inful. But Faust is bad
and reckless. By the aid of his black art he calls up a devil named
(in the legend) Mephostophiles with whom he makes a contract of
service. For twenty-four years Faust is to have all that he desires,
and then his soul is to go to perdition. The contract is carried out.
With the Devil as comrade and servant he lords it over time and space,
feeds on the fat of the land, travels far and wide, and does all sorts
of wonderful things. At the end of the stipulated time the Devil
gets him.

From the very beginning of his musings on the theme Goethe thought of
Faust as a man better than his reputation; as a misunderstood
truth-seeker who had dared the terrors with which the popular
imagination invested hell, in order that he might exhaust the
possibilities of this life. Aside from his desire of transcendental
knowledge and wide experience, there was a third trait of the
legendary Faust which could hardly seem to Goethe anything but
creditable to human nature: his passion for antique beauty. According
to the old story Faust at one time wishes to marry; but as marriage is
a Christian ordinance and he has forsworn Christianity, the Devil
gives him, in place of a lawful wife, a fantom counterfeit of Helena,
the ancient Queen of Beauty. The lovely fantom becomes Faust's
paramour and bears him a remarkable son called Justus Faustus.

What wonder if the young Goethe, himself disappointed with
book-learning, eager for life, and beset by vague yearnings for mystic
insight into the nature of things, saw in Faust a symbol of his own
experience? But as soon as he began to identify himself with his hero
it was all up with Faust's utter damnableness: a young poet does not
plan to send his own soul to perdition. At the same time, he could not
very well imagine him as an out-and-out good man, since that would
have been to turn the legend topsy-turvy. The league with the Devil,
who would of course have to be conceived as in some sense or other an
embodiment of evil, was the very heart of the old story.

At first Goethe planned his drama on lines that had little to do with
traditional ideas of good and bad, heaven and hell, God and Devil.
Faust is introduced as a youngish professor who has studied everything
and been teaching for some ten years, with the result that he feels
his knowledge to be vanity and his life a dreary routine of hypocrisy.
He resorts to magic in the hope of--what? It is important for the
understa