great delusion of a hard theology, and the only
really damnable person in the whole company is the Mephistopheles of
Goethe, who seems from first to last continually to be committing the
sin against the Holy Ghost.
The salvation of Faust is implicit in the whole structure and meaning of
the play. It is worked out mystically in the Second Part, along lines of
human life and spiritual interest far-flung into the sphere that
surrounds the story of the First. But even in the First Part, the happy
issue is involved in the terms of Faust's compact with the devil. Only
on the condition that Mephistopheles shall be able to satisfy Faust and
cheat him "into self-complacent pride, or sweet enjoyment," only
"If ever to the passing hour I say,
So beautiful thou art! thy flight delay"--
only then shall his soul become the prey of the tempter. But from the
first, in the scorn of Faust for this poor fiend and all he has to
bestow, we read the failure of the plot. Faust may sign a hundred such
bonds in his blood with little fear. He knows well enough that a spirit
such as his can never be satisfied with what the fiend has to give, nor
lie down in sleek contentment to enjoy the earth without afterthought.
It is the strenuous and insatiable spirit of the man that saves him. It
is true that "man errs so long as he is striving," but the great word of
the play is just this, that no such errors can ever be final. The deadly
error is that of those who have ceased to strive, and who have
complacently settled down in the acceptance of the lower life with its
gratifications and delights.
But such striving is, as Robert Browning tells us in _Rabbi ben Ezra_
and _The Statue and the Bust_, the critical and all-important point in
human character and destiny. It is this which distinguishes pagan from
idealist in the end. Faust's errors fall off from him like a discarded
robe; the essential man has never ceased to strive. He has gone indeed
to hell, but he has never made his bed there. He is saved by want of
satisfaction.